This course treats gender roles and family life throughout the European past, with comparative attention to families of other historical cultures and to relationships within non-human primate communities. It emphasizes the historical agency of women and children generally elided from traditional master narratives of Western Civilization, demonstrating how feminist and ethnohistorical approaches can reveal their experience. Course materials will include historiographical and anthropological literature as well as primary documents, literary works and visual sources. Meets the Critical Perspectives: Social Inequality requirement. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.

Degree requirement — Critical Perspectives: S, Equity and Power: EPG

1 unit — Neel

Previously Featured Offering

Families in Historical Perspective

Mar. 2018
Instructor: Carol Neel

Women, Children & Men: Families in Historical Perspective explores how we came to be who we are as modern persons, emphasizing how the circumstances, upbringing, and values of people of the past were at once like own and different.

This course considers family life in historical context. It asks how we came to be who we are as modern persons, emphasizing how the circumstances, upbringing, and values of people of the past were at once like own and different. It begins this inquiry with an examination of twentieth-century childhood, parenting, and gender roles through film, text, and artifacts. It continues by exploring marital relations and household structures—and familial success and failure—in the deep European past. In the last two weeks of the block, this course will center on historical American childhoods and how we can know them. Although students will develop their respective voices in mutual conversation on common readings and in a final group oral/ written examination, they will have the opportunity to explore topics of individual interest in research essays supported by library materials.

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