CHANGING AMERICAN FAMILIES
Fulfills Human Diversity co-curricular requirement

CFA 3348-001H
TTh 9:30AM-10:50—101 Dallas Hall
Crista DeLuzio—56-DH—214-768-3748

This course explores changing expectations for and experiences of families in the United States from the colonial period to the present.  We will focus on the multiplicity of forms family life has taken in the past, paying careful attention to differences among and within families of race, class, ethnicity, gender, age, and sexual orientation.  Readings, lectures, discussions, and assignments will address a range of issues associated with family life, including gender roles and relations; generational roles and relations; courtship; marriage; divorce; reproduction; child rearing; gender divisions of labor at home and between home and work; and the relationship between public and private life. Throughout, we will be interested in discerning the ways in which American families have shaped and been shaped by forces of economic, legal, political, social, and cultural change.

Readings include: : 1) Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender, Culture and Change, 1700-1835; 2) Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society; 3) Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic; 4) Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; 5) Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction 6) Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn;  7) Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, The Baby Boom, and Social Change; 8) Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption; 9) Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline