Women's History Commons^™

In The Field The Women Saved The Crop: The Women’S Land Army Of World War Ii, Denna M. Clymer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Women’s Land Army brought together rural and urban sectors of the United States in a climate of national and regional crisis. By the time the country was cast into war, the agricultural sector was already caught in a downward economic spiral that drove away laborers. With demand falling, and farms propped up only by experiments in subsidy and parity, when military and industrial jobs emerged in urban areas, farm laborers became scarce. At the same time the war created jobs for men outside of the agricultural sector, farm prices recovered and demand soared, forcing farmers to look to women …

Since The Time Of Eve : La Leche League And Communities Of Mothers Throughout History., Joanna Paxton Federico

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

La Leche League International (LLL) is the oldest and largest breastfeeding support group in the world. This thesis examines how, beginning in 1956, seven Catholic housewives from suburban Chicago built up the institutional knowledge to sustain a cohesive global network of breastfeeding mothers. It also explores how LLL managed this knowledge over time in response to developments in scholarship and changing social conditions. Based on a narrative analysis of LLL publications, this thesis argues that the League’s founders drew selectively from existing bodies of knowledge and from their own cultural perspectives to establish a sense of community among breastfeeding women. …

Southern Veils : The Sisters Of Loretto In Early National Kentucky., Hannah O'Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the experiences of Roman Catholic women who joined the Sisters of Loretto, a community of women religious in rural Washington and Nelson Counties, Kentucky, between the 1790s and 1826. It argues that the Sisters of Loretto used faith to interpret and respond to unfolding events in the early nation. The women sought to combat moral slippage and restore providential favor in the face of local Catholic institutional instability, global Protestant evangelical movements, war and economic crisis, and a tuberculosis outbreak. The Lorettines faced financial, social, and cultural pressures—including an economic depression, a culture that celebrated family formation …

"Ever True And Loyal:" Mary Todd Lincoln As A Kentuckian, Andrew Landreth

Scholars Week

This paper considers Mary Todd Lincoln from the perspective of her relationship with her home state of Kentucky. Utilizing her own writings and those of her contemporaries, as well as secondary studies, this paper argues that Mary Todd Lincoln's life and relationships embodied many of the same contradictions of her home state and that important aspects of her public and private life were influenced by her upbringing in antebellum Kentucky. Particular emphasis is placed on her views of slavery and on her relationship with the Todd family during the Civil War.

"Avenging Furies": The Memoirs Of American Women In The Philippines During The Second World War, Meghan E. O'Donnell

Student Publications

A large and active resistance movement developed in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation of the islands from 1942-1945. This paper discusses the memoirs of several women caught up in these movements, specifically Claire Phillips, Margaret Utinsky, Yay Panlilio, and Virginia Hansen Holmes. I argue that these women utilized their memoirs to secure places for themselves in history, using gendered and racialized language to define their experiences as incredible adventures. Their memoirs give significant insight into the civilian experience of the Japanese occupation and testify to the unique efforts made by women to support the American cause.

Butch Between The Wars: A Pre-History Of Butch Style In Twentieth-Century Literature, Music, And Film, Karen Allison Hammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Butch Between the Wars is a pre-history of “butch,” a twentieth-century masculine style that became an identity category for lesbians in the 1940s and ’50s. Between the two world wars and in the early postwar period, women used the energy of butch to create literature, music, and character on film. Butch-styled artists expressed a muscular orientation to the world, one with close associations to lower and working class black and white masculinities. Those who were recognizably lesbian and those with less clearly defined sexualities challenged the idea that strength, authority, and independence are qualities “naturally” bound to the male body. …

Flapperism: A National Phenomenon Comes To New Orleans, Tracy Carrero

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Rountree, Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie," 1853-1912 (Sc 3136), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and typescript (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3136. Letter, 10 January 1869 of “Mag” (or “May”) to Lizzie Rountree, Lebanon, Kentucky. Writing from Louisville, Kentucky, she tells Lizzie that she will not be returning to Caldwell Institute in Danville, Kentucky, where they had been schoolmates. She notes the departure of three additional students and reports on the whereabouts of others.

