Women's Studies Commons^™

Undergraduate Women's Self-Reported Body Image After Exposure To Weight-Related Versus Nonweight-Related Media Images, Casey Elizabeth Swick

Honors Projects

The proposed study aims to determine whether there is a relationship between exposure to weight-related media images and self-reported body image. About 60 undergraduate women at Bowling Green State University will participate in the study. Half of these women will view five weight-related media images and the other half will view five nonweight-related media images. After exposure to either the experimental or control condition, the women will be asked to complete the Body Ideals Questionnaire as well as reveal their age, year in school, race/ethnicity, and number of women’s studies courses taken on a survey. Correlational data will be obtained …

Undergraduate Women's Self-Reported Body Image After Exposure To Weight-Related Versus Nonweight-Related Media Images, Casey Elizabeth Swick

Honors Projects

The proposed study aims to determine whether there is a relationship between exposure to weight-related media images and self-reported body image. About 60 undergraduate women at Bowling Green State University will participate in the study. Half of these women will view five weight-related media images and the other half will view five nonweight-related media images. After exposure to either the experimental or control condition, the women will be asked to complete the Body Ideals Questionnaire as well as reveal their age, year in school, race/ethnicity, and number of women’s studies courses taken on a survey. Correlational data will be obtained …

Cycling Historiography, Evidence, And Methods, Lorenz J. Finison

Boston’s Cycling Craze, 1880-1900: A Story of Race, Sport, and Society

My purpose in Boston’s Cycling Craze, 1880-1900, was to unearth a largely hidden social cycling history from the point of view of the ordinary, not the famous. While there were many Boston connections to racing champions like Major Taylor, Eddie McDuffee, and Nat Butler, and there are abundant sources of evidence about them, the research was not just about them, nor just about bicycle racing, nor just about unique or fast bikes. I wanted to write about what bicycling meant to ordinary citizens of Boston and its surrounding towns— and to write about the worsening social climate of the …

Happenings 2014, Women's Center, Wright State University

Women’s Center Newsletter

A two page newsletter created by the Wright State Women's Center documenting the current affairs of the Women's Center as well as other happenings on campus.

This issue highlights speaker Geraldine Moriba for the Anita Hill Lecture on Gender Justice, the ACE Women's Network-Ohio Conference, a calendar of events, and more.

The Development Of Personal Status Law In Jordan & Iraq, Kelsey Cherland

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores the historical development of personal status law, which governs a person’s marriage, divorce, and custody rights. It is significant because it is part of a framework that has defined women’s rights for centuries. I will argue that personal status law is a patriarchal framework that has been reinforced over time, leading up to the creation of nation-states in the Middle East. As such, this is the “institution” of personal status that will be traced using historical institutionalism theory. In this thesis I will argue that personal status has undergone a critical juncture, or crucial moment of potential …

Pro-Anorexia/Bulimia Interactions Online: Problematizing Complex Cultural Phenomena, Nicole D. Schott

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In the West, and increasingly globally, individuals, particularly women, are fixated on weight loss, driven by the goal of achieving a culturally-desired, and aggressively marketed, "skinny" female physique. There are online forums where individuals refer to themselves or their eating disorders as "pro-ana" and "pro-mia". Individuals who post on these sites both align with, and challenge, what medical and mental health professionals define as serious mental health problems that result in severe, sometimes fatal, medical complications. This thesis specifically focuses on interactions with, and within, the pro-ana/mia culture on the social media websites Tumblr and YouTube. Over sixteen months, and …

Moved To Move: Socially Contextualizing Women's Exercise Motivations, Dusti Rae Werner

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Using qualitative data from 11 interviews with women who exercise regularly, this research explores women's motivations to exercise, how they make social comparisons and how they self-evaluate their bodies through the social context of gender, socio-economic status and race. Women with intrinsic motivations to exercise find more positive, long term outcomes than those with extrinsic motivations. Women compare themselves to similar others, such as their peers to form self-evaluations more readily than they do media images. Respondents also indicated the importance of relationships in beginning and maintaining exercise regimes.

