Women's Studies
Course Descriptions
Fall 2007

Women’s Studies 100 – Women, Culture, Religion, and Society
(4 semester hours)
Millen, Rochelle L.

Pre-requisite:  None
Women, Culture, Religion, and Society is an introductory Women’s Studies course.  Participants in this course will bring differing levels of experience, interests, and talents, which this course will seek to recognize and value as a strength.  Together, we’ll seek to understand the complex experiences of women from a variety of backgrounds.  One major premise of Women's Studies is that a focus on women's lives can help us to create new frameworks for exploring gender--frameworks that help us more accurately describe and understand the variety of lived experiences of all people regardless of gender.  As a class we will think critically about the influence of religious ideas, texts, and doctrine, historical events, race, gender, sex, sexuality, class on women's lives.  In doing so, we will work with the research methods of traditional fields (religion, history, psychology, sociology, literature), and their attendant theories, but also invoke the creative challenge that Women’s Studies offers to traditional, academic ways of knowing social and cultural life.  In particular, since it arose out of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, Women’s Studies insists on an intense and necessary relationship between theory and practice.  Required:  two papers, a midterm exam.  This course is writing intensive.