S Y L L A B U S

Introduction

Course Assignments

Assigned Books and Readings

• Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (PMHB), January 1983.
• Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, April 1991.
• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings.
• Charles Brockton Brown, Alcuin.
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
• Jessie Fauset, There Is Confusion.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper.
• S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America.

Students registered for the class will receive a free copy of Women in the City of Brothery Love. One additional book, Gertrude Stein's Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings, may become available later in the semester.

Class 1: Introduction: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the City

Class 2: Gendered Encounters: The Leni Lenape, The Europeans, and William Penn

• Peter Lindestrom, Geographia Americae, With An Account Of The Delaware Indians Based On Surveys And Notes Made In 1965-1656, trans. Amandus Johnson (Philadelphia: The Swedish Colonial Society, 1925), 191-202.
• Daniel G. Brinton, The Lenape and Their Legends (1884; New York, AMS Press, 1969), 109-122.
• Anthony F. C. Wallace, "Woman, Land, and Society: Three Aspects of Aboriginal Delaware Life," Pennsylvania Archaeologist 17, nos. 1-4 (1947): 1-35.
• Jean R. Soderlund, ed., William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 1680-1684: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 82-89, 155-62, 307-345.
• Thomas J. Sugrue, "The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania: Indians and Colonists, 1680-1720," PMHB 116, no. 1 (January 1992): 3-31.
• Francis Jennings, "The Delaware Indians In the Covenant Chain," in A Delaware Indian Symposium, ed. Herbert C. Kraft (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1974), 89-101.
• Francis Jennings, "Brother Miquon: Good Lord!," in The World of William Penn, eds. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 195-214.
• Marshall J. Becker, "Hannah Freeman: An Eighteenth-Century Lenape Living and Working Among Colonial Farmers," PMHB 114, no. 2 (April 1990): 249-269.

Class 3: Female and Familial Friends and Neighbors

• Mary Maples Dunn, "Women of Light," in Women of America: A History, eds Carole Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 114-136.
• Jean Soderlund, "Women's Authority in Pennsylvania and New Jersey Quaker Meetings, 1680-1760," William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (October 1987): 722-749.
• Alison Duncan Hirsch, "A Tale of Two Wives: Mythmaking and the Lives of Gulilema and Hannah Penn," Pennsylvania Magazine 61, no. 4 (October 1994): 429-456.
• Jean Soderlund, "Women in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania: Toward A Model of Diversity," PMBH 115, no. 2 (April 1991): 163-183.
• Sharon Salinger, "'Send No More Women': Female Servants in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," PMHB 107, no. 1 (January 1983): 3-28.
• Jean Soderlund, "Black Women in Colonial Pennsylvania," PMHB 107, no. 1 (January 1983): 29-48.
• Report:
  • Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Class 4: Benjamin Franklin, Revolutionary Libertinism, and Revolutionary Women

• Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Bantam). (Selections--270p) Benjamin Franklin, "Old Mistresses Apologue," The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 3, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 27-31.
• Edmund Morgan, "Secrets of Benjamin Franklin," New York Review of Books, 31 January 1991, p. 41-46.
• Esther DeBerdt Reed, "The Sentiments of an American Woman," 1780, reprinted in PMBH 17 (1894): 361-366.
• Wayne Bodle, "Jane Bartram's 'Application,': Her Struggle For Survival, Stability, and Self-Determination in Revolutionary Pennsylvania," PMBH 115, no. 2 (April 1991): 185-220.
• Carole Shammas, "The Female Social Structure of Philadelphia in 1775," PMBH 107, no. 1 (January 1983): 69-83.
• Joyce D. Goodfriend, "The Widowhood of Margaret Shippen Arnold: Letters From England, 1801-1803," PMBH 115, no. 2 (April 1991): 221-255.
• Film: 1776.
• Report:
  • Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975).

