From Wendy Gamber:

My syllabi for the two versions of Women and American Politics I taught recently are attached. My students used WASM to locate primary sources and for their research papers. They made greater use of WASM in the Spring 2007 version of the course, which ended in 1920. The Fall 2008 version, given the timeliness of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, spanned the period between the late 18th century and the present. I had a more difficult time steering students toward high quality sources because so much was instantly available to them via Google (not that all such materials are necessarily of low quality). That’s certainly a problem I experience in all my classes–and I suspect I’m not alone. Our library pays millions for excellent electronic databases, including WASM, but students can be reluctant to make the best use of the resources for which their tuition pays.

Wendy Gamber
Indiana University

Gamber – Women, Activism, and Politics in the United States, c. 1789-1920

Gamber – Women and American Politics syllabus-1

Attached is a document I put together for the students in a class I
teach called “Oberlin History as American History.” Each year I teach
the class, we have a new focus for our local history projects. This
year we are looking into women and activism in Oberlin, 1960-1980. We
are interested in exploring both the campus and the town. I have
suggested that my students use the introductions to three “Women and
Social Movements” projects to get a better sense of the social and
legal conditions of the period, and the struggles around which women
organized. These introductions are excellent scholarly essays on
their own. Moreover, in a class where I hope to help my students
learn how to collect and use primary materials to create their own
essays, the introductions model a particularly important kind of
writing.

Carol Lasser
Oberlin College

Lasser Assignment

From Ruth Rosen on assignments in her course “Gender Matters in 20th Century America”:

It seemed to me that we needed to start creating assignments that used
Women and Social Movements. As you’ll see, option one simply asked
students to select one of the projects and to work with the documents in
a rather uncomplicated manner. The second was much more complicated, as
students were asked to read the documents and to see if the author’s
interpretation was fair, partial or needed correction. This was a much
more sophisticated kind of historiographical assignment. Only a handful
of students chose option 2, but those that did were on their way to
graduate school at Harvard and other such universities. Most of the
class picked option one and were amazingly creative. I have not yet
had the time to consider how I would do it differently, but I would
certainly know and expect that most students would choose the easier
option one. If the state of California doesn’t completely collapse, I
will again be teaching this course, “Gender Matters in the 20th
Century.”
Instructions for Document.doc 2009
Ruth Rosen, Professor Emerita UC Davis, Visiting Professor
UC Berkeley.