SF-1180 American Women Writers and the Struggle For Equality
Until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, women in the United States were denied the right to vote. The struggle for equal rights for women began, we might say, in 1868 when Susan B. Anthony launched the first woman's suffrage newspaper in the U.S.'s The Revolution with the slogan "Women, Their Rights, and Nothing Less."In the face of their disenfranchisement, women have turned to literature and print culture as a forum for public and private expression, democratic participation, and political debate. This course examines how American women writers were literary activists; that is, they used their short stories, novels, poems, essays, and conversion narratives to support and fight for women's suffrage and engage questions of justice and human rights. With their writing, these women exposed injustices affecting not only their gender, but other marginalized groups as well, including African Americans and Indigenous people. The course will move between early suffragist writings by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, late-nineteenth-century novels by Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and contemporary feminism by authors like Chimamanda Adichie, bell hooks, Jessica Valenti, Rebecca Solnit, and Kristen Sollee. Extracurricular activities will enhance classroom readings and discussions.