WOMEN AND CRIME IN THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Crime happens. Property is damaged and stolen, lives are lost, and law, order, and justice evolves. This course taps into that ongoing reality by centering the herstorical evolution of female crime, highlighting women and girls of many kinds across time and spaces of America. It moves across centuries (through to the contemporary period) probing within and far beyond icons to unveil the gendered nature of crime and moreover to empower students to see and trace everyday female criminality that ignited across racial, ethnic, as well as lines of age in the winding path of American history. While men and boys dominate public and even scholarly expectations of crime and carceral conversations for many, students will leave this course with a far more rigorous understanding of the herstories gained by taking serious the types of crimes that women and girls acted out by exploring: robbery, assault, infanticide, larceny, murder, arson, prostitution, serial killers, and drug-related crimes. As well as going further to probe state and federal power through carceral medicine - showing the interior world of female prisoners, physicians, the movement of females into "asylums'' and mental state hospitals, incarceration based on "insanity" while going further to examine births, illnesses, and death of women and teens in jails and prisons. Students will be likewise pushed to engage America's timeline of race, gender, and executions that includes women and girls. Racialized and gendered criminality, law enforcement violence, healthcare and deathcare in prisons are critical public health issues that students can better understand the complicated evolutions by deeply probing the herstorical lives of women, girls, and crime through this course. Students will read, learn, dig up the past, and write to ensure a future of herstory and remembrance.
Course Attributes: BU BA; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H

WOMEN AND CRIME IN THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN HISTORY

HISTORY 39SM

Section 01