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Western Michigan University

Theses/Dissertations

Gender history

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Reframing National Women's History Month: Practicalities And Consequences, Skylar Bre’Z May 2021

Reframing National Women's History Month: Practicalities And Consequences, Skylar Bre’Z

Dissertations

This study evaluates the practicalities and consequences of designating one month (March) out of the calendar year for the commemoration of women’s history. In the 1970s and 1980s, national women’s organizations such as the Women’s Action Alliance (WAA) collaborated with the Smithsonian Institute and the Women’s History Program at Sarah Lawrence College to build programs to increase awareness of women’s history. Using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in feminist theory, media studies, and historical memory studies, this project contextualizes the commemoration through its connection to 1970s women’s activism, explores its usefulness as a tool for building educational equity, and questions its …


Agents Of Justice: Female Plaintiffs In The King’S Court In Thirteenth And Fourteenth-Century England, J. Savannah Shipman Aug 2016

Agents Of Justice: Female Plaintiffs In The King’S Court In Thirteenth And Fourteenth-Century England, J. Savannah Shipman

Masters Theses

It has often been assumed that medieval women, noble or common, had little or no agency, were forced into submissive roles by dominating men, and had little control over their day-to-day lives. Theoretical statements about law served to support these assumptions as they forbade women from prosecuting men for any crimes other than the murder of her husband or for rape. Yet the records of the court proceedings before the king and his justices and the Calendar of Patent Rolls paint a very different picture. The sources themselves show that women regularly came to court to gain compensation and justice …