Womens Studies 11 is a 4-credit course open to all students in grades 10, 11 and 12. (It does not meet the Social Studies 11 requirement)

This course will look at how women and girls have worked and thought and lived from pre- historic times to now. It will ask you to consider questions such as:

• Why is it that women, who make up 52% of the population, are still considered a “special interest” group?
• Why do women in this country still make less money than men do in the same jobs?
• Why do our history textbooks tell us so little about what women were doing?
• Why do girls and women continue to die for beauty?
• Why are there laws in this world that allow a girl’s family to kill her for being raped?
• Why is a woman violently assaulted or killed in their country every six minutes?
• Why are there still so many more men in positions of power than women?
• Why is it not known that the strongest human muscle exists in the female body?
• How does the unequal treatment of women harm men?

In this course you will look at films, magazines, television, newspapers, visual, dramatic and audio art, photographs, letters and stories.

Discussion of women’s issues raised in these media make up a major portion of the course. Assignments are mainly response journals and projects.