"Not Your Mother's Pta": Women's Political Activism In Twentieth-Century America, Jennifer Lynn Mcpherson

History ETDs

Not Your Mother’s PTA: Women’s Political Activism in Twentieth-Century America provides the first in-depth study of women’s political activism in the National PTA and its local PTA units. It closely examines how women integrated themselves and their ideas on women’s and children’s welfare reform into government from the 1890s through the 1970s. This project explores the resources, strategies, and methods used by PTA women working for women and children’s interests at the local and national level, primarily in public schools and government agencies. Not Your Mother’s PTA challenges the subtext of the PTA mother/housewife and shows how women used the …

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …

Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …

Changing The Message: Battered Women's Advocates And Their Fight Against Domestic Violence At The Local, State, And Federal Level, 1970s-1990s, Clara Amy Van Eck

History Theses & Dissertations

This thesis analyzes congressional hearings, reports to Congress, government statistics, acts of Congress, Supreme Court rulings, and newspaper articles to examine how, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, battered women's advocates altered their rhetoric when dealing with local, state, and federal governments in order to change policies, laws, and to obtain funding for domestic abuse shelters. In the 1970s, battered women's advocates used anti-patriarchal language to help survivors of sexual assault and of domestic violence understand the pervasive and systemic nature of violence against women to liberate survivors from the belief that the violence was their fault. In the 1980s, …

New Design Principles For Mobile History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Presentations and other scholarship

This study draws on design-based research on an ARIS–based mobile augmented reality game for teaching early 20th century history. New design principles derived from the study include the use of supra-reveals, and bias mirroring. Supra-reveals are a kind of foreshadowing event in order to ground historical happenings in the wider enduring historical understanding. Bias mirroring refers to a nonplayer character echoing back a player’s biased behavior, in order to open the player to listening to alternative perspectives. Supra-reveals engendered discussion of historical themes early in the game experience. The results showed that use of a cluster of NPC bias mirroring …

Eartha M. M. White Collection Container List, Thomas G. Carpenter Library Special Collections And University Archives

Finding Aids and Container Lists

Personal correspondence, documents, notes, memorabilia, printed materials and photographs. Notable materials include numerous photographs chronicling twentieth century black history in Jacksonville and historical photographs of urban Jacksonville. Included in the collection are the photographs of R. Lee Thomas, a black photographer active in the early twentieth century in the southern United States. Thomas' work covers primarily southern black religious and labor groups, circa 1946-49.

Making An Impression: Butter Prints, The Butter Market, And Rural Women In Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Pennsylvania, Jennifer L. Putnam

Madison Historical Review

Pre-industrial butter-making was an arduous process, involving milking, churning, proper storage, printing, and, sometimes, transport to market. The 19th-century economy in Philadelphia was forever changed by the practice of rural women selling their surplus butter as a response to the rise of consumerism. Butter-making provided rural women with the means to earn their own income, providing economic agency and increasing their independence by allowing them to work outside of the home. Butter prints emerged as a way to brand one’s butter with a signature trademark. A print’s size and shape, the materials and methods used in its construction, and the …

Féminisme Oblige: Katharine Susan Anthony And The Birth Of Modern Feminist Biography, 1877-1929, Anna C. Simonson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Féminisme Oblige examines the life and work of Katharine Susan Anthony (1877-1965), a feminist, socialist, and pacifist whose early publications on working mothers (Mothers Who Must Earn [1914]) and women’s movements in Europe (Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia [1915]) presaged her final chosen vocation as a feminist biographer. Between 1920 and 1958, Anthony published nine biographies of women, all of which in some way challenged the assumptions behind established gender norms and the status quo. Perhaps most importantly, Anthony’s biographies, grounded in the exciting new theories of Sigmund Freud, challenged women themselves to think differently about their prescribed …

"Going Steady?": Documenting The History Of Dating In American Culture, 1940-1990, Jill E. Anderson

University Library Faculty Publications

“‘Going Steady?’: Documenting the History of Dating in American Culture, 1940-1990” is a one-credit, pass/no-credit freshman seminar taught for Georgia State University’s Honors College. This course has grown out of my current research on post-World War II girls' cultural and intellectual history and out of my work as Georgia State University's History, African-American Studies, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Librarian. "Going Steady?" is designed to teach basic primary-source searching and interpretive skills and to familiarize students with primary sources available to them as Georgia State University students. Centering on a broad and engaging topic, the course offers a general …

Mental Health Memories: A Web-Based Archive For Mental Health Stories, Amanda E. Castro

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Mental Health Memories project is an online archive created in order to display and preserve the personal histories of those with mental health experiences. The project aims to fill a void in available material culture related to the history of mental health and its preservation. Participants’ contributions include: oral histories, personal items, documents, and audio. Bringing together multimedia sources, the MHMemories website allows for the preservation of these items and stories through the digitization of contributions. This method allows for participants’ items to stay in their possession while also becoming part of the archive. In order to recruit participants, …

Garrison, Kathryn (Topmiller), 1917-2012 (Sc 3117), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3117. Two letters of Kathryn Garrison, Bowling Green, Kentucky, to her godchild “Betsy,” regarding hats made by Wilhelmina Howard, a Bowling Green milliner who was Betsy’s grandmother and Kathryn’s cousin.

