Prof Mary Evans COL 5.04J

This course is available to all second and third year undergraduates who are permitted to take an outside option as part of their programme. This course is available to General Course students.

Term One

An introduction to the history of the Women’s Library; issues of inclusion and exclusion in the holdings

The making of the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’; the ways in which ideas about these identities were formed by moral discourses ; the emergence of cults of domesticity and family life.

The campaigns and the circumstances that changed ideas about gender and the making of the gendered citizen. The part that ideas, and ideals, about citizenship and the nation were informed by expectations about gender.

Term Two

The making of the British Empire : the negotiation and the transformation of gender in a globalising world ; ‘settling’ the Empire and defining the boundaries of citizenship.

Politicising gender : the ways in which gender difference became a matter of politics and access to power. Fighting for, and against, transformations of gender roles and identities. The British campaign for suffrage and its connections with distinct traditions of social reform.

Representing gender : accounts , visual and written, of women and men; changing views about the body and sexuality . Sexuality and religion, the expression of symbolic power

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the MT. 10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the LT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 presentation and 1 other piece of coursework in the MT.

The following items indicate possible reading for the course :

Sally Alexander                   ‘Men’s Fears and Women’s Work : Responses to

                                              Unemployment in London between the Wars’,

                                              (Gender and History, 2000)

Lesley Hall                           Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since

                                              1880 (2013)

Jane Lewis                            The End of Marriage ? Individualism and Intimate

                                               Relations (2003)

Pat Thane and

Tanya Evans                          Sinners ? Scroungers? Saints? ( 2012)

John Tosh                               A Man’s Place : Masculinity and the Middle

                                                Class Home (1999)

Jeffrey Weeks                         Sex, Politics and Society ( 2007)

Dissertation (100%, 10000 words) in the ST.