WOST 302 - Women and Families

Units: 3 ; Breadth Area: Diversity
Gender and unpaid family care-work. Covered topics may include family formation and dissolution, parent-child relations, interaction and power, the diversity of families, heteronormativity, domestic violence, reproductive rights, and family policy.

Prerequisites: Junior, senior or post-baccalaureate standing.
Possible Instructional Methods: Entirely On-ground, or Entirely Online, or Hybrid.
Grading: A-F or CR/NC (student choice).
Breadth Area(s) Satisfied: Overlay - Diversity
Course Typically Offered: Fall & Spring

Student Learning Outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:

Identify and examine contemporary U.S. families, the division of labor within the household, domestic violence, heteronormativity, and changing social and economic roles for women.
Analyze historical and contemporary research on marriage as a political institution that creates alliances between groups, systems of inequality between men and women, exclusive boundaries by law, and perpetuates social inequality.
Examine issues of class, race, ethnicity, immigrant status and gender and the ways these identity markers impact power in contemporary U.S. families.
Explore the social construction of motherhood in the U.S. with particular attention paid to marginalized mothers.
Discuss theoretical and empirical studies on the family and its impact on gender and human development in the U.S.
Examine how an analysis of gender, power, and inequality in the contemporary U.S. family necessitates a broader focus on how the categories of race, class, sexuality, immigration status, and nationality impact family members. Examine feminist critiques of marriage, social welfare, and work/family balance.
Analyze contemporary and diverse U.S. families and examine the ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality, disability and immigration status impact contemporary family life a feminist perspective.

Diversity Overlay Learning Outcomes

describe the histories and/or experiences of one or more U. S. cultural groups and the resilience and agency of group members;
identify structures of oppression and the diverse efforts and strategies used by groups to combat the effects of oppressive structures;
analyze the intersection of the categories of race and gender as they affect cultural group members’ lived realities and/or as they are embodied in personal and collective identities;
recognize the way that multiple differences (including, for example, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, immigration status, gender expression, color/phenotype, racial mixture, linguistic expression, and/or age) within cultural groups complicate individual and group identities.