An introduction to key feminist thinkers and ideas through a survey of the history of modern gender and sexuality. Feminism is traditionally differentiated from other political and philosophical movements by a focus on the experiences of women, their lives, the forms of oppression they suffer, and the modes of theory and action which they undertake. The history of feminist thought and action, however, has been troubled by the difficulty of specifying the category of women. For feminist thought, this difficulty suggests the impossibility of isolating the theoretical or practical project of liberating women from a broader critique of gendered life and of other distinct forms of injustice, such as race, class, ability, age, and the like. In this class, we will engage this problem by exploring how gender has been socially and historically constructed. We will approach the unity in difference of “woman,” as well as “man,” “trans,” and other gendered identities and roles, by investigating how different forms and periods of social organization have given rise to diverse ways of understanding and structuring gender. Rather than seeing “woman” as something presupposed by feminism, we will interpret feminism as a methodology for investigating the differential formation of “woman” as a temporally dynamic and internally complex category which is always defined in relation to other genders and to social systems which are not obviously “about” gender, like politics, the economy, natural and social science, the arts, religion, philosophy (of course), and in a word, society as a whole.