Hist. 72200: “Love, Marriage, and Motherhood in U.S. History” Professor Kristin Celello Tuesday, 4:15-6:15pm
This course explores gender and the politics of the family in the United States, considering the intimate, private lives of American women over time and place as well as the public manifestations and ramifications of the same. We will study how ideals of wifehood and motherhood have been constructed, and how who has created and had access to these ideals has changed over time. We will analyze the evolving meanings and value assigned to women’s reproductive labor, particularly the larger forces that influenced and were influenced by women’s various roles and responsibilities within their families. Throughout the semester, we will play close attention to questions of race, ethnicity, class, region, and sexuality. We will also consider how the social history of women’s family lives intersected with politics (domestic and international), law, medicine, social movements, and the economy, among other issues. Students will be asked to write several short papers over the course of the semester, as well as a longer, historiography based paper as a final project.
Course Schedule:
August 30: Reconsidering Public and Private
Reading: Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard University Press, rev. ed., 2002)
September 6: Marriage and Race in Early America
Reading: Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Cornell University Press, 2000)
September 13: Reproduction and Race in Early America
Reading: Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
September 20: Reproduction and the American Revolution
Reading: Susan Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
September 27: Same-Sex Marriage in the New Nation
Reading: Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2014)
October 14: Marriage in the Borderlands
Reading: María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish- American Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880 (University of Nevada Press, 2007)
October 18: Fiction, Marriage, and Race
Reading: Tess Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Illinois Press, 2011)
October 25: Motherhood and the Welfare State
Reading: Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1994)
November 1: Motherhood and Modernity
Reading: Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
November 8: Reproductive Rights
Reading: Rebecca M. Kulchin, Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980 (Rutgers University Press, 2009)
November 15: Adoption across Borders
Reading: Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Duke University Press, 2012)
November 22: Beyond the Heterosexual Family
Reading: Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)
November 29: Marriage and Consumer Culture
Reading: Karen M. Dunak, As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America (New York University Press, 2013)
December 6: Marriage and Power
Reading: Marcia A. Zug, Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches (New York University Press, 2016)