This course is a study of American Feminism as a set of ideas, as a political movement, and as a historical force that has shaped American culture. The course begins with the formation of an organized movement for women’s rights in the 1840s and progresses to the woman suffrage and birth control movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The course also covers the situation of American women after the World War II era, the high point of “second wave” feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, and the questions and issues posed by feminists and their critics since that time.