This course will use a World History approach to explore the role of women during the period of colonization of the Americas between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. It will examine how women were affected by and how they affected the ways the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, the French and the Dutch carried out their respective colonization projects in the New World. Students will read about ideologies and ideas about gender roles in Europe and how the specific colonizing powers deployed these ideas in the New World. Consequently, student will learn how these ideas actually played out in different contexts throughout the Americas; how both settler and native populations interpreted and applied these ideas in the multicultural and multiracial context of the Americas. Through specific examples we will explore how race, class, and gender determined a woman’s circumstances both in Europe and in the Americas and at the same time how they challenged these categories. The course will emphasize the differences in the ways different areas of the Americas were colonized and question whether or not these differences determined women’s lives.