Class 5: Republican Mothers and Female Virtue in the Birthplace of the Nation

• Karen List, "The Post-Revolutionary Woman Idealized: Philadelphia Media's 'Republican Motherhood,'" Journalism Quarterly 66, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 65-75.
• Elaine Forman Crane, "The World of Elizabeth Drinker," PMBH 107, no. 1 (January 1983): 3-28.
• Charles Brockton Brown, Alcuin (1798, 1815), edited by Cynthia Kierner (NCUP).
• Report: Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994).
• Report:
  • Charles Brockton Brown, Ormond
  • OR   The Secret Witness (1799).

Class 6: Abolitionism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century

• Margaret Hope Bacon, ed., Lucretia Mott Speaking (Pendle Hill, 1980). (28p)
• Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 70-119.
• Emma Jones Lapsansky, "Feminism, Freedom, and Community: Charlotte Forten and Women Activists in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia," PMBH 113, no. 1 (January 1989): 3-19.
• Margaret Hope Bacon, "'One Great Bundle of Humanity': Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)," PMHB 113, no. 1 (January 1989): 21-43.
• Report:
  • Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Class 7: Walt Whitman's Adhesive Love

• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
• Jay Grossman, "'The Evangel-Poem of Comrades and of Love: Revising Whitman's Republicanism," American Transcendental Quarterly 4, no. 3 (September 1990): 201-218.
• Richard Ellman, "Oscar Meets Walt," New York Review of Books, 3 December 1987, p. 43-44.
• Report:
  • Charley Shively, ed., Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working-Class Camerados (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987);
  • Charley Shively, ed., Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989)
  .

Class 8: Nudes, Prudes, and Thomas Eakins

• Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). (131p)
• Adam Gopnik, "Eakins in the Wilderness," The New Yorker 70 (26 December 1994): 78-91.
• Whitney Davis, "Erotic Revision in Thomas Eakins' Narratives of Male Nudity," Art History 17 (September 1994): 301-341.
• Report:
  • Henry Rule, "Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins: Variations on Some Common Themes," Texas Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1974): 7-57;
  • Norma Lifton, "Thomas Eakins and S. Weir Mitchell: Images and Cures in the Late Nineteenth Century," Psychoanalytic Perspectives in Art (1989): 247-274;
  • Lincoln Kirstein, "Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins: A Poet's and A Painter's Camera- Eye," Aperture 16, no. 3 (1972);
  • Richard Whelan, "Thomas Eakins: The Enigma of the Nude," Christopher Street (April 1979): 15-18
  .

Class 9: M. Carey Thomas and Bryn Mawr College

• Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, in Fernhurst, QED, and Other Early Writings (New York: Liveright, 1971).
• Selections from Marjorie Dobkin, The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent State University Press, 1979); Helen Lefkowitz
• Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994).
• Report:
• Marjorie Dobkin, The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent State University Press, 1979).
• Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994).

Class 10: Peaceful and Feminist Philadelphia

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1973). (63p)
• Mary Francis Cordato, "Towards a New Century: Women and the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876," PMBH 107, no. 1 (January 1983): 113-135.
• Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 120-233.
• Report:
• Margaret Hope Bacon, One Woman's Passion For Peace and Freedom: The Life of Mildred Scott Olmsted (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1993).

Class 11: Lost Sisters

• Vice Commission of Philadelphia, A Report on Existing Conditions (Philadelphia, 1913).
• Marcia Carlisle, "Disorderly City, Disorderly Women: Prostitution in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia," PMHB 110, no. 1 (October 1986): 549-568.
• Steven Ruggles, "Fallen Women: The Inmates of the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, 1836-1908," Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983): 65-82.
• Report:
  • Ruth Rosen and Sue Davidson, eds., The Mamie Papers (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1977).

Class 12: Philadelphia "Negroes"

• Jessie Fauset, There Is Confusion (Boston: Northeastern, University Press, 1989).
• Vincent Jubilee, "In the Shadow of Harlem," Pennsylvania Gazette (May 1981): 37-40.
• Report:
  • W. E. B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; New York: Shocken Books, 1967).
  • William Gardner Smith, South Street (Chatham, N.J.: The Chatham Bookseller, 1954).

