ONLINE COURSE

FEMINIST HISTORY, GENDER EQUALITY AND WOMEN’S ACTIVISM

The place of women at work, in the family and in politics

About the course

This course will help you address key contemporary feminist issues surrounding gender, discrimination, sexual violence and demands for gender equality and gender justice. These are crucial to your daily life and to our common future. The #MeToo movement is one striking example of women’s struggle and growing participation in social and political movements in all parts of the world. The course will help you question the place of women at work, in the family and in politics. It will help you to understand the reasons for the persistence of women’s secondary condition, and of misogyny, the devaluation of women and violence against women.

The course will teach you about key moments in the history of global feminism. We chart the forces – political, economic and within the family – that were central to the founding and growth of the women’s movement. The thinking of these pioneers, their understanding that “the personal is political” is still with us. It has fed subsequent waves of feminism and been taken into contemporary forms of activism in which young women throughout the globe struggle for structural change. The course will examine how decolonisation and racial politics have been central to women’s movements and why intersectionality became a crucial concept in the battle for the rights of ALL women – women of colour, LGBTQ, non-binary, trans. You will learn how feminist economics could change the world for both women and men. You will understand how technology and the algorithms which feed medicine, facial recognition and voting rights have all been male-centred and need change.

Lecturers

Our short introduction to this course includes original talks with the following experts:

Juliet Mitchell

Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies, University of Cambridge

Hannah Dawson

Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas, King's College London

Maxine Molyneux

Professor of Sociology, University College London

Durba Mitra

Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University

Lucy Delap

Reader in Modern British & Gender History, University of Cambridge

Susan Himmelweit

Emeritus Professor of Economics, Open University

Judy Wajcman

Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

Course coordinator

Lisa Appignanesi OBE

Lisa Appignanesi (OBE) is a writer, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at King's College London. She is Senior Commissioning editor at EXPeditions.

In her words, "being a woman is a very complicated thing because one is at the same time the Other, the second sort of being, against whom all kinds of sexist attacks can be directed, the kind of being who is secondary in terms of the constitution of science or indeed the constitution of the body politic".

What you'll learn

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

You will examine the history of feminism and understood why women’s history matters.
You will go through the different waves of feminism.
You discover key concepts and terminology, such as gender, and intersectionality.
You will understand better the gendered meaning of family and “work” in women history and how it influenced family life, family relationships, and women’s ability to organize politically, socially and economically.
You will examine contemporary feminist issues and the growing women’s participation in social and political movements.

The course includes

5 sections
11 lectures

Course duration

3 hours

Price

24,99€

(Online price)

Course curriculum

Chapter	Description	Lectures	Completion time
WELCOME TO THE COURSE BY LISA APPIGNANESI	What makes this course special is the diversity and quality of our speakers – all contributors to the EXPeditions platform, who share their passion and knowledge in intimate conversations that resonate with the challenges of our daily lives. We hope you will find the course useful for reassessing the critical role of feminism in imagining a radically different future.	1	10'
THE LONGEST REVOLUTION BY JULIET MITCHELL	We have the great pleasure of presenting you to Juliet Mitchell, one of the leading figures – indeed one of the founders – of the second wave of the women’s movement. Juliet went on to establish the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge. Here, she takes us back into the analysis which stimulated her thinking about women and shaped her groundbreaking essay, ‘The Longest Revolution’, which came out in its first form in 1966. She thinks of this book as a deconstruction of the situation of women, as identified with the family.	1	20'
A HISTORY OF BLIND SPOTS BY HANNAH DAWSON	Professor Hannah Dawson of King’s College London takes us into the early history of women, passionately reflecting on their condition and pointing out its wrongs, which have lasted for centuries. For her, the history of feminism is a history of trying to make visible things that are completely apparent to some, and yet remain invisible to others.	1	20'
THE FOUR WAVES OF FEMINISM BY MAXINE MOLYNEUX	Leading sociologist, Maxine Molyneux from University College London, presents global feminism as constituting four distinct waves of action. She has participated in several of these.	1	20'
THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL FEMINISMS BY DURBA MITRA	Welcome to today’s talk on The History of Global Feminisms with Professor Durba Mitra of Harvard University. She will show us how the history of global feminisms is deeply entrenched in the history of colonialism, as well as in the history of the rise and fall of slavery.	1	20'
LEARNING FROM THE FEMINIST PAST BY LUCY DELAP	Welcome to today’s lecture on Learning from the Feminist Past with historian Professor Lucy Delap of the University of Cambridge. She tells us that there are important ways in which we should be looking back at feminist histories.	1	20'
FEMINIST ECONOMICS FOR EVERYONE BY SUSAN HIMMELWEIT	Welcome to today’s talk on Feminist Economics for Everyone, with economist Professor Susan Himmelweit. She will tell us how feminist economics looks at the economy from the point of view of women’s everyday lives and how it can achieve a better effect for everyone.	1	20'
HOW GENDER SHAPES TECHNOLOGY BY JUDY WAJCMAN	Welcome to today’s talk on How Gender Shapes Technology with sociologist Professor Judy Wajcman of the London School of Economics. She will detail for us the crucially important way the notion of masculinity has affected scientific, technical and industrial work and our current world of algorithms.	1	20'
THE #METOO MOVEMENT AND THE NEED FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE BY DURBA MITRA	Welcome to today’s talk on the #MeToo movement and the Need for Structural Change with Professor Durba Mitra of Harvard University. Durba will tell us why it is essential for feminist thought to be enacted in a political movement that starts with the individual but shapes a collective imagination.	1	20'
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? BY LISA APPIGNANESI	We are coming to the end of this course. What have we learned?	1	10'

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