Table of Contents Our features About this Site Teaching Resource Websites Teaching Components Hildegard of Bingen Old Norse Sagas Medicine of Gender Anchoress Women of Mesoamerica Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fathers and Daughters Alone in Shakespeare Confess or Deny? "Witches'" Choices in 1692 History of Mary Prince (1831) Frida Kahlo: Mexican Artist, World Icon The Maiden Knight: The Roman de Silence and the Romantic Tradition Kate Chopin: A Feminist Voice at the fin de si�cle Transatlantic Feminisms: Women's Narratives of Travel and Displacement Twentieth-Century American Women Composers: A Retrospective in Song Power, Poison, and Politics in Ancient Rome Warrior Women in Anglo-American Folksong and History Feminist Humanities Project Center for the Study of Women in Society 349 Hendricks Hall 1201 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-1201 Phone: (541) 346-2263 Fax: (541) 346-5096 fhp@darkwing.uoregon.edu Site maintained by Wired Humanities Project Updated 02/01	Welcome to Digital Teaching Units:Gender in History Website Directory This site has been visited times since August 2000.
	"A Poetry of Science - The Life and Works of Abbess Hildegard of Bingen," a collaborative effort between Dr. Jan Emerson and the Feminist Humanities Project, explores the many facets of this fascinating woman's life, from visionary to healer, scientist and composer, the work of Hildegard of Bingen continues to captivate and awe. Click here or on the image to the left for more information. Currently offline for updating, please check back again soon.
	This on-line database is being utilized by Dr. Zoe Borovsky as a "digital appendix" for her research on these mythical-heroic "sagas of antiquity." These sagas with their fantastic accounts of Scandinavian heroes, whose adventures took place in the mythic past prior to the settlement of Iceland (ca. 870 A.D.), are presumed to have circulated orally before they were recorded much later. This database uses text-analysis software called TACT, developed at the University of Toronto. Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	Historicizing women's role in medicine has been an ongoing feminist project since the 1970s. Recent efforts in assessing medieval medical practice have recognized the cultural work of women's medical work (not exclusively midwifery), treating it in relation to class, economics, professionalization, religion and spirituality, and literature. How does a feminist exploration of medieval medicine shape the questions we ask of a history of medicine? How does it illuminate other cultural practices and assumptions, especially modern ones? Dr. Louise Bishop seeks to answer these and other questions in this intriguing site. Click here or on the image to the left for more information.
	A wonderful teaching site for the film "Anchoress" (dir. Chris Newby, 1993) produced through the collaborative efforts of Regina Psaki, University of Oregon, and Dianne Downey, International High School. This site includes viewing exercises, historical letters and film reviews. Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	Have you ever wondered whether in all the world and throughout the ages there have ever been societies in which women enjoyed a greater equality with men? Questions such as this one lead Professor Stephanie Wood to examine the so-called "gender complimentarity" among indigenous peoples of ancient and colonial Mesoamerica (the culture zone that is now encompassed by much of Mexico and part of Central America). She explores images from pictorial manuscripts and indigenous language texts in search of the evolution of complementarity and the increasing gender hierarchy, particularly after the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century. Click here or on the image to the left for more information.