Class 13: Affluent Philadelphia Society

• Films: Philadelphia Story; High Society
• Report:
  • Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1963).
  • OR   Digby E. Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper Class (New York: The Free Press, 1958).
  • OR   John Lukacs, Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).
• Report:
  • Sam Bass Warner, The Private City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).

Class 14: Working Class Masculinities and Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia

• S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993). (371p)
• Report:
  • Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
  • OR   Billy G. Smith, The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

Class 15: Lesbians and Gay Men in the City of Sisterly and Brotherly Love

• John D'Emilio, "Homophobia and the Trajectory of Postwar American Radicalism: The Case of Bayard Rustin," Radical History Review (Spring 1995): 80-103.
• Marc Stein, "Sex Politics in the City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves," Radical History Review (Spring 1994): 60-92.
• Marc Stein, "'Birthplace of the Nation': Imagining Lesbian and Gay Communities in Philadelphia," in Home Without Homophobia (New York, Routledge: forthcoming), 1-59.
• Anita Cornwell, Black Lesbian in White America (Naiad, 1983). (129p)
• Film: Philadelphia.
• Report:
  • Robert Scully, A Scarlet Pansy (New York: William Faro, 1933).
  • Marc Stein, The City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994).

"Sex, Gender, and Sexuality" in the City Book Reports

Each book reporter should prepare a 5-10 minute dynamic oral presentation, to be followed by questions and discussion. Some presentations will be scheduled for the beginning of class; others will be scheduled for later. Prepare handouts if these will be helpful. Reports should describe and analyze the texts. For primary documents, explore what the texts can teach us about sex, gender, sexuality, and Philadelphia. For secondary texts, also be sure to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the authors' arguments. For those texts that do not specifically foreground questions of sex, gender, and sexuality, explore what an analysis of sex, gender, and sexuality might bring to the subjects at hand. All book reporters should make every effort to relate their report to the week's assigned readings and topic.

You are strongly encouraged to obtain your books or articles well in advance of your scheduled report. You should also arrange to discuss in advance the report with me, either by telephone or in my office.

Rank order the following list of books, using "1" for your first choice. Turn in your selections to my office.

____ Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

____ Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975).

____ Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994).

____ Charles Brockton Brown, Ormond; OR   The Secret Witness (1799).

____ Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

____ Charley Shively, ed., Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working-Class Camerados (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987); Charley Shively, ed., Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989).

____ Henry Rule, "Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins: Variations on Some Common Themes," Texas Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1974): 7-57; Norma Lifton, "Thomas Eakins and S. Weir Mitchell: Images and Cures in the Late Nineteenth Century," Psychoanalytic Perspectives in Art (1989): 247-274; Lincoln Kirstein, "Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins: A Poet's and A Painter's Camera- Eye," Aperture 16, no. 3 (1972); Richard Whelan, "Thomas Eakins: The Enigma of the Nude," Christopher Street (April 1979): 15-18.

____ Marjorie Dobkin, The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent State University Press, 1979).

____ Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994).

____ Margaret Hope Bacon, One Woman's Passion For Peace and Freedom: The Life of Mildred Scott Olmsted (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1993).

____ Ruth Rosen and Sue Davidson, eds., The Mamie Papers (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1977).

____ W. E. B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; New York: Shocken Books, 1967).

____ William Gardner Smith, South Street (Chatham, N.J.: The Chatham Bookseller, 1954).

____ Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1963). OR   Digby E. Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper Class (New York: The Free Press, 1958). OR   John Lukacs, Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).

____ Sam Bass Warner, The Private City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).

____ Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800 -1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). OR   Billy G. Smith, The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

____ Robert Scully, A Scarlet Pansy (New York: William Faro, 1933).

____ Marc Stein, The City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994).