Women's History Commons^™

“Ite Missa Est”: How Can The Altar Alter Attitudes And Actions?, Ebenezer Akesseh

Journal of Global Catholicism

This paper brings into focus the relationship between personal agency and so-

cial structure, demonstrating that what we celebrate on the altar forms within

us the proper dispositions that can help prevent the occurrence of corruption.

The first part examines corruption from a socio-cultural perspective and ex-

plains the incidence and effects of corruption. The second part discusses the

relationship between worship and the formation of actions and attitudes. It

highlights the need to embody the social implications of our celebrations. Using

responses from interviewees, the third part illustrates that the celebration of the

Eucharist shapes the commitments and conduct …

Negotiating Plurality: Korean Catholic Funerals As Lived Religion, Jieun Han

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines Korean Catholic funeral rites through the lenses of ritual

guidebooks and lived religion, arguing that Catholic funerary practice in Korea

has emerged through sustained engagement with Confucian and Buddhist tradi-

tions as well as modern nationalism. Focusing on Catholic manuals such as the

Sangjang yesik [Rites for Mourning and Funerals] and related texts, it traces how

officially sanctioned liturgical forms coexist with, accommodate, and reinterpret

indigenous ritual logics surrounding mourning, burial, ancestor veneration, and

care for the dead. Rather than viewing Korean Catholic funerals as a simple

localization of Roman rites, the article conceptualizes them as a …

Editor's Introduction, Brent H. Otto S.J.

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

From Humanitarian Aid To “Counterrevolution”: Foreign Assistance To Pentecostals In Soviet Ukraine And Its Criminalization By The Gpu–Nkvd, 1932–1935, Oleksandr Korotaiev

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article examines foreign assistance to Pentecostal communities in the Ukrainian SSR and the mechanisms of its criminalization by Soviet state security agencies in 1932–1935. Drawing on GPU–NKVD criminal investigation files, secret police reports, party-state documentation, personal correspondence, and memoir sources, the study reconstructs transnational channels of humanitarian support, practices of resource distribution, and the transformation of survival strategies into objects of political repression.

Particular attention is devoted to two distinct models of foreign assistance. The Odessa case demonstrates a centralized system connected to the former leadership of the All-Ukrainian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith and transnational Pentecostal networks …

Cosmetic Nationalism: Fashion And Feminine Performance In Trump-Aligned America, Nicola Rountree-Williams

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

This paper examines how fashion, beauty, and feminine presentation operate as political tools within Trump-aligned American culture. Drawing on historical examples from fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and European aristocratic fashion, it argues that aesthetics have long been used to reinforce nationalism, gender hierarchy, and political authority. The paper analyzes contemporary trends such as “Republican makeup” and “Mar-a-Lago face,” arguing that these hyper-feminine and highly racialized beauty standards function as performances of loyalty, wealth, and traditional femininity within Trump-aligned politics. Through figures such as Kristi Noem, the paper demonstrates how women’s appearances can visually legitimize masculine authority while limiting women’s autonomy …

Reclaiming The Silenced: West African Women, Anticolonial Activism, And Storytelling As Historical Resistance, Tahsina Nasir

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper examines the systematic erasure of West African women from dominant historical narratives of anticolonial liberation, focusing on decolonization and post-independence nation building in Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, and Nigeria. Although women played central roles in organizing, mobilizing, and educating during nationalist movements, their contributions were increasingly sidelined once state power was achieved. Drawing on feminist historiography, Black feminist thought, and archival and literary sources, this study analyzes how state actors dismantled autonomous women’s organizations, including the Federation of Ghana Women, and confined women to symbolic roles within party-controlled structures. Figures such as Hannah Kudjoe, once central to political mobilization, were …

A Case For Societal Provenance: Marguerite Harper As Told By The Men She Represented, V. Emily Cranwell Deinert

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This paper argues for making societal provenance the grounding framework for archival descriptive standards to ensure that important voices already present in archives are no longer buried. This study reclaims from archival obscurity the career of literary agent Marguerite E. Harper to illustrate the need for this expansion. Harper proves strikingly absent from some of the archives for the authors she represented. Likely an unwitting omission from archivists that uncritically accepted the narratives of these male authors, Harper’s erasure provides a potent example of the ways that archival descriptive standards may unintentionally further silence historically marginalized voices within archives. The …

The Method And The Machinery: Gloria Steinem, India, And The Cold War Making Of American Second Wave Feminsim, 1956-1972, Rashida Shafiq

History Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that Gloria Steinem became one of the most visible feminists of her generation because two political inheritances — postcolonial India and the Cold War liberal United States — converged in a single career. In 1957 and 1958, on a Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship, Steinem spent eighteen months in India, where she moved from elite intellectual circles in Delhi to Gandhian and Sarvodaya peace work in the villages of Ramnad. Walking with Bhoodan fieldworkers through caste-riot-stricken communities, she absorbed a repertoire of organizing practices — listening across difference, lateral and leaderless structure, decision by consensus, and the conversion …

