This collection is a rich archival repository and includes material such as the Loretta Ross papers, the Activist Life Oral History Project, the Black Women’s Health Imperative Records, the National Latina Health Organization Records, and a number of personal archives of well-known feminist thinkers and activists. We will also spend time working with the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College.

We will explore how the reproductive justice framework can offer us a space to hold conversations about gender, race, equity, community belonging, and human rights. What does it mean to live in a Post-Roe world? A world where many are actively curtailing reproductive rights and denying gender-inclusive education? A world that includes long histories of resistance, mutual aid, and organizing? In this course, we will examine histories of sexual and reproductive health movements.

As a final project, students will synthesize these explorations of community, history, and identity to construct their own set of personal sexual ethics. They will practice viewing their own identities through an intersectional lens to explore the ways that power plays a role in the ethics of sex. This course challenges students to think critically about the ethics of sexuality, examining the norms of their peers, families, and communities and reading about historical and current debates on the topic. For young people growing up during these debates, it is difficult to navigate the impact of these cultural conversations on the daily reality of their personal lives. More recent scholarship in sexuality studies has questioned whether consent itself does enough to ensure that sex is ethical.

Colleges across the United States-as well as some states like California-have adopted an affirmative model of consent (“yes means yes”), rather than the earlier model in which passive acquiescence signaled permission to continue (“no means no”). In the post-#MeToo era, sexual ethics are in a state of flux, with gendered power dynamics coming further into view and definitions of consent shifting dramatically.

Our Precollege Programs offer a Smith experience for high school students. Review our Codes of Conduct for students and parents/guardians to ensure that this program is the right fit for you. Smith Precollege Programs are open to students entering 9th-12th grade in the fall of 2024. Students receive important information, skills, and a network of friends and mentors as they return to their high school lives and prepare for their college experiences, including the opportunity to receive recommendation comments for college application processes. By the end of the program, students will have a college-level experience that introduces them to future college, career, and personal pathways committed to gender-inclusive and just communities.Ĭourse material and topics range each year, but include the following: women’s histories queer histories sexual health and reproductive justice gender in social spaces of athletics, politics, education, and other fields and visual and literary art forms as expression and critique. The Women, Gender, and Representation program provides high-school-aged students with a life-changing experience! Students selected for this program demonstrated open-mindedness and commitment to exploring gender in history, contemporary social and political issues, and forms of cultural representation.

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