The Inner Lives of Black Women
Amy Sherald, First Lady Michelle Obama, 2018, oil on linen, National Portrait Gallery. Photo by Victoria Pickering on Flickr. See image license info here.
Course Description
This course encourages students to use creative and rigorous historical methods to recover Black women’s experiences, which have often been placed on the periphery of American history and American life.
Drawing largely on primary sources such as letters, personal journals, music, literature, poetry, and film, the course explores the everyday lives of Black women in America from the nineteenth century to the present. We begin in our present moment with discussions of the contemporary painter Amy Sherald; former First Lady Michelle Obama; singers Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé; and victims of police violence, including Breonna Taylor and Sonya Massey.
We then look back at the lives and times of a wide range of Black women, including Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth, enslaved women in the nineteenth century; Nella Larsen, a Harlem Renaissance novelist; Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, legendary blues and jazz singers; Josephine Baker, an expatriate entertainer; and Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer, reformers and luminaries of civil rights activism.
We will examine the struggles of African American women to define their own lives and to improve the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions of Black communities. Topics include Black women’s enslavement and freedom; kinship and family relations; institution- and community-building; violence and trauma; labor and leisure; changing gender roles; consumer and beauty culture; mental health; social activism; and queer identities and the politics of sexuality.
Meet the Instructor: Allyson Hobbs
Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Kleinheinz Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and received a Ph.D. in American History with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has won several teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford's highest prize for excellence in teaching. Professor Hobbs teaches courses on African American history, African American women's history, and 20th-century American history. Her book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, was published by Harvard University Press in 2014. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.com, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and The Washington Post.
Of related interest
AFRICAAM 54N
AMSTUD 54N
FEMGEN 54N
CSRE 54N