HL 98 – Junior Tutorial
Harvard College, Fall 2014, Tuesdays 2:30-4:30pm
Tutor: Maggie Doherty (doherty4@fas.harvard.edu)
Student: Megan Jones
Feminism on the Front Lines: War, Gender, and Social Change in Post-bellum America
This tutorial examines the development of American feminism in relation to the United
States’ military engagements from the Civil War to the present. The syllabus places particular
emphasis on the twentieth century, an era that saw several cataclysmic wars as well as great
social upheaval. We will ask how these two historical developments influenced and informed
each other. How do cultural representations of war construct masculinity? How did women
participate in the war effort (at home or at broad), and how did this participation change
social norms around employment or domesticity? How was feminism harnessed by U.S.
foreign policy efforts, or how did feminism capitalize on foreign policy? How did writers and
filmmakers respond to global violence or two crises in gender? How did literary of cinematic
depictions of women’s lives reflect or influence public policy? We’ll examine these questions
over the course of our two units. Our discussion will culminate in the development of a
research project for the final paper.
The goals of the junior tutorial are as follows:
1) deepen and expand your current research interests
2) identify fields of study and their key questions and texts
3) develop independent reading, writing, and research skills that will prepare you for the
senior thesis
Required Texts
The following texts should be purchased or borrowed from the library. Other readings,
marked here with an asterisk, will be uploaded by the student or the instructor to the course
website: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/1405
Louis May Alcott, Civil War Hospital Sketches (1863)
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970)
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1962)
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (1968)
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters (2010)
Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps (1865)
Course Requirements
Because the junior tutorial is an intimate classroom setting, full preparation and
participation are required. Please have read everything assigned and have given some
thought to the themes and questions that animate the course.
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There will be two brief, ungraded response papers for each unit, due on the dates below.
The nature of the response papers will be discussed in during the class prior. Broadly
speaking, the purpose of the response papers is to generate questions and ideas that could
direct future research.
Each unit will require one short paper, 4-6 pages, due on the dates below. These papers
will be the building blocks for the final research paper, and a handout will be given out
specifying the nature of the assignment. The final research paper, 12-15 pages, will be due
Thursday, December 4th. You must write a 1-2 page proposal, with at least five sources,
by Friday, November 14th. A partial draft (5-7 pages) will be due Sunday, November
23rd (to be discussed in class), and a full draft with a bibliography will be due Friday,
December 5th. The final class will require a brief presentation (5 min) that presents the
argument of your paper and that responds to potential questions and counter-arguments.
The grade breakdown is as follows:
-1st short paper: 20%
-2nd short paper: 20%
-oral presentation: 5%
-final research paper (including completion of drafts): 30%
-participation and completion of response papers: 25%
Schedule of Readings
Week One – 9/2/14 – Introduction
-Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853)
-Barbara Foley, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville’s Bartleby,” American
Literary History (2000)
-sample syllabuses
Week Two – 9/10/14 – Syllabus Development
-senior thesis, Josiah Pertz, “The Jewgrass Boys” (2005)
UNIT ONE
Nurses, WACs and Runaways: Women in Wartime from the Civil War through the
Second World War
Week Three – 9/16/14 – Civil War Women
- *Julia Ward Howe “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
- Louisa May Alcott Hospital Sketches
- Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps
- *from Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
(2012) (ch. 4-5)
Week Four – 9/23/14 – What We Talk About When We Talk about Women (A Brief
Methodological History)
- from Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
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-
*Simone de Beauvoir, introduction to The Second Sex (1949)
*from Gibert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) (Part I)
*from bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (1981)
*Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American
Historical Review (1986)
- *from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)
** response paper #1**
Week Five – 9/30/14 – The First World War and Feminist (re)Reading
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- *Beatrice Macdonald, scrapbooks and other archival materials, from the Schlesinger
Library at Radcliffe College
- *from Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
(1981)
** short paper #1 **
Week Six – 10/7/14 – World War II, on the Battlefield
- Photojournalism from WWII (Life magazine)
- Felix de Weldon, Iwo Jima Memorial
- *from Allan Berubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World
War II (ch. 7-8)
- *from Rachel Cohen, Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of Artists and Writers
- Rogers and Hammerstein, South Pacific (1958)
Week Seven – 10/14/14 – World War II, on the Home Front
- Penny Marshall, A League of Their Own (1992)
- *Advertisements calling women into the workforce
- *Leisa Meyer, “Creating G. I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior
in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II,” Feminist Studies (1992)
- *Karen Tucker Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women Workers during
World War II” Journal of American History (1982)
** response paper #2 **
UNIT TWO
Policy and Protest: From the Cold War Through Feminism’s Third Wave
Week Eight – 10/21/14 – Cold War Families and Fears
- *Report on President’s Commission on the Status of Women (1963)
- from Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique (1962)
- * “One Woman: Two Lives,” Time November 3, 1961
- from Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (1990)
- *poetry by Anne Sexton (“The Housewife,” “Her Kind,” “The Abortion,” “With
Mercy for the Greedy”) and Sylvia Plath (“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Morning
Song”
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Week Nine – 10/28/14 – Civil Rights and Consciousness-Raising
- *Civil Rights Act Title VII
- *NOW Statement
- *“The American Female,” Harper’s October 1962
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
- *from Robert Self, All in the Family, chapter 2 (1990)
Week Ten – 11/4/14 – Sex and Gender in Southeast Asia
- Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters (2010
- *My Lai massacre media coverage: Time November 28, 1969 and Life December 5,
1969
- *“Three-Five-Zero-Zero” from Hair
** response paper #1 **
Week Eleven – 11/11/14 – Protest and Possibility: the New Left
- Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night, second half (1968)
- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970)
- *SDS, “Statement on the Liberation of Women”
- Songs: “Bring Them Home,” “Ohio,” “If You Love Your Uncle Sam,” “Gimme
Shelter,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Saigon Bridge,” “Born in the U.S.A.”
- *Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (1971)
Week Twelve – 11/18/14 – 1980s: The End of the Cold War and the Beginning of Women
in Combat
- Ridley Scott, G.I. Jane (1997)
- Faulkner v. Jones (1995)
- Selected Op-Eds from the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the
Providence Journal, The Nation, the National Review, Dissent
Week Thirteen – 11/25/14 – The Iraq War and the War on Terror
- Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You (2014)
- The Geneva Convention on Torture
- Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty (2013)
**short paper #2**
Week Fourteen – 12/2/14 – American Feminism: Where are we Now?
- *Patricia Lockwood, “The Rape Joke”
- Adam Plunkett, “Patricia Lockwood’s Crowd-Pleasing Poetry,” Page-Turner
- Mallory Ortberg, “How Not to Review Women’s Writing,” The Toast
- Lena Dunham, Girls (selected episodes)
- Title IX
- “Rethink Harvard’s Sexual Harassment Policy,” Boston Globe, October 15, 2014
- Senate Bill 967 (University of California on affirmative consent)
** oral presentation**
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