	Equal pay for equal work is an issue of obvious importance for women today, but at the beginning of the century Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was fighting for the right of women merely to engage in meaningful, fulfilling work in the public sphere. She argued that women's liberation would come not through suffrage and the ballot box but through economic independence. Her book Women and Economics was an international bestseller in 1898. She also wrote fiction--voluminously--to illustrate her ideals for women. We will look at one or two short, teachable stories that embody the ideas of this writer, a socialist and feminist, called a "daring humorist of reform." Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	"Where's Mom When We Need Her? Fathers and Daughters Alone in Shakespeare" explores the role of the daughter as both political and economic asset in several of Shakespeare's plays. Encouraging gender-focused readings of Shakespeare brings to light many aspects perhaps left unnoticed by more common readings of these popular plays. Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	In 1692 Salem, Massachusetts John Westgate overheard Alice Parker quarreling with and scolding her husband in a local tavern. Westgate thought Parker exhibited shameful behavior for a good Puritan woman, and he presented this damning evidence against Alice at her witchcraft trial. He claimed that immediately afterwards a black hog ran toward him, threatening to devour him. He realized that it wasn't a real hog, and that it might have been the devil, most likely brought directly to him by Alice Parker, thus proving that she was a witch. Westgate successfully linked the accused woman with misdeeds unbecoming of a Puritan woman, and more importantly he linked her to Satan himself. What could a woman confronted with "evidence" like this do? We will explore the options that women had during the witch trials. Denial was dangerous, as all the women who denied the charges were hanged. They could not successfully prove that they had had no dealings--however trivial--with the devil, in other words, that they had not sinned in any way. Confession was a more promising strategy to save one's life, but the court only believed certain confessions: those accompanied with sincere contrition and apology--acts that further enmeshed women into the discourse of depravity expected of them. Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	Transporting Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas and the islands of the Caribbean as slaves began shortly after Columbus "discovered" the New World in 1492 and continued until the late 1800's. This massive, involuntary population movement changed these areas forever; slave descendants are in the majority on many Caribbean islands today. England, France, Spain and Holland profited hugely from the sugar plantations on their island colonies, run with slave labor. We may think of this tropical region today as a vacation paradise, but Caribbean slavery was more brutal than slavery in the southern U.S. What was it like to be a slave? What were women's lives like in slavery? Of the hundreds of slave women who worked on British islands from 1623 to 1833, when Britain became the first major nation to emancipate its slaves, only one has left us her story in her own words. Mary Prince, born into slavery in late eighteenth-century Bermuda, walked away from her owners in London in 1828 and dictated her life story to abolitionists for publication. This site provides materials to put her moving story into its larger context. Click here or on the image to the left for more information.
	This is one of several sites devoted to Mexico's women icons compiled for a course of the same title in Women's Studies and History at the University of Oregon and reorganized as a Digital Teaching Unit for Gender in History. The objective is to explore the historical figure of Frida Kahlo as well as the reconstructions of her image over time by various groups for various purposes, all with the ultimate goal of better understanding the artist and her work, Mexican cultural history, and the ways people interact with the past to extract personal meaning from it. A cult-like following has developed in recent years behind this intriguing figure from the Mexican revolutionary area. Why are women around the world embracing this painter and her work, inadvertently transforming her from a subversive into a commodity? To what extent are "othered groups" finding solace in Kahlo's own multi-dimensional "alterity" and pain (as woman-artist, daughter of Catholic/cultural Jews, bisexual, handicapped, ambivalent mother, Communist, nonconformist swearing smoker, indigenista, feminist, or...)? How has her life and/or art contributed to the evolution of mexicanidad as it is perceived inside and outside Mexico? What does her work capture of the Revolution and the social and cultural changes it set in motion? One observer suggests she constructed an identity of "female mestizaje" by unifying the stereotyped images of Mexican women. Would you agree? What do you make of her heavy reliance on self-portraiture? What insights does Kahlo's work give us into the way the female body is/was lived versus made and displayed, at least in her cultural milieu? Did she challenge traditional imagery of the female body? If so, how and to what end? Does her work evoke pain? If so, is this significant for considerations of gender? These and other questions are ones that might be answered in the images and texts compiled here for further study.. Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	The Roman de Silence is a medieval romance with a difference. In the 13th century a mysterious author wrote a little-known knightly adventure about a woman brought up as a man. For as long as she can remember, our heroine, Silence, has been treated, dressed, and thought of as a boy, and when she grows up she becomes the best knight in England. Although Nature made her a perfect woman, Nurture has made her a perfect man and knight. The question our author is playing with, in making his "perfect knight" a woman, is this: Are men and women different because of nature, or because of nurture? Click here or on the image to the left for more information.
