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Did French Women Love Their Children? The Contentious Image Of Exotic Maternity In Early Modern French Travel Narratives, Anna Young

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Throughout the period of early French colonization in the New World, travel writers commented extensively on Native American childrearing practices. Early modern French colonialists were particularly fascinated by the fact that native women almost always nursed their own children, unlike their French counterparts, who typically outsourced the labor of reproduction to wet nurses. French writers consistently pointed to the tendency of Native American women to nurse their own children as evidence of a superior sense of maternal duty, vehemently criticizing the custom of wet-nursing in France and the moral deficiencies of European women who participated in it.

Travel writers participated …

Marriage And Gender: A History Through Letters, Victoria Kern

Senior Honors Projects

Research on the evolution of marriage can be found quite easily, but the opportunity to see into the lives of married couples from the past is rare. Through the analysis of letters between my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, I provide a glimpse of what being married has meant throughout the 20^th Century for heterosexual couples. Societal ideas about what makes a marriage ideal have changed over time, but they have always been closely linked with gender expectations (Berk, 2013), so a feminist approach to the analysis of the evolution of marriage is used with my family’s letters as a …

African American Women Leaders In The Civil Rights Movement: A Narrative Inquiry, Janet Dewart Bell

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to give recognition to and lift up the voices of African American women leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. African American women were active leaders at all levels of the Civil Rights Movement, though the larger society, the civil rights establishment, and sometimes even the women themselves failed to acknowledge their significant leadership contributions. The recent and growing body of popular and nonacademic work on African American women leaders, which includes some leaders’ writings about their own experiences, often employs the terms “advocate” or “activist” rather than “leader.” In the academic literature, particularly on …