Eat It: Sex, Food And Women's Writing [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Simply put, Eat It: Sex, Food and Women's Writing surpasses its rather immodest claims. This is no mean feat, for the editors allow that they have collected short stories, nonfiction shorts and poetry that, as the back claims offers, hinge "on the carnal." More than that, the gathered works purportedly address the ways in which experiencing food entails nothing short of "power, biology, social obligation, experimentation, nourishment, pain and pleasure." The authors treat the topics, ranging from the politics of potatoes to tricks for field dressing deer, with a blend of seriousness and humour befitting the material. What becomes clear …

Review Essay: Engaging Feminist Histories, Elizabeth Groeneveld

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

This review essay considers three recently published texts that centrally engage with the question of how one writes about feminisms and feminist histories in ways that do justice to their complexity and dynamism.

Gendered Violence: Continuities And Transformation In The Aftermath Of Conflict In Africa, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Jennifer Fish, Tamara Shefer

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

This thematic cluster of essays, titled “Gendered Violence: Continuities and Transformation in the Aftermath of Conflict in Africa,” focuses on the continuities between regimes of violence during organized political conflict and persisting violence against women in the postconflict era of democratic governance. The genesis for this collection evolved out of an international symposium organized by the first author of this introduction, in August 2011. The aim of the symposium was to explore African women’s experiences in the aftermath of mass violence and genocide—both in terms of their victimhood and their agency—and their positioning in the broader context of their social, …

Female Activism: Reevaluating Traditional Buddhist Patriarchy In Chinese Occupied Tibet, Mikaela Murphy

Undergraduate Research Awards

Examines the role of Buddhist women as activists in Chinese-occupied Tibet. The author's entry essay for the 2014 Undergraduate Research Awards is included.

Gender Disparity Within The Employment Sector In Saudi Arabia, Alyssa Bovell, Libby Durnwald

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

The purpose of our research is to examine why an increased access to higher education has not resulted in an expansion of employment opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia, and how this affects the development of the country. We examine this topic through a feminist and cultural relativist lens in order to understand why Saudi Arabian women are living in such a gender-segregated state. The lack of opportunity to enjoy one’s right to employment renders the progressivism of women’s rights as civil society has taken measure to eradicate such a disparity in the employment sector and disrupt the institutional norms …

An Engineering Journey: A Transcendental Phenomenological Study Of African-American Engineers' Persistence, Kristy Somerville-Midgette

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This transcendental phenomenological research study examined the perspectives and lived experiences of African-American female engineers related to the factors that led to their persistence to enter, persist through, and remain in the field. The study was guided by four research questions: (a) How do K-12 experiences shape African-American female engineers' decisions to enter the STEM field? (b) What persistence factors motivated African-American female engineers to enter the engineering profession? (c) What are the factors that shape African-American female engineers' persistence to progress through postsecondary engineering programs? (d) How do professional experiences shape African-American female engineers' persistence in the field? Cognitive …

Managing Rapeability: Women's Perceptions And Negotiations Of The Fear Of Sexual Assault, Jessica Friton

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

For women, the fear of sexual assault and harassment is pervasive. This study examines women's perceptions and negotiations of such fear while emphasizing the gendered social structures within which such fears are learned and experienced. Open ended interviews were conducted with 13 women enrolled in a self-defense undergraduate class. The interviews were transcribed and qualitatively analyzed. Findings provide rich descriptions of women's fears of victimization, how they learn such fears, and how they cognitively and behaviorally managed fear in their everyday lives. The author argues that learning and managing fear of sexual assault and harassment is part of gender socialization …