	Katherine O'Flaherty was born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis. Her mother was of the Creole elite, descended from early French pioneers. Her father was a native of Ireland, and was a prosperous merchant. He died in a railroad accident in 1855. Kate was strongly influenced in her early years by her great-grandmother, Mme. Charleville, who taught her not to judge people by appearances. (Seyersted) Kate was educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis, and in 1870 married Oscar Chopin. On their 3-month honeymoon in Europe Kate often took solitary walks, and enjoyed smoking. Her first novel, At Fault, was published in 1890. Her first collection of short fiction, Bayou Folk, appeared in 1894, followed by A Night in Acadie, in 1897, and both received wide acclaim. Kate's reputation as a "local color" writer was established. When her novel, The Awakening, was published April 22, 1899, it was widely condemned for its frank portrayal of a young woman who has desires that her marriage cannot fulfill. Her third short-story collection, A Vocation and a Voice, was canceled by her publisher. Kate had a strong following, however, and, 70 years later, the novel reappeared as a strong voice of feminine conviction at the fin de si�cle. Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	This site provides an introduction to different modes of understanding representations of movement (travel, displacement, exile) in women's culture. We seek to unravel the metaphors used to describe encounters and conflicts in feminist theory that attempt to cross the conventional definitions of national and regional literatures. Click here or on the image to the left for more information.
	On November 13, 2000, soprano Ann Tedards and pianist Gregory Mason, both members of the University of Oregon School of Music faculty, presented a recital of art songs composed by twentieth-century American women composers. The program, which included a wide variety of compositions for voice and piano, spanned the twentieth century and offered a taste of the eclectic wealth of creativity often left unperformed in contemporary recitals. Romantic songs from the turn of the nineteenth century were followed by songs by African-American composers from the 1940's, settings of Sappho fragments to ragtime, blues and boogie styles, settings of texts by Willa Cather which describe a young woman’s first impressions of the American west, and a group of songs composed in the late 1990’s entitled "Days and Nights." The recital was part of the "Faculty Artist Series" and the "Festival of the Millennium." Click here or on the image to the right for more information.
	Roman historical narratives covering events from the Republican period (circa 500 b.C. to 31 b. C.) to the late the Empire (3rd century A.D.) often refer to the political use of poison by individuals or groups. Tradional values and institutions, the bedrock of Roman power and success, were often perceived as threatened by change. Foreign religions, unorthodox life-styles, conspiracies to overthrow the Senate and the dynastic intrigues of the imperial court were regarded as adulterating and impoverishing the moral and political patrimony of Rome. The literary presence of poison generally accompanies or preannounces some form of disturbance caused by a rejection of the old and the craving for novelty. Poison is therefore embedded in a moral discourse on the dangers of seeking "new things" (res novae)--a Latin expression denoting revolution and tyranny--stimulated by uncontrolled desires, vis-a-vis the traditional values stressing "manly" self-control and moderation, both individually and as a community. Given the strong moralistic and didactic purpose of history-writing--the only leisurely occupation worthy of a Roman statesman--and the interaction between the public and private sphere, the use of poison is not only emblematic of its user's moral character, but it also defines the user's gender. Click here or on the image to the left for more information.
	The Female Warrior is a high-mettled heroine of ballads who masquerades as a man and ventures to war for love and for glory. Songs about such women were pop-song "hits" for nearly three centuries. The earliest is an Elizabethan bestseller that stayed in print for 200 years. Dianne Dugaw's book, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry is based on the author's own collection of these old ballads. Dugaw first heard songs about Female Warriors in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where Ollie Gilbert sang two ballads for her from the 1700s, Polly Oliver and The Cruel War Is Raging-- which you may know from the 1960s Peter, Paul and Mary version. In a few years, she had discovered thousands of versions of more than 120 songs about cross-dressing women. Click here or on the image to the right for more information
	To find out more about the Digital Teaching Units site, click on About the Site on the left. Click on any of the links on the left to reach an area of interest in our web site. To return to this website directory, click on the schoolhouse icon on the main page of each of the Teaching Components. The icon looks like this: Happy Exploring!