History Commons^™

The Clara White Mission

Eartha M. M. White Textual Material

Pamphlet: The  Clara White Mission - A tradition of service for 75 years. Informational pamphlet listing the Mission's Officers and Board of Directors. Undated.

The Clara White Mission Leaflet

Eartha M. M. White Textual Material

Pamphlet: The  Clara White Mission - " Continued Dedication To Service In Jacksonville". Informational leaflet about the Clara White Mission that lists the Voluntary Board of Directors. Multiple copies - green, pink, and yellow. Undated.

Agencies Of Clara White Mission Postcard

Eartha M. M. White Textual Material

Postcard: Images of the Clara White Mission, Mercy Hospital, Proposed Orphanage, Day Nursery, Old Folks Home, and Historic Museum on front of postcard. Description of courses offered and a request for help on verso. Undated.

Clara White Mission, Inc. Postcard

Eartha M. M. White Textual Material

Postcard: Image of the Clara White Mission, front of postcard. Description of courses offered and a request for help on verso . Undated.

Best Wishes From Clara White Mission

Eartha M. M. White Textual Material

Document: Copy of poem " If" by Rudyard Kipling, compliments of the Clara White Mission, Dr. Eartha M. M. White, President, 613 W. Ashley St., Jacksonville, Fla. Undated.

Wedded To Power: Dynastic Marriages And The Hidden Diplomacy Of Women In Early Modern Europe, Amelia H. Earl

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The diplomatic power of women in the ‘Great Power’ dynasties of Europe has been passed over in historiography because very often their power rested in their relationships to their male counterparts. Dismissing these women’s diplomatic and political power as “soft power” of the domestic sphere overlooks the fact that the political structure of Europe relied heavily on familial ties. In early modern Europe, the whole continent was a kinship; thus, familial relationships between two dynasties were inherently political. The daughters and mothers of these dynasties discovered that there was permeable access to the European political arena through marriage and motherhood. …

“A Loving And Faithful Wife”: A Study Of Dakota Territory Divorce Law And Marital Expectations In The Late Nineteenth Century, Cassidy Amanda Abfalter-Dial

Dissertations and Theses

“A Loving and Faithful Wife” provides a procedural and gender-based analysis of twenty-five Dakota Territory divorce cases, from Clay County, ranging from 1867-1884. This analysis is based on an understanding of the procedural aspects of the territorial divorce court system, as well as nineteenth century gender ideologies, include the ideals of True Womanhood, and Separate Spheres. By employing a close reading method, this research analyzes the language in court filings, allegations used in complaints, and the outcome of the cases. This analysis reveals men and women used unspoken gender scripts to present their marriages to the court and attempt to …

The Sting Of The Women Airforce Service Pilots: The Fight For Militarization And Recognition, Cassandra Cates

Honors College Theses

The Women Airforce Service Pilots, commonly known as the WASPs, were the first women to fly military planes for the United States. Serving during World War II, the main goal of the WASPs was to relieve the men flying planes domestically, so the men could serve overseas. But despite their dedicated wartime service, negative press and an unfavorable Congressional investigation prevented the WASPs from being fully recognized in 1944, and consequently militarized. Once they were disbanded near war’s end, the WASPs returned to civilian life. Not until the 1970s did the WASPs start to speak out about their service and …

“None In Velvet Gowns”: Camp Followers And White Womanhood In Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Warfare, Angelica Labren Torres

History Theses

For over two hundred years, women who followed American and European armies during the long eighteenth century were popularly stereotyped and denigrated as prostitutes, burdens, and generally individuals of ill repute by both contemporaries and subsequent generations of historians. While recent scholarship has largely debunked this long-standing characterization as simplistic and inaccurate, the question remains: why exactly were these women so mischaracterized in their own time, particularly by commissioned officers and other members of Anglo-American middling and elite classes, when ample evidence existed of their material usefulness and comparative marital fidelity? This thesis seeks to address the ideological and cultural …

Fashioning The Body Politic: Explorations Of The Political Semiotics Of Fashion In France And England During The French Revolution, Annika F. Gauthier

Scripps Senior Theses

In the midst of the French Revolution, women’s fashion underwent a complete revolution, moving from the multi-layered elaborate gowns of the ancien regime, to light, form-fitting dresses. These gowns reveal the way clothing reflects the political positions of women and the ways the French and the British used clothing to construct national identity and politics. Following research on the political symbolism and role of clothing across France and Britain, this thesis reviews fashion’s overarching connection to politics, revealing its role in the early French Revolution’s conception of women and patriotism, women’s responses to political exclusions, and rival nations’ adaptations of …

Founding Mothers: The Nineteenth Amendment’S Place In Originalist Due Process Analysis, Tracy Turner

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

[INTRODUCTION] During a public speech in 1856, Sojourner Truth is described as stating: “I have had two husbands yet I never possessed one of my own. I have had five children and never could take any one of them up and say “my child” or “my children . . .” One of Truth’s two husbands was an older enslaved man, forced upon her for the purpose of providing new victims of slavery. The second husband may have been a man she considered to be her real husband but was never allowed to marry. By law, Truth’s children belonged entirely to …

Mother Mary Goemaere: A California Pioneer, M. Dougherty Professer Emerita

History and Political Science| Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.

