Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Gender (4)
- Women (4)
- Feminism (3)
- Great Depression (2)
- New Deal (2)
-
- Queer (2)
- United States (2)
- 1980s (1)
- Activism (1)
- African American (1)
- Archives (1)
- Bessie; Baker (1)
- Black Education History (1)
- