How do we define femininity and masculinity, and what political purposes do those definitions serve. Beginning with some nineteenth-century essays on women's rights, this course will explore recurrent questions in the interdisciplinary field of gender studies: definitions of sex, gender, and oppression; gender roles in marriage, motherhood and fatherhood; work and domestic arrangements; the impact of race on gender definitions; gender and sexualities. We will read essays about these issues within the United States, and later in the semester, we will read about how gender matters within our cultures.