Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Fighting For Home: Northern New England Women And The Civil War, Savannah A. Clark

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the experiences of Northern New England women during the Civil War. Though these women were physically distant from the frontlines, the war came to their doorsteps. The war challenged and changed the physical and idealized space of the household and women’s role within it. This thesis examines how women experienced, resisted, or enacted wartime changes to household space. Through an examination of letters written by women, this study argues that, despite the disruptions of the war and the absence of male family members, Northern New England women fought to protect their homes from change.

Women used a …

"Between The Two Great Battlefields:" Scottish Medical Women's Encounters With The Eastern Front, Fiona Gale Holter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the role of medical women on the battlefront during the First World War. Using the Scottish Women’s Hospitals as a case study, it argues that frontline medical women occupied a liminal space on the fronts. As both witnesses and participants, they confronted wounds, trauma, and violence wrought by total war. Since this was typically reserved for the combatant, contemporary notions of gender refused to acknowledge medical women’s authority within the war story. This dissertation employs medical women’s wartime experiences to argue that their war story redefines our understandings of combatancy, allowing us to see it as a …

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, …

"The Quality Of Women's Intelligence" : Female Humanists In Renaissance Italy., Julie Myers-Mushkin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the advent of humanism in Renaissance Italy impacted women, namely those who were raised within intellectual families and granted educational opportunities not before afforded to members of their sex. In quattrocento Italy, learned women began to circulate their writings and participate in the humanist milieu, and the intellectual lives and published works of these female humanists all in some manner contested Renaissance patriarchy and gender perceptions. As such, this thesis challenges the conception that the Renaissance further disenfranchised women and offers a framework for analyzing and appreciating the ways in which women participated in the academic …

Please Don't Forget About Me: African American Women, Mississippi, And The History Of Crime And Punishment In Parchman Prison, 1890-1980, Telisha Dionne Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite the vast amount of research covering incarcerated men in the southern prison system from the beginning of the nineteenth century to present, the incarceration of women has gone almost unexamined. As the forgotten offender, historians, criminologist, and others interested in Mississippi carceral studies have failed to include a historical study that focuses on the incarceration of African American women in Mississippi. To date, there are two major historical works that explore Mississippi penology and its notorious Parchman Penitentiary. David Oshinsky’s, Worse Than Slavery and William Banks Taylor’s, Down on Parchman Farm, are the two pivotal historical works that examine …

Minnie And Ivy: Minnie Moore-Willson, Ivy Stranahan, And Seminole Reform In Early Twentieth Century Florida, Sarika Joshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During an era when the Seminoles were little regarded in Florida, despite mass Indian reform nationwide, Minnie Moore-Willson of Kissimmee and Ivy Stranahan of Fort Lauderdale attempted to bring reform to the state. Living amongst members of the tribe, both women used their familiarity with Seminole life and practices, as well as their political and social connections, to enact change for the tribe. This was done, respectively, through the creation of reservations and attempting to increase educational and vocational opportunities for tribe members. This thesis examines the lives and activism of Minnie Moore-Willson and Ivy Stranahan over the first two …

The Edenton Tea Party, 25 October 1774: A Patriotic Female Community In Revolutionary North Carolina, Eliza Love Shelton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis examines the background and significance of the women who participated in the Edenton Tea Party, which took place in 1774. By examining this important event and the community that supported it, I illuminate the common political and domestic struggles of white women in the American Revolution as well as how they changed. The time period includes Edenton's part in the colony's participation in the war, the women's demonstration, their subsequent wartime experiences, and the legacy of their unprecedented rebellion, all of which place women on the path to attain the right to participate in American government. I analyze …

The Temperance Worker As Social Reformer And Ethnographer As Exemplified In The Life And Work Of Jessie A. Ackermann., Margaret Shipley Carr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project used primary historical documents from the Jessie A. Ackermann collection at ETSU's Archives of Appalachia, other books and documents from the temperance period, and recent scholarship on the subjects of temperance, suffrage, and women travelers and civilizers. As the second world missionary for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Ackermann traveled in order to establish WCT Unions and worked as a civilizer, feminist, and reporter of the conditions of women and the disadvantaged throughout the world.

"In Order To Establish Justice": The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movements Of Maine And New Brunswick, Shannon M. Risk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study of the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movements in Maine and New Brunswick brings to light the struggles of Americans and Canadians to define a wider democracy and citizenry amid times of profound socio-economic changes. Targeting the struggle for the female vote allows the historian to explore time-honored ideas about womanhood, manhood, and membership in a national political body. In the Borderlands of Maine and New Brunswick, a place where historians see cultural connections, the border loomed large. Borderlands historians have virtually ignored women’s political behavior in this region. This study will demonstrate that although Maine and New Brunswick women …

Vibia Perpetua's Diary: A Women's Writing In A Roman Text Of Its Own, Melissa Perez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Writing the history of women in antiquity is hindered by the lack of written sources by them. It has been the norm to assume that the only sources that can tell us something about them are the sources written by men. This thesis challenges this convention as it concerns the social history of Rome through the exploration of a written source by a woman named Vibia Perpetua. She was a Roman woman of twenty-two years from Roman Carthage, who was martyred on March 7, 203 C.E. The reason that we know of this Roman woman and what happened to her …

Pseudo-Democracy In America, 1945-1960: Anticommunism Versus The Social Issues Of African Americans And Women., Fashion S. Bowers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the period 1945 - 1960, the United States developed an intense fervor of anticommunism and strove to prevent the spread of communism to other nations, particularly the Indochina region. As a result, the government ignored or responded inadequately to key social events at home affecting both women and African Americans. This thesis will explore the extent of the active involvement in Indochina to prevent the spread of communism and the effects of that involvement on major social issues at home concerning African Americans and women. The United States had numerous opportunities to discontinue its involvement in Indochina, but it …

Women At The Loom: Handweaving In Washington County, Tennessee, 1840-1860., Ann Cameron Macrae

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the evidence for handweaving in antebellum Washington County, Tennessee. The author examines probate inventories, wills, store ledgers, and census and tax materials to determine the identities of the weavers, the equipment and raw materials available to them, and the kinds of textiles that women wove. The author discusses the reasons many women continued to weave cloth at home although commercially woven textiles were available in local stores.

The author concludes that many of Washington County's antebellum weavers wove as a contribution to the country goods the family bartered at the local store. Others may have been responding …