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Full-Text Articles in History

Women In Wartime Shipyards: Operating A Drill Press Was Like Using An Egg Beater, Carol A. Strohmetz Dec 2017

Women In Wartime Shipyards: Operating A Drill Press Was Like Using An Egg Beater, Carol A. Strohmetz

Master's Theses

This research examines the duality of the roles of American women during World War II. The research draws upon oral histories, newspaper accounts and advertisements, music and films of the time, letters and family scrapbooks, and primary and secondary sources. Most prior research focuses on either women in the workforce or women in the home. This research synthesizes all aspects of the lives of women as they navigated the hostile terrain of the male workforce and continued to perform the duties assigned to them by society. This research highlights the multiple roles that women successfully executed as they cared for …


Beyond The Boundaries Of Childhood: Northern African American Children's Cultural And Political Resistance, 1780-1861, Crystal L. Webster Nov 2017

Beyond The Boundaries Of Childhood: Northern African American Children's Cultural And Political Resistance, 1780-1861, Crystal L. Webster

Doctoral Dissertations

Notions of childhood as a distinct developmental period of life were concretized during the nineteenth century. Features of children’s lives including innocence, play, and exclusion from labor became markers of ideal childhoods as part of the racialized modernization of childhood. This dissertation uncovers the ways in which modern constructions of childhood attempted to subjugate northern African American children throughout the nineteenth century and highlights the means by which black children and conceptualizations of black childhood became agents and sites of resistance. In doing so, it demonstrates both how African American children experienced age-based forms of subjugation as well as their …


Images Of Women In Refugee Drama: Eve Ensler’S Necessary Targets And Ellen Mclaughlin’S The Trojan Women, Kaitlyn Tossie Jun 2017

Images Of Women In Refugee Drama: Eve Ensler’S Necessary Targets And Ellen Mclaughlin’S The Trojan Women, Kaitlyn Tossie

Theses and Dissertations

In the past ten years, a critique of the conceptualization of refugees in Western mass media has emerged as a developing discourse in response to post-20th century genocides. Photographs in mass media of wailing refugees began to appear in the early 1990s when reports of the Bosnian genocide appeared in the United States. These images, and the stereotypes that surround them, contribute to the universal depiction of refugees as weak. Though the way in which theatre comments on this conceptualization of refugees has largely been ignored, theatre has a unique ability to comment on, reflect, and create a culture that …


Defying Civility: Female Writers And Educators In Nineteenth-Century America, Tess Evans May 2017

Defying Civility: Female Writers And Educators In Nineteenth-Century America, Tess Evans

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis project investigates how northern American women in the nineteenth-century defied civility and what the consequences were. Primary and secondary source research of poetry, prose, letters, government documents, and personal accounts reveal that these women were able to step out of the domestic sphere to create a new world for themselves without the aid of males. This paper and accompanying online exhibit, Civil War Successes, explores how defying the notions of a civil woman paved the way for an earlier women’s movement than the twentieth-century. A nation torn apart by civil war saw women creating outlets for their …


Murder Becomes Her: Media Representations Of Murderous Women In America From 1890-1920, Emily M. Crumpton May 2017

Murder Becomes Her: Media Representations Of Murderous Women In America From 1890-1920, Emily M. Crumpton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis explores the relationship between the media, murderous women, and the concept of separate spheres. Murderous women challenged established gender norms. They did not conform to the societal expectations of their gender, therefore, they were not considered “normal.” As such, women like Alice Mitchell, Jane Toppan, and Amy Archer Gilligan became objects of media, medical, and public curiosity. As defined by medical science and society, newspapers policed the boundaries of “normality” by sensationalizing the lives, actions, and trials of deadly damsels. Newspaper coverage of murderous women reminded the public of the consequences of “abnormality” and non-conformity. This thesis argues …


"Mothers Like Us Think Differently": Mothers' Negotiations Of Virginity In Contemporary Turkey, Asli Aygunes Mar 2017

"Mothers Like Us Think Differently": Mothers' Negotiations Of Virginity In Contemporary Turkey, Asli Aygunes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Even though virginity in Turkey is commonly defined, thus gendered, as losing the hymen, in Turkish society, discourses of virginity connect to broader discussions, such as modernity, morality, social honor/shame, religion, family values, and even medicine (vaginismus and artificial hymen surgery). Previous scholarship on women’s rights in Turkey outlines how historical approaches by Kemalist secularism were not enough to diminish oppressive social norms such as virginity and how the current conservative government and elements of traditional Turkish society perpetuate virginity as an important virtue for unmarried women. This study adds seven Turkish mothers’ interpretations of what I am calling the …


"Let's Get Together And Chew The Fat": Women, Size And Community In Modern America, Amelia Earhart Serafine Jan 2017

"Let's Get Together And Chew The Fat": Women, Size And Community In Modern America, Amelia Earhart Serafine

Dissertations

"Let's Get Together and Chew the FAT: Women, Size, and Community in Modern America" argues that between 1948 and the 1980s, women in America formed communities around issues of size in order to claim agency over their bodies. Primarily concerned with losing weight, many women in these groups nonetheless created new tools and abilities with which to resist oppression based on body size. Some women went as far as to form explicitly positive fat identities and reject compulsory slenderness. This dissertation investigates four cases studies: TOPS (Take off Pounds Sensibly), Overeaters Anonymous, Weight Watchers, and the Fat Liberation movement of …


Women's Hit Cheating Songs: Country Music And Feminist Change In American Society, 1962-2015, Madeline Rachel Morrow Jan 2017

Women's Hit Cheating Songs: Country Music And Feminist Change In American Society, 1962-2015, Madeline Rachel Morrow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines songs about cheating performed by women in country music that appeared on year-end country songs charts in Billboard magazine from 1962 through 2015. The study of a total of fifty qualifying songs included a focus on their lyrical and musical content, the performers' personae and careers, and the way the particular outside factors of feminism and changing gender relations in American society may have influenced them. These songs do not show a purely linear progression of or emphasis on social change, in spite of country music's pride in conveying the truth about the lives of its songwriters, …


‘Something A Little Bit Tasty’: Women And The Rise Of Nutrition Science In Interwar British Africa, Lacey Sparks Jan 2017

‘Something A Little Bit Tasty’: Women And The Rise Of Nutrition Science In Interwar British Africa, Lacey Sparks

Theses and Dissertations--History

Widespread malnutrition after the Great Depression called into question the role of the British state in preserving the welfare of both its citizens and its subjects. International organizations such as the League of Nations, empire-wide projects such as nutrition surveys conducted by the Committee for Nutrition in the Colonial Empire (CNCE), sub-imperial networks of medical and teaching professionals, and individuals on-the-spot in different colonies wove a dense web of ideas on nutrition. African women quickly became the focus of efforts to end malnutrition due to Malthusian concerns of underpopulation in Africa and African women’s role as both farmers and mothers. …