2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog > Courses > HI - History > 200 > HI 205
2023-2024 Undergraduate Catalog
From the ongoing struggle against the permissiveness of sexual harassment waged by the “Me Too Movement,” to the robust pro-life movement, to the calls for transgender rights, the legacies of the feminist as well as gay liberation movements, and the criticisms levied against these struggles are still salient and even disputed in political life today. Among those voices, religious leaders continue to passionately debate these issues using theological arguments to undermine and/or advocate for women’s, gay, and trans peoples’ liberation. Considering this story from the Catholic perspective, this course considers how Catholics engaged with these movements often vehemently debating, and sometimes embracing, the “new woman” of the 1920s, contraception, second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and abortion. This course will offer students the chance to engage with the longer history of feminist and LGBTQ movements in the twentieth century, while at the same time immersing them in how Catholics responded to historic debates about gender and sexuality that shaped political and cultural life in this era.