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This document describes an interdisciplinary English and history course on women and work in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is designed for 11th and 12th grade students and it includes ideas suitable for use with college bound or vocationally oriented students. A major objective of the course is to help students analyze their ideas on work and job stereotyping so that they will combat traditional limitations placed on women in the work force. The unit begins by presenting sources of statistics for describing the current earnings gap between men and women. Then suggestions are given for student assignments on analyzing the portrayal of women in television. Much of the unit is devoted to an analysis of the middle class ideal of a lady as contrasted with the real life of women exhibited through occupational types: houseworker/motherworker, farmworker laborer, frontier builder, industrial worker, plantation mistress, slave, teacher, lawyer, and doctor. The unit concludes with a section on women and the law. Teachers are encouraged to have students read about sexist legal decisions and about workers' civil rights. These are used as an introduction to a discussion on the Equal Rights Amendment. This course description suggests many appropriate books for each of the themes in the unit. (Author/BC)

High school students writing research papers face the problem of finding audiences for their work, especially today when the consensus is that any kind of good writing requires some hypothetical audience or reader. Unless students are in a composition class where they write to someone special, they have difficulty grasping the idea of audience. Discussing the opening lines of Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" helps students grasp the idea that Hemingway creates his readers along with his story. To make the transition from Hemingway's fiction to their own research projects, students need to study contemporary nonfiction to see how these writers create audiences. Choices abound for good nonfiction, among them John Madson's "Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie," or"Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art" and "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," by Barbara Tuchman. For other students, audiences can be created through the use of "The Journal of Popular Culture." Students can assume they are writing their paper to be "published." By finding an appropriate audience, students can write lively, informative papers. (HOD)