Women’S Movement And Mobility In New York City: Restriction, Rejuvenation, And Resistance In The Progressive Era, 1900-1920, Helene Martinez Erlbaum

Undergraduate Research Awards

In this thesis, I aim to explore the implications of women and girls travelling unaccompanied in New York City during the time before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (circa 1900-1920). By exploring specific examples of societal measures and responses to the phenomena of widespread female mobility – including responses to these original measures by both affirming and opposing parties – and increasing existence in the public sphere, I hope to discern the public attitude towards the growing social freedoms of women as they possibly move beyond the more strict Victorian or Edwardian social rules of the previous generation. Of …

Perigee Club Of Rock Hill Records - Accession 156, Book Club Of Rock Hill, Perigee

Manuscript Collection

The Perigee Club of Rock Hill Records document the organization, membership, and activities of a women’s book club in Rock Hill from its founding in the mid-twentieth century through the early twenty-first century. Organized on February 22, 1955, by the Perihelion Club of Rock Hill, the Perigee Club was established to promote literary study, intellectual discussion, and social fellowship among its members. The club was federated by the South Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs on March 11, 1955, placing it within a broader statewide network of women’s civic and cultural organizations.

The collection includes constitutions and by-laws, meeting minutes, membership …

“Beejagalu Namma Jeevana” (Seeds Are Our Life): Women Farmers’ Relational Practices Of Care, Labor, And Life Within Regenerative Systems In South India, Sara F. Mehkri

Scripps Senior Theses

“Beejagalu Namma Jeevana” (Seeds are Our Life): Women Farmers’ Relational Practices of Care, Labor, and Life within Regenerative Systems in South India, examines the role of women farmers in regenerative agricultural systems in Kanakapura, Karnataka, through ethnographic fieldwork with GREEN Foundation (GF) and its farmer networks. It argues that regenerative agriculture in this context is produced through care-based multispecies assemblages that reconfigure relationships between labor, knowledge, and ecological life, generating resilient socio-agroecological systems and expanding forms of human capability.

Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews with women farmers, participant observation, and historical analysis of agrarian change in South India, this thesis …

Fragments Of Time: The Legacy Of Luna Kaufman, Ariel Espinoza Collantes

Cohort 2025-2026

Ariel Espinoza is a Junior in the Honors Program at Seton Hall University, majoring in Political Science with a minor in Legal Studies in Business. Her project explores the life and legacy of Luna Kaufman, a Holocaust survivor, educator, and arts advocate, through archival research conducted at Seton Hall. Using a podcast format, Ariel examines how Kaufman’s experiences shaped her commitment to music, theater, and cultural preservation, and how she used the arts as a means of promoting memory, resilience, and understanding. Ariel's work highlights the role of archives as “time machines,” showing how the past continues to inform the …

"Queens Of Ghost-Land" 134 Years Later: Un-Masking An Appalachian Witchcraft Accuser, Aine Norris

English Faculty Publications

In 1891, newspapers across America printed a story about witches in the Appalachian Mountains and the alleged powers they possessed to control their small farming community. The article was scathing in accusation and ultimately contributed to continued othering of the women profiled, increasing their visible vulnerabilities of class, gender, and societal status. Despite an implied familiarity with the region, the article was published with initials for its byline, an act that simultaneously identified the author to locals as historian Eva Grant while offering her anonymized national protection as a subject expert. For over five years the accusations were re‐printed in …

Women's Work And Wealth: Measuring The Impact Of Incremental Liberations, 1850-1870, Hannah Kelly

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-difference model, this project analyzes data from the IPUMS Full Count census for 1850, 1860, and 1870 at a state level for 48 states. Four models assess the impact of property laws on women's real property holdings, labor force participation, household types, and real property values.

By quantifying the impact of various legal reforms on women's economic empowerment, this project fills a gap in the understanding of the intersection between law, society, and women's economic agency during a transformative period in pre-industrial American history. These impacts can implicate the effectiveness of legislative measures in advancing …

Military Women In Sci-Fi Films: Breaking Barriers Since 1902, Introduction, Stacy Fowler, Deborah A. Deacon

Law Librarian Scholarship

From its beginnings, science fiction has been about humanity's battle for dominion over "the other," whether that means aliens, giant monsters, or nature herself. Especially in the male-centric military, that same designation of "other" is often assigned to women. Yet in the realm of science fiction, women in the military can attain what is often elusive in the real world—full participation and equality.

Chapters correspond to broad topics prevalent in science fictions films: Conquest, Evolving, Peril, Prey, Ethereal, and Exploration. The book focuses on portrayals of military women in science fiction films, exploring how they are able to excel in …

Deborah Morton Reviews Her Star Pupils, Deborah Morton

Westbrook College Alumni Reminiscences

Notes regarding several  former students collected by Deborah Morton.

Crafting The Right To Vote, Breana M. Mosher

Knowledge and Creativity Expo

This paper examines how British Suffragists between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used traditionally feminine domestic crafts as tools of political protest and communication. Excluded from formal political speech and subjected to censorship, violence, and imprisonment, women in the suffrage movement transformed textiles such as banners, posters, embroidery, and postcards into powerful tools of visual propaganda. Through close evaluation of suffrage-era material culture, this paper argues that domestic crafts enabled women to reclaim their voices and publicly expose state violence and political repression. By employing symbolism, color, and slogan-based design, suffragists created a recognizable visual identity that countered …

Adelaide Louise Butman Irving '04, Adelaide Louise Butman Irving

Westbrook College Alumni Reminiscences

Essay describing Adelaide Irving's experiences as a Westbrook Seminary student 1900-1904.

Marguerite Shaw '37, Marguerite Shaw

Westbrook College Alumni Reminiscences

Letter from Marguerite Shaw to Dorothy Healy detailing her experiences at Westbrook Junior College in the 1930s.

Miriam Fisher Fosher '08, Miriam Fosher

Westbrook College Alumni Reminiscences

Essay written by Miriam Fisher Fosher regarding her experience at Westbrook Seminary 1907-1908.

Nancy Mckeen '45, Nancy Mckeen

Westbrook College Alumni Reminiscences

Essay written by Nancy McKeen "45 regarding her experience at Westbrook Junior College 1943-1945.

Lifting The Political Fog: People, Power, And Antislavery Politics In Upstate New York, 1848-1861, Nicholas Thony

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This work details the ascendance of the political antislavery movement in upstate New York, focusing on the roles a diverse array of actors played in constructing an unlikely Republican coalition of conservatives, reformers, black New Yorkers, nativists, prohibitionists, and abolitionists in the years preceding the Civil War. In weaving together the parallel and inextricable stories of powerful newspaperman Thurlow Weed, female reformers like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and black communities across the state, I argue the success of the political antislavery movement resulted from their combined efforts. Thurlow Weed was one of the most important politicians of …

“Be Only A Man": Authority, Dependency, And Masculinity In Geniza Letters Of Mothers To Their Sons, Oded Zinger

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

One of the most exciting discoveries among the Cairo Geniza, a rich trove of ancient manuscripts discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue at Fustat (Old Cairo), is women’s letters. Up until the early modern period, we have no text written by a Jewish woman preserved in traditional channels of transmission—that is, manuscripts copied by scribes and preserved in libraries or personal collections. Yet the Geniza documents preserve over two hundred letters written by women in different languages and spanning several centuries. Twenty-nine of these letters are from mothers to sons. Letters from mothers to sons have some distinctive characteristics when …

Conversion And The Reconfiguration Of Religious Gender Roles: Conversas And Moriscas In Late Medieval Iberia, Ivana Arsić

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This study addresses the impact of the cultural homogenization policy in late medieval Castilian and Aragonese societies by analyzing Spanish Inquisition documents through a gendered lens. Specifically, this article illustrates how these records depict the religious experiences of Conversas and Moriscas (Christian women of Jewish and Muslim origin, respectively). Whereas recent investigations within cultural studies have engaged in descriptive analysis of female conversion, this article will provide a causal explanation through a comparative gendered perspective, arguing that women’s heightened involvement in religion was particular to the context of forced conversion. Toward this end, I first examine how Jewish and Muslim …

Mary’S Granddaughters: Marian Conversion, Gender, And The Reproduction Of Religious Belief In Medieval And Early Modern Castile, Amanda Valdés Sánchez

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article explores how the conversion of Muslim women was perceived as being spurred by Mary’s love, as evidenced in Castilian Marian miracle collections, popular literature, church iconography, and missional policy. I argue that, in the context of the Castilian colonization of Muslim Iberia, Muslim women’s conversion was stimulated and imagined differently from their male counterparts. Through the analysis of post-thirteenth-century Castilian Marian miracle tales and devotional iconography, my research interrogates the role of Marian devotion in the construction of a model of religious conversion that specifically sought to convert women and children and identified Muslim women as the means …

“An Extremely Dangerous Institution:” The Cultures And Controversy Of Public Social Dances In Montana, 1900-1930, Danielle Allison Brown

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper explores public social dances east of the Continental Divide in Montana from 1900 to 1930. Rural social dances in schoolhouses and urban dances in dance halls created two different dance cultures. The relaxed nature of rural dances preserved the traditional values of nineteenth-century social dances, which reinforced community and family ties. Urban dances reflected the modern fads of the roaring twenties and challenged traditional values with sexual suggestiveness. Progressive Era moral reformers concerned about the possibility that social dance promoted illicit sexuality participated in an anti-dance movement and pushed for regulations of social dances. The anti-dance movement in …