This course explores the history of gender in Canada and the United States from 1880 to 2000, with an emphasis on women. It is organized both chronologically and thematically to understand how notions and practices of gender changed throughout time. Women’s historical experiences are positioned as central to this course that emphasizes the heterogeneity of the category of “women”. At the same time, this course underlines the importance of gender as a relational construct by investigating how binarized concepts of gender – namely masculinity and manhood/femininity and womanhood – developed across time, space, and place, and how non-binary identities expand our understanding of gender as construction, identity, and practice. In addition to gender, “other” crucial sites of analysis are examined: these include race, class, immigration and ethnicity, sexuality, and the body. Topics to be addressed include industrialization, class conflict, women’s suffrage, capitalism, and mass consumer culture, war, peace, reconciliation, and decolonization.
