Gender, Rights, & Leadership in History (HIST10017)

This subject introduces key issues in the history of sex, gender, power and identity. Students will be encouraged to think critically about ideas about gender across diverse places and times and how they have constrained or enabled change. We will examine the challenges faced by women (and people of other minoritized genders and sexualities) in gaining legal and political recognition. Attention will be given both to structural inequalities and changing assumptions about masculinity and femininity, gender relations, sex roles and sexual practices.
 
The subject focuses first on women’s struggles for rights – to education, the vote, work, citizenship, rights within marriage, reproductive rights – as well as campaigns for recognition of diverse sexualities and of gendered violence. We will analyse these historical contests about gender, within and across lines of race, class and sexuality, reflecting also on how imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and socialism shaped such contests and how people tackled multiple bases of oppression. We will examine struggles to achieve equal rights, so often a goal of the modern state, but also strategies to uphold them across diverse social and political contexts. We ask however what would constitute progress in these areas, to what extent it has been achieved, and why progress is also sometimes reversed.
 
Secondly the subject focuses on the challenges that women have faced historically in exercising leadership and political power. We critically analyse the experiences of some of the most iconic and mythologised women leaders, as well as a selection of significant women who inherited  or were appointed or elected to national leadership.  Most of the world’s nations have never had a woman leader. Does history help us understand why this is so? And what does this mean for how women are considered as leaders and for the history of women and power?  We also examine the experiences of women and people of other minoritized genders and sexualities who led campaigns for social, political and economic reform.
 
Students will read a range of primary sources and learn continually to reflect on the gendered nature of history. The subject will include case studies from Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas.
 
Classes will be two one-hour lectures with a 1-hour tutorial a week.