Jewish Women’S Folk Memory Of Argentine Schooldays, 1900–1955, Jacqueline Laznow

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

This essay explores the folkloric formation of Jewish-Argentine female identity through schoolyard experiences and domestic resistance in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews with women who later made aliyah, the study analyzes these accounts as personal experience narratives, arguing that painful memories of antisemitism and “otherness” are cognitively restructured through folk processes into a symbolic frame for communal interpretation. These narratives function as “legend discourse,” sparking commentary and intergenerational transmission, and serve as mechanisms for reconstructing daily life within a dominant Christian culture. They reveal a “hyphenated” Jewish-Argentine identity reimagined from the perspective of the narrators’ …

Hindu Poetry And The Project Of An Inter-Spiritual Catholic Theology, Francis X. Clooney

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article engages the work of the Indian south Indian Tamil-language Vaiṣṇava poet saints known as the Alvārs. The article specifically focuses the First HundredHoly Linked verses of Poykai Ālvār to argue for inter-spiritual learning between Catholics and Hindus. The article concludes with personal reflections on this encounter within the context of the global Catholic Church

[2026 Honorable Mention] Impact Of Chicana Rewritings Of La Virgen De Guadalupe And La Malinche, Destiny Villarreal Quintero

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

This piece elaborates on the cultural significance of La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche in Mexican/ Chicanx communities and how they impact women's gender roles.

Forced Dependency: The Subjugation Of Women Through Medicine In Ancient Greece And Rome, Evelyn J. Polovich

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

In the ancient Mediterranean men were in charge of every facet of life, including women’s medicine. They forced women out of the oversight of gynecology and reformed it into a method of control that they could assert in order to force women into a position of submission. This paper aims to bring the ways in which ancient medicine was influenced by cultural ideas and worked to subjugate women and allow men to gain further control over their autonomy. This research was inspired by the works of ancient physicians like Hippocrates, Soranus, and Galen, as well as contemporary sources that critique …

A History Of The Underground Comix Scene: The Seriousness Of An Unserious Genre, Harris Darcie Shugart

Master's Theses

The Underground Comix Scene of the 1960s and 1970s was born out of an age of censorship. The Comics Code Authority, a regulatory body created by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, established guidelines requiring publishing houses to self-regulate following a recommendation from the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1953. Comix with an X, for their X-rated nature, represent an emerging counter-culture in the latter half of the 1960s and the 1970s, with an epicenter of San Francisco. These comix and their artists were not interested in obtaining the looming ‘Seal of Approval’ from the …

A Northwest Perspective: A Comprehensive Survey Of Sally Haley's Life And Career, Mary Timbrook

University Honors Theses

Sally Haley is a successful artist who built a long career in the second half of the 20th century as a painter in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been part of several solo and group exhibitions within museums and galleries across the country and she was awarded the Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts in 1989. She is best remembered for her unique still life paintings, frequently painted in egg tempera, which sold immensely well during her lifetime and after. Haley trained at the Yale School of Art in the late 1920s and early 30s, where she learned to paint …

Kitchen Table Press: A Case Study Of Regression To The Neoliberal Mean, Alaina Disalvo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the idealistic founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980 and its slow downfall, culminating in the cession of ownership of the Press to a university in 1992. It traces the ideological development of Kitchen Table Press’s key founders, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, and their respective relationships to the ideologies of other renowned feminist figures of the era, specifically June Jordan and Adrienne Rich. It examines the history of the Press through historical, intersectional, affective, and socialist lenses. This thesis argues that neoliberal pressures can bend even the most radical organizations away from their …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

破酆都 Calling Her Through The Gates, Yuqi Liu

Masters Theses

My practice centers on papermaking, printmaking, and artist books to explore fiber as both image and language. I treat paper not simply as a surface, but as a living material through which memory, labor, and history can be held. By making my own sheets from plant fibers, fungi, and other organic matter, I create works in which material and meaning are inseparable. Shaped by my engagement with the natural world, women’s history, and overlooked vernacular forms of knowledge, my work moves through cycles of life and death, presence and disappearance, fragility and resilience. My projects with mushrooms and mycelium led …

Care, Control, And The Racial Regulation Of Black Women’S Reproduction In American Medicine, Rheya K. Wilk

Honors Thesis

Black women in the United States continue to experience disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality, negative reproductive healthcare experiences, and documented disparities in medical treatment. From slavery through the twenty-first century, American medicine has repeatedly positioned Black women’s reproduction as a site of regulation, rather than care, making medical mistrust among Black women a rational response to a long history of institutional conflict embedded in American medicine. Drawing on medical history and bioethical analysis, this thesis traces reproductive abuse across distinct, yet connected, eras. Beginning with antebellum gynecological experimentation on enslaved women, it demonstrates how racialized assumptions about pain and …