The Co-Occurrence Of Multiple And Overlapping Demands Among Women Leaving Prison, Jennifer Jo Schweitzer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The findings presented in this thesis result from an analysis of the experiences over a three-year period of thirteen women recently released from prison, all of whom simultaneously struggled with severe physical and mental health problems, drug and alcohol addiction(s), and histories of trauma. The purpose of this study was to better understand the strategies women with these multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities utilized as they attempted to reintegrate into the community. This group of thirteen women is a subsample of a population of 41 women whose reentry experiences were the focus of a larger, longitudinal research project. The data consist …

Victim Blaming, Protests, And Public Space: News Coverage Of The Occupy Wall Street Sexual Assaults, Abigail Barefoot

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Occupy Wall Street was a national protest centered on wealth redistribution and sparked a national dialogue about economic reform. The movement faced internal challenges of crime occurring in the camps including sexual assault; these crimes were covered by news outlets as part of their Occupy Wall Street coverage. This thesis will expand upon previous feminist research on sexual violence news coverage by using a feminist media analysis to examine the coverage of sexual assaults occurring during Occupy Wall Street. Previous feminist research on sexual assault coverage argues that newspapers use myths about rape to discredit the crime and blame the …

Could The Girls Be Counseled?, Christy L. Spurlock

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Females attending Western Kentucky University in the late 1950s and 1960s had a much different dress code and residence hall rules than their male counterparts.

Warmikuna Juyayay! Ecuadorian And Latin American Indigenous Women Gaining Spaces In Ethnic Politics, Maria S. Moreno Parra

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

This research utilizes an agency framework to examine the complexities of the participation of indigenous women in local, national, and global spaces of activism. By examining the connections between processes of globalization of indigenous and women’s rights, development agendas, local politics, and gender dynamics in indigenous organizations, this research highlights the connection of ethnicity, gender, and power in an indigenous organization of Cotacachi, Ecuador, and for Ecuadorian and Latin American indigenous leaders and professionals working in national and global arenas.

Four interconnected topics are explored: (1) the understanding of indigenous women’s participation in the history of their organization within a …

When Speech Isn't Free: Legal Barriers And Consequences Of Reporting Sexual Violence, Kevin M. Fleming

Departmental Honors Projects

Incidents of sexual violence continue to be a serious problem for society. Likewise, acts of sexual violence impose severe consequences for survivors. The consequences initially begin at the onset of the survivor’s journey to psychological recovery following the traumatic sexual assault. The consequences take on a unique set of characteristics when the survivor attempts to use the justice system to confront the perpetrator who committed the offense. These characteristics can transform an adversarial process into an isolated battle for the survivor. In the worst cases, the justice system empowers individuals who wish to silence survivors with free speech restrictions instead …

Navigating The Pathway To Leadership: A Study Of The Process Women Follow In Assuming Executive Level Leadership Roles Within Christian Higher Education Institutions., P. J. George

Journal of Applied Christian Leadership

"this dissertation is a study and examination of how Francis E. Clark utilized written communication, global travel and organization to re-shape the global Protestant church’s ministry to young people through the Christian Endeavor Society. First, given that a biography has not been written about clark in almost a century, this dissertation first tells the story of his unique and long-lasting contributions to youth ministry as the church knows it today. Second, it tells the story of the growth of Christian Endeavor under the leadership of Clark. While some books and papers have some sections about Christian Endeavor, none really address …

Racism, Sexism Problems For Women Of Color, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Power Of Multiplying: Reproductive Control In American Culture, 1850-1930, Virginia B. Engholm

Theses and Dissertations--English

Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth?

In …

Knowing And Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, And Adolescent Girlhood In Midcentury American Film, Michael Todd Hendricks

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of …

Undermining The Angelic Restrictions Of First-Wave Feminism: What The New Woman Did, Didn't, And Wouldn't Do, Jane Kristen Asher

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation provides an intertextual reading of Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895), Victoria Cross's The Woman Who Didn't (1895), and Lucas Cleeve's The Woman Who Wouldn't (1895) in order to historically and culturally contextualize these popular New Woman novels in social-purity feminism, the marriage debate, and reticent sexual politics of the late-nineteenth century. By examining the ways that The Woman Who heroines discursively and thematically engage with first-wave feminism and by focusing on this dialectical exchange of feminist ideas and practices as they were manifested in feminist publications and campaigns at the turn of the century, I argue …

