CHANGES SPACES AND MOBILITIES: WOMEN IN

The turn-of-the-century United States was a nation on the cusp of a number of momentous social, cultural, and political movements. One of the biggest changes was in the status and role of women. From the emergence of the New Woman in the last decade of the 19th century, to the suffragette in the 1910s and the flapper in the 1920s, the roles and positions of women were expanding and evolving in unprecedented ways. Coupled with the growth and expansion of cities, women’s mobility and the spaces they occupied changed dramatically during this time period. In this course, we will examine texts that depict the situation of women and their mobility in various social and cultural contexts in the shifting urban landscape of early twentieth-century New York City. What spaces were women allowed/expected to occupy? What spaces were considered taboo or off limits? What were the effects and consequences of the spaces that women occupied? How did women’s mobility differ to men’s? How do race and class impact mobility and space? What factors influenced women’s mobility and how did these factors change/develop over time? Course materials will likely include work by Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, Sui Sin Far, Anzia Yezierska, Edith Wharton, and Faith Baldwin, as well as the film Skyscraper Souls