I have mixed feelings about my experience in this class. On the one hand, I found the student-led discussion format to be really frustrating. Class discussion was mostly dominated by a few students who always spoke and then there were some students who rarely said anything… and I think we would've gained more had Prof. Hirsch taken a more active role in leading the discussion (or if she had even lectured a bit more). As it was, I never knew what to take notes on and I often left class with a headache. On the other hand, the reading assignments for this class were really fascinating. Some of them were dense and it was a LOT of work to get through them all (a lot of pages), but I really felt the material was worthwhile, interesting, and eye-opening. Prof. Hirsch was not very good about replying to emails promptly and sometimes her responses to questions I'd email were not very helpful. I definitely think she was intelligent, experienced, and passionate about women's issues... but I don't think she was the best instructor (mainly because I would've preferred that she do more speaking in class). She was also somewhat intimidating although I did go to her office hours a few times and she was a little warmer one-on-one than she appears in class, but it's hard to work up the nerve to approach her. She is more helpful in office hours than by email. I also wish she would've provided more feedback on the weekly 1-page postings we had to write (she only returned two of them the whole semester and the comments were brief and there was no letter grade on them). I pretty much have no clue what grade I'll be getting in her class because the whole semester has passed and we only got one grade back (for our "position paper"). The class was a good experience, but it was more because of the well-chosen readings than because of Hirsch's teaching style. I would take another class taught by her, but I wouldn’t rush to do so. I would, however, strongly recommend taking Fem Texts II (perhaps with another prof) for the sake of the reading list alone—the texts you'll cover are excellent.