Course Description: HISTORY OF WOMEN’S POWER & AGENCY: COMPARATIVE APPROACHES

How have scholars in the past studied the historical experience of women? How should we study the historical experience of women in light of new understandings of gender and political culture? These questions are the starting point of how to approach women, individually or collectively, in comparative historical contexts, informed by the latest theoretical approaches.

We will survey the secondary literature, looking at the historiographical debates which have shaped the field and how the history of women and gender has changed over the decades. We will relate these histories to political, ideological and economic developments. We will likewise examine how gender affected women’s agency and access to power, and explore the relationship between class and gender.

Finally, we will delve into problem of integrating women into modern historical narratives by reading our sources with a more critical eye and by questioning modern assumptions in regard to gender roles in past societies. The evidence must not be read through the lenses of modernity.  As K. LoPrete has vigorously argued, modern scholars tend to trivialize or exceptionalize pre-modern women even when they appear in the sources. Modern scholars also tend to evaluate pre-modern polities with anachronistic and incomplete understandings of political culture, and impose modern notions of impersonal institutions and public space. Such historical works overlook or erase the fundamental role women played in household-based dynastic polities and as integral actors in the political community.

In addition to familiarizing ourselves with the most influential theoretical contributions to the study of women’s history and gender, we will ground ourselves empirically in the following periods and geographical spheres: late medieval Christian Europe, the Islamic Middle East and Anatolia/Byzantium, as well as early modern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the eastern Islamic world and far east.

Course Objectives

• Students will have acquired a firm grasp of the history of women with a comparative aspect focusing on the Christian and Muslim Worlds over time
• Students will have developed their reading, writing, and analytical skills through the engagement with primary sources and secondary literature
• Students will have gained new insight on our present attitudes and values toward women and gender through a deeper understanding of past historical, social and cultural developments