71243 - Methods, Sources, Research and Documentation for Women's Studies

Learning outcomes

This course will provide students the tools to address a research in general (in the humanities), and in particular in women and gender history.

Course contents

This course will be held in English and will introduce students to methodological sources and sites of memory for women’s studies.

During their lives, women produced and received documents (e.g. letters, diaries and memoirs), which are preserved in several public and private archives. This material is particularly important to understand women's status and stories: marginalised in the private sphere, they enjoyed fewer rights than men, also for what concerned access to wealth. However, as the analysis of women's papers shows, they stood for themselves and negotiated the boundaries of the spaces and roles society assigned to them. The analysis of documents by women allows us to recover their voices and to clearly understand the importance of the ordinary in the wider societal context.

Moreover, the twentieth century saw the rise of strong female subjectivities and women's significant presence beyond the private sphere. This also led to the creation of a number of women's archives, key to the construction of our history and histories.

By approaching women's documents from a theoretical and practical perspective, this course will also provide students with tools for research in the humanities, with a particular focus on women and gender history.

The course will develop the following topics:

• ✔History and memory.
• ✔The concept of document and its various definitions.
• ✔Sites of memory and research: libraries, archives.
• ✔Oral history
• ✔The concept of documentation.
• ✔Special libraries: structure, organisation, purpose, unique products, standards description and reference tools.
• ✔Resources and documentation services in a gender perspective: the women’s documentation centre in Bologna.

Readings/Bibliography

• Sara Delmedico, Opposing Patriarchy. Women and the Law in Action in Pre-Unification Italy (1815-1865) (London: IMLR, 2021), selected chapters.
• Sue McKemmish, ‘Evidence of me’, The Australian Library Journal, 45:3 (1996), 174-187.
• Honor Sachs, ‘Reconstructing a Life: The Archival Challenges of Women's History’, Library Trends, 56:3 (2008), 650-666.
• Bonnie G. Smith, ‘Gender I: From Women's History to Gender History’, in Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot, The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory (London: SAGE, 2013)
• Judith P. Zinsser, ‘Women’s history/feminist history’, in Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot, The SAGE handbook of historical theory (London: SAGE, 2013)

Further suggestions will be given during classes.

 

Office hours

See the website of Sara Delmedico