PS 1622 Women and Political Theory
Spring 1998

Instructor: Iris Young
Office: 3J 13 FQ
Phone: 648-7432
Hours: Mon. 11-12:00, Wed 3-5:00, and by appt.
Email: irisy+@pitt.edu

This course traces the development of some key ideas and arguments about women, gender and the family made by important political theorists of the modern past and the present.. It sets these arguments in context by reading an account of shifts in production and family life that helped a distinction between private and public spheres emerge in Europe. We read about the public connection of women with the anti-slavery movement in the United States in the nineteenth century, and the complex and conflicted relations that developed between the women and anti-racist issues and organizing. The course ends with a focus on important contemporary issues of gender and democracy, representation, and the connection between care work, social justice, and policy.

The following books are on sale in the Pitt Book Center and on reserve in Hillman Library:

Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings (you will read only The Subjection of Women, which is the title on reserve, I believe)

Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class

Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries

Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy

One additional book is on reserve from which some pages of reading are required, but the book is not on sale in the book center:

Jean Jacquet Rousseau, Emile

Course format and requirements: You are expected to come to class regularly. I will sometimes take attendance. You should come to class prepared to discuss together the reading assigned on the syllabus for that day. I will take the last half hour of each class session to introduce basic terms, themes and arguments of the reading for the next session. Thus I will not lecture on the reading on the day it is assigned, but rather expect you to have questions, observations and comments about it.

Your written assignments will consists of four take home essay examinations; each will be 6- 8 typewritten pages long. The syllabus lists the dates they are due; I will hand out the questions for each assignment at least one week before it is due.

Topics and Readings by Session:

August 31: Introduction to the course and to J.J. Rousseau

September 2 - Okin, Chapters 5 and 6. Rousseau on natural man, social contract and the role of

women.

September 9 - Rousseau, Emile, Book V - How girls and women should be educated to be pleasing to men but modest, cultured enough to be entertaining but not to run

things.

September 14 - Okin, Chapter 7. Rousseau's Contradiction? -- Equality for men but not for women? Suggested additional reading: Okin, Chapter 8.

September 16 - Wollstonecraft, Chapters 1 and 2. This fan of the French Revolution argues against many forms of traditional privilege and hierarchy.