Mestiza, Métis, American: How Intermixture On United States Borders Shaped Local, Regional, And National Identities, Carla L. Mendiola

History Theses and Dissertations

This project compares mestizaje in Mexican American communities of the Texas-Mexico border and métissage in Franco American communities of the Maine-Canada border, from the pre-contact period to the 20th-century. Exploring the central themes of intermixing, borders, and identity, the paper shows the long-standing presence of mixed-ancestry groups in the U.S. and investigates how social and geopolitical borders have been used to racialize and exclude these groups from U.S. history, and, ultimately from acceptance as part of U.S. identity. The comparison of Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley and Maine’s St. John River Valley follows the development of these communities and recognizes …

Time Travel, Labour History, And The Null Curriculum: New Design Knowledge For Mobile Augmented Reality History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the 'null curriculum'. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to …

The Early History Of The Mill Valley Public Library, Rebecca Karberg

Rebecca Karberg

Working-Class Black Women’S Role In Building And Sustaining Black Communities In The Pacific Northwest, Tessara G. Dudley

Student Research Symposium

In response to the scholarly focus on the historical racism of the Pacific Northwest, this research attempts to answer the question of how Black communities have persisted in the face of discrimination. This study is a historical examination of the roles that Black women have played in building and sustaining Black communities within predominantly white regions, with a specific focus on the Portland-Vancouver area during and after World War II. This work focuses on the activities of working class Black women, a significant proportion of Black women migrating to the Pacific Northwest during World War II, examining their community-building activities …

Pierian Club - Bowling Green, Kentucky (Mss 610), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 610. Minutes, correspondence, yearbooks, and miscellaneous records of the Pierian Club, a women's literary club in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Pedigo, James Spenser, 1882-1933 (Sc 3114), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3114. Letter, 19 September 1910, to “Mildred” from J. Spenser Pedigo, Bowling Green, Kentucky. A friend of her parents, Pedigo greets the newborn Mildred, praises motherhood and family, and sends his regards to her parents and to one “Kate Carr.”

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …

No Foreign Despots On Southern Soil: The American Party In Alabama And South Carolina, 1850-1857, Robert N. Farrell

Master's Theses

During the 1850s in the South, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, rallied southerners culturally and politically around nativism, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic ideology. This thesis studies nativism in the Deep South and challenges existing scholarship by Tyler Anbinder and William Darrell Overdyke. Anbinder claims that southern Know Nothings held little in common with their northern counterparts and exhibited only regional characteristics. Overdyke maintains that the American Party in the Deep South participated in the national organization, but he argues that nativism appeared only as an incidental component.

An analysis of private papers, speeches, and newspapers …

Winchel, Beulah Rhea, 1912-2015 (Mss 609), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 609. Correspondence, photographs, travel materials, genealogy, and other personal papers of Beulah R. Winchel, a Breckinridge County, Kentucky, native and a teacher and librarian who served in Japan, Germany and France with the U.S. Army Special Services and the Department of Defense Dependents Schools.

Uncovering The Truth: Women Spies Of The Civil War, Olivia Traina (Class Of 2017)

History Undergraduate Publications

The American Civil War is one of the most impactful events in our nation’s history. There is so much that can be analyzed within this one event, from the years leading into the war, during the war, and Reconstruction. Most historians and school history textbooks only focus on the male and battle aspects of the war. While these two topics make up a majority of Civil War history, there is another huge component that played a prominent role, and that is the women spies.

Women spies played a vital role in the Civil War. Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Belle Boyd, Sarah …

A Continuous Present, Margaret L. Lundberg

Margaret Lundberg

The readers of a text are—in many ways—also its authors, with the act of reading creating a dialog between a text already written and a text generated through reader response, creating a community along the boundary between author and reader. To illustrate that boundary, I situated myself—through my research and writing—as a responding audience to nineteenth-century Iowa farm wife Emily Hawley Gillespie, as she is revealed through the pages of her thirty-year diary. Through a constructivist paradigm, the methodology of philosophical hermeneutics, new historicism, and the creative vehicle of fiction, I entered Gillespie’s text to examine the themes which emerged …