Worldwide, women are influencing businesses and economies on an unprecedented scale. WIDE ANGLE's '1-800-INDIA' (2005) and 'Pickles, Inc.' (2005) give us insight into two instances of economic and social shifts being wrought by the entry of women into local and international economies. In this lesson, students will begin by examining historic photographs to determine how economic roles for women have changed in the United States. They will then look at contemporary examples of women entering the workforce for the first time: in India's outsourcing sector; and in small business in Israel. They will explore how these women's entry into the economic sphere often involves negotiation and the overcoming of obstacles, but can bring about larger social and behavioral changes as well. As a Culminating Activity, students will apply the knowledge gained in this lesson toward a response to a Document-Based Question.

This course explores theoretical issues and concerns underlying global feminisms, and their expression through diverse forms of feminist activism at the community, national, and transnational levels. A comparative perspective is used to examine the following questions: How are women’s issues understood and articulated in different contexts? What are the linkages between women’s multiple identities (class, race, caste, ethnicity, religion, location) and feminist activism? How do conflict, religious fundamentalism, and militarization of societies impact women’s lives? Further, the course explores the role of the state in influencing the course and direction of women’s movements, and women’s mobilization within and across national boundaries for social and gender justice. The challenges and dilemmas facing contemporary women’s activism are also addressed.
In this semester the course will devote a section of the course to the Black Lives Matter struggle in the US and its global impact.

During this unit, there will be several opportunities for students to address their experiences as well as take a closer look at the experiences of those written about in the unit. Students will take a journey into the time periods of Apartheid in South Africa and the Jim Crow Era/Civil Rights Movement in America. Students will be exposed to practices that would be described as “man’s inhumanity to man,” but are often left out of Social Studies textbooks and glossed over-- if ever addressed in middle school classrooms.

This unit will be geared toward my Advanced Placement Literature and Composition class, but could certainly be taught in any survey course of English literature, or a course that examines women’s literature.

One objective, part of the AP Literature curriculum, is to teach historical context. This is always important so that students realize that art is a response to real life, and characters’ lives represent real lives shaped by real events. I also want my students to see connections to their own lives, and that the struggles for equity are not futile, but ongoing and necessary. I would like students also to see that a society that suppresses a group of people, is weaker, not stronger, and oppression is something for all of us to fight. And, I would like to open up some dusty-shelf texts to high school teachers who might not consider teaching them.

This unit will ask students to examine the historical boundaries in law, society, and economics for women in medieval literature, and consider how females depicted in stories from these eras might reveal power and agency that is not revealed in laws or politics. The unit will include the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, poetry from Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and stories from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies textbook with primary source readings. This resource was supported by funding from the OER Creator Program at UMass Dartmouth.