CGES Collaborative Seminar Fall, 2005

Questions of gender and citizenship in the West have their roots in the transatlantic "age of revolutions" and they have remained central to political developments in Europe and the Americas to the present day.   Subsequent moments of intersection between transformations in gender relations and political struggles, such as the feminist movements of the second half of the twentieth century, also have been trans-Atlantic phenomena. These recent periods of movement resurgence lend themselves to analyses that parallel the research on the late-18 th -century and early19th century revolutionary moments.

This seminar is organized around analyses of and comparison across a series of key historical moments when there were intersections between challenges to the political order and challenges to the gender order in Europe and the U.S., and integrates literary, historical, and sociological perspectives on these struggles. By using literary texts and political tracts produced by women themselves in diverse revolutionary moments, as well as secondary analyses theorizing these transformations, we examine issues of political language and identities, perspective, voice, and intersecting inequalities.     We consider competing definitions of feminism, radicalism, transformation, inclusion, equality, and citizenship in European and American politics from 1776 to 2000.

The periods/transformations on which we will focus are:

1. the transatlantic revolutions between 1776 and 1820

2. the extension of liberalism and the popular revolts of 1848

3. first wave feminism, World War I and socialist revolutions, roughly 1900-1919

4. fascism, anti-feminism, familism, and female agency

5. the "new social movements" associated with 1968

6. the " Wende " of 1989, and afterward; post-socialism, and democratization