Women's History Commons^™

Self-Advocacy Of Women In Sexualized Labor, 1880-1980s, Kim Marie Matthews

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to centralize, into women's history, the marginalized historical voices of women activists working in sexualized labor (and/or those using sexualized economic strategies). This thesis situates the work of Josie Washburn, a former madam who turned self advocate in 1907, squarely within the Progressive Era debate on prostitution, By centralizing women's voices of sexualized lahor, it provides a means to track the long-term evolution of the intersections between women's sexualized labor choices, traditional labor choices, self-advocacy, popular media, and social/political movements on behalf of women. This study asserts that a majority Progressive Era working women …

Writing The Convent In New France: The Colonialist Rhetoric Of Canadian Nuns, Thomas M. Carr Jr.

French Language and Literature Papers

Most writing by women that has survived from before the fall of New France—perhaps most writing by women during that period—was done by nuns in the seven communities founded before 1763: the Ursulines, the Hôtel-Dieu, and the Hôpital-Général in Québec; the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières; the Hôtel-Dieu and two uncloistered institutes, the Congrégation de Notre-Dame and Sisters of Charity of Marguerite d’Youville in Montreal.

While the nuns wrote above all to promote the spiritual vitality of their communities, they also provide a unique female perspective on the colonial milieu. Marie Guyart, Catherine Simon de Longpré, and Marguerite Bourgeoys are the best …

Proper Women/Propertied Women: Federal Land Laws And Gender Order(S) In The Nineteenth-Century Imperial American West, Tonia M. Compton

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study explores the relationship between federal land policy and women’s property rights in the nineteenth-century American West, analyzing women’s responses to expanded property rights under the 1850 Oregon Donation Act, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the 1887 General Allotment Act, and the ways in which the demands of empire building shaped legislators’ decisions to grant such rights to women. These laws addressed women’s property rights only in relation to their marital status, and solely because women figured prominently in the national project of westward expansion. Women utilized these property rights to both engage in the process of empire …