CORE 003 SC - Researching Home and Activism in the 19th-Century United States

This course explores how women activists conceptualized home as a space for transformative change in the 19^th-century U.S. We’ll begin by studying how Native American activists past and present have drawn on both Native and settler notions of home in order to resist settler colonialism. We’ll then look at the ways that free and enslaved Black women reworked tropes of idealized motherhood and utilized trappings of domestic life such as crafting and interior decorating in order to assert claims to personhood and citizenship and to push back against stereotypes propagated by a white-dominated abolitionist movement. And we’ll close by examining how utopian movements and early women’s colleges reimagined home as part of their larger efforts to reimagine society. Throughout the course, we’ll learn about archival research into 19^th-century home life and how historians, literary critics, and other scholars study forms of domestic activism that left traces not in published writing but rather in diaries, commonplace books, and material objects. And we’ll think critically about how the archival record is itself mediated by the structural forces these 19^th-century activists resisted.

Course Credit: 1.0

Please refer to the course schedule on the Scripps Portal for current course offerings and details.