Women in History

Recommended Prerequisites

Not applicable.

Teaching Methods

The course is divided into two modules. For each one, the first sessions are lectures, so as to make historical time, themes, bibliography, available sources and research methodologies familiar to the students. The following sessions are mostly practical work, in the sense that students make presentations on particular issues, in the form of a book review, discussed by the group. Supervising of the first stages of the final essay is also part of the classes. Final essays may be either on the state-of-the-art of a particular issue or a new research using the available sources.

Learning Outcomes

Students should acquire knowledge of medieval historiographical representations of powerful Iberian women and of normative discourses from the 17th to the 19th centuries that built images of women and defined their social roles and behavior; understand the genesis and evolution of such archetypes as well as their resilience and projection in present times; get acquainted with the plurality of actual women’s social roles, including elite, anonymous workers and socially marginalized women. Students should become aware that: medieval paradigms of feminine power were subject to occultation and demonization in the following centuries; though images altered through the 19th century secularization process, behavior expectations were unchanged; present common sense projects back into the distant past what is actually a 19th century stereotype of the “feminine”; the absence of women in the work market prior to the 20th century and their separation from power dynamics are myths.    

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

The course will discuss the representation of women throughout History, mainly the discrepancy between discourses that depict them and their documented actions. Two focus: 1) Lost paradigms of symbolic feminine power in the Iberian Middle Ages (8th-13th centuries). Study of a number of women of royal blood (queens, sisters and daughters of kings) who incarnated aspects of that paradigm and a) were erased or demonized by coeval and latter historiographical discourse; b) left non negligible traces of power in documentation and artistic realizations. 2)  European 17th, 18th and 19th centuries’ stereotypes about “woman” in the discourses of Medicine, Theology and Law, as well as in both canonical and popular literature; elucidation of the prevailing normative discourse and discussion of its motivations; contrastive approach to the lives of actual women known to history (mainly from the working class, but the political, religious and economic elites will also be studied).

Head Lecturer(s)

Professor a Definir - Faculdade de Letras

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Synthesis work may be replaced by research work on historical sources.: 30.0%
Synthesis work: 70.0%

Bibliography

Anderson B., Zinsser, J. (2000). Historia de las mujeres. Barcelona: Crítica

Duby, G., Perrot, M. (dir.) (1995). História das mulheres 3-4. Porto: Afrontamento

Ferreira, M.R. (2011). Entre conselho e incesto: a irmã do rei. e-Spania, 12

Ferreira, M.R. (2014). La reine est morte: la succession politique des filles de roi aux XIe et XIIe siècles. e-Spania, 17

Lopes, M.A. (2012). Dominando corpos e consciências em recolhimentos portugueses. In L. Rubio, Ed, Instituciones y centros de reclusión colectiva (siglos XVI-XX). León: Univ. de León

Lopes, M.A. (1989). Mulheres, espaço e sociabilidade (séc. XVIII). Lisboa: L. Horizonte

Martin, G. (2011), Mujeres y poderes en la España medieval. Alcalá de Henares: CEC

Morant, I. dir (2006). Historia de las mujeres en España y America Latina, 3-4. Madrid: Cátedra

Silva, M.R. (1999). A mulher. Bibliografia portuguesa anotada (1518-1998). Lisboa: Cosmos

Wiesner, M. (2008). Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge Univ. Press.