Teaching Women’s Rights and the Imperialist Agenda

Abstract

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois I am a graduate student studying English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and I recently concluded co-teaching a course called The Human Experience of War. UW-Eau Claire is a medium-size public university in the Midwest with an undergraduate enrollment just above ten thousand. As a graduate student, I had the opportunity to co-teach an undergraduate course with a collaborating professor. The course consisted of reading various works of British literature that spanned World Wars I and II. It was a 300-level literature course that was available to non-English majors and filled a GE (general education) requirement for upper-level humanities, which resulted in an eclectic mix of students with a wide array of interests, backgrounds, and majors. My official title for this class was Teaching Assistant, and my responsibilities included everything that comes with teaching a college literature course (i.e., teaching classes, responding to written work, lecturing, composing lesson plans, designing assignments/projects, etc.). The goal was to approach wartime literature from a varied perspective, reading and analyzing both canonical and popular culture texts in order to further our understanding of the experience of living IN wartime Britain. Supplementary readings from texts such as Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory were used in order to provide context and useful background information. Through the experience of teaching this course, one recurring theme that struck me as significant was the ever-present need of people to have a cause to justify their actions. It seems that people have a limitless supply of explanations and reasons for systematically destroying one another. Unfortunately, I also found that the professed reasons for going to war or promoting imperialism often had little to do with the actual motivation for such actions. Over the last few decades, the growing concern with women’s rights— domestically and across the globe—has made it the newest target of exploitation to further American imperialism, much to the detriment of women’s rights movements around the world. It is important for anyone teaching about women’s rights, globalization, or war to recognize this misappropriation of feminist issues to further the imperial agenda. Teaching Note Teaching Women’s Rights and the Imperialist Agenda