This team-taught course helps students learn about the character and quality of women’s lives across cultures in the contemporary period and to study the consequences of globalization by examining it through the prism of gender. Accounts of women’s lives in regions outside the United States are presented along with readings that provide the historical, social, political, and economic background needed to fully understand these lives. In this course we encounter the powerful and the powerless; the rich and the poor; the courageous and the meek; and in learning their stories we also learn something about the world they inhabit and that we inhabit along with them. In experiencing this world of women, we learn about the human struggles that unite and divide people across cultures in the modern world. This course qualifies as an elective in the major and minor programs in Anthropology, History, Psychology, or Sociology. It also can be chosen to fulfill the Cultural Perspectives requirement in the Health and Human Services major. This course satisfies the Global Awareness Core requirement, and, if taken as Comparative Literature or English, fulfills the second literature requirement in the Great Conversation part of the Core.