Growing 'Homeplace' In Critical Service-Learning: An Urban Womanist Pedagogy, Vanessa Lynn Marr

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores the role of critical service-learning from the perspective of urban community members. Specifically, it examines the counternarratives produced by Black women community gardeners who engage in academic service-learning with postsecondary faculty. The study focuses on this particular group because of the women's deep involvement with grassroots organizing that reflects their sense of self and other community members, as well as their personal and political relationships to Detroit, Michigan. Given the city's economic disparities rooted in racial segregation, structural violence and gender oppression, Detroit is a site of critical learning within a postindustrial/postcolonial context. This intersectionalist approach to …

Adverse Health Effects Of Spousal Violence Among Women Attending Saudi Arabian Primary Health-Care Clinics, H. M. Eldoseri, K. A. Tufts, Q. Zhang, J. N. Fish

Ellmer School of Nursing Faculty Publications

This study aimed to investigate the frequency of spousal violence among Saudi women and document the related health effects and injuries, as well as their attitudes to gender and violence. Structured interviews were conducted with 200 ever-married women recruited from primary-care centres in Jeddah. Nearly half of the surveyed women (44.5%) reported ever experiencing physical violence from their spouse. Although 37 women (18.5%) had received violence-related injuries, only 6.5% had reported these injuries to a health-care provider. Victims of spousal violence had poor perceptions of their overall health, and reported pain or discomfort, antidepressant use and suicidal thoughts. Women mostly …

Sexual And Political Affairs: Representation Of Women In American News Media, Melissa Beal

Masters Theses

Explores representations in American news media of women who have been involved sexually with male politicians and women who are politicians through a critical rhetorical lens. Through the use of poststructural feminism, the term "mistress" is problematized. Attention is given to the news media's focus on women's bodies as sites of dangerous sexual temptations as well as the media's constant attention to women's physical features, which reduces women to objects. It is shown that similar coverage regarding bodies is not given to men. Also discusses the news media's frequent interrogation of women's minds. Explores aspects of confession and apology through …

The Effect Of Interpersonal Relationships On The Body Image Of First Year, Women Of Color Studying At Predominately White Undergraduate Institutions, Lauren Kross

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

"The Effect of Interpersonal Relationships on the Body Image of First Year, Women of Color Studying at Predominately White Undergraduate Institutions" by Lauren Kross, a 2014 graduate student in the Gender and Women's Studies Department at Minnesota State University Mankato, focuses on how relationships and peer groups positively or negatively impact the body image of first year women of color studying at Minnesota State University Mankato, a predominately white undergraduate institution. The first year of college is a time that students experience many changes in their environment, academics, interests, and identity development. Their previously formed and newly formed relationships play …

Pursuit Of Empowerment: The Evolution Of The Romance Novel And Its Readership In Fifty Shades Of Grey, Amy Elizabeth Quale

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the new-adult romance work Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James and the novel's readership to identify the evolution of the romance genre and the ways in which the genre is used as a tool for empowerment. As the genre evolves, subgenres develop with the new "empowering" characteristics. As new technologies present themselves to readers, readers have more opportunities to participate with one another and affect the genre's evolution. I assert that Fifty Shades of Grey and the romance community are limited by the patriarchal values traditionally portrayed by the genre; however, the nature of the …

Perspectives Of Female Leaders In Athletic Training, Kyle Matthew Momsen

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Previous research has found that women face barriers in athletic training and it appears that they are not represented in leadership positions in numbers equal to the demographics of athletic training. The purpose of this research was to explore the leadership experiences and perspectives of female athletic trainers who have earned a leadership position at the highest levels in athletic training. This qualitative investigation utilized semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 12 women that held national leadership positions in athletic training. The data from this investigation suggests that many of the barriers that previously faced women in athletic training have decreased or …