From Farewell To Fáilte: The Voices Of Iowa’S Irish Daughters, Katie Hermanson

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

Irish women’s immigration to Iowa brought rich culture and lasting impacts, despite their contributions being silenced by history. Women left Ireland for economic opportunity and education abroad to support their impoverished families. Millions emigrated between 1830 and 1915, spreading across the world. The Irish women who came to the United States encountered discrimination and cultural stereotyping as they worked in domestic service, developed religious orders, taught school, owned businesses and raised families. Women bore the burden of supporting their families in Ireland by sending remittances home and communicating between countries. Their cultural identity as exiles dwelled in guilt for leaving …

“Before Your Honour?”: Divine Morality And Women Reclaiming Power In Ben Jonson’S Volpone And William Shakespeare’S Measure For Measure, Delilah G. Fleming

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how the female protagonists in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Jonson’s Volpone navigate and combat corrupting patriarchal forces through moral religious speech. In both plays, the male characters have allowed false gods and hypocrisy to dictate and justify their corrupt behavior. By engaging with the historical significance of early modern female rhetoric this thesis examines Jonson’s Celia and Shakespeare’s Isabella, and how they operate in the interest of godly virtue rather than blind obedience to patriarchal figure heads.  Volpone’s Celia is a character largely neglected in the canon, and whose speech emphasizes the relationship between female agency …

Res Historica, Volume 5, Alpha Rho Epsilon Phi Alpha Theta, Lindsay Rae Smith Privette Phd

Res Historica

The 2026 journal of historical research by Anderson University students, Res Historica.

The editorial team for this edition of Res Historica was Dr. Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, Julia Ackerman, Callyn Wright, Logan Davis, and John Hinton. Cover art by Mary Beth Lee.

The Ladies' Home Journal: Dormant Seeds Of The Feminine Mystique Pre-Wwii, Isis Santos Villaça

University Honors Theses

At the turn of the 20th century, magazines were becoming increasingly available to the middle class. Throughout the 1890–1930s, the industry put forth an entire new iteration of publications that came to be popular with female readers. One of the most successful publications from this period, The Ladies' Home Journal, distinguished itself through its strong editorial presence on the page. The editors of the Ladies' Home Journal intended to create a "traditional" female identity that reflected domesticity in the journal, which countered the rising notions of the New Woman. Simultaneously, the publication aimed to create an educational product with …

Father Of The Bride: Shakespeare's Daughter Issues Played Out, Allison G. Lincicome

Global Tides

Shakespeare, throughout the majority of his plays, fixated on the relationship and expectation of obedience between fathers and daughters. Given the prevalence of his works in children’s media and secondary public education, recognizing the moral messaging of his works can help those who interact with his work better interpret and share this popular media in proper context. This essay analyzes three of Shakespeare’s plays, conduct literature from early modern England, and historical documents referencing Shakespeare’s own relationship to his daughters. These sources in conversation paint a more comprehensive picture of the expected behavior of daughters during Shakespeare’s time, and the …

An Ordinary Hero: Examining The True Nature Of Amelia Earhart, Daniella Hernandez

Emerging Writers

This essay explores how Amelia Earhart’s perception in society has been skewed by the sensationalism surrounding her career as a female aviator and the conspiracies surrounding her mysterious disappearance. The author argues that Earhart’s true character and the impact she had on society as a whole have been overshadowed by the media’s fascination with her strange death.

"In Her Own Words: Annotating A 19th-Century Southwest Florida Diary", Jordan L. Von Cannon

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

The Gendered Duality Of Coldness In The Portrayals Of Eliza Hayley, Francesca Blanch-Serrat

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In the eighteenth century, coldness was defined, on the one hand, in relation to the body and the senses (a body that is lacking in heat) and on the other, to emotion (an individual lacking in passion). It was linked to illness and disability (Turner, 2012), equated to death, seen as both a cause and effect of physical decline and older age, and used as a synonym for low libido and infertility (Toulalan, 2015). In contrast to these negative connotations, coldness was also regarded as a remedy to temper the passions and to ensure longevity (Yallop, 2015), and taking cold …

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 …

From Motherhood To Sisterhood: Women Strike For Peace And The Transmission Of Feminist Consciousness, Olivia R. Aldrich

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Women Strike for Peace (WSP) has traditionally been understood as a maternalist peace movement that emerged in response to atmospheric nuclear testing during the early Cold War era. This thesis argues that WSP’s history reveals a more nuanced relationship between motherhood, feminism, and political activism than existing scholarship has suggested. Rather than operating in distinct stages, maternalism and feminism operated simultaneously, working alongside one another throughout the organization’s history. Furthermore, this thesis builds upon Ednie Kaeh Garrison’s concept of feminist “radio waves,” arguing that WSP functioned as a transmitter of feminist consciousness, where ideas, organizational practices, and different political identities …

“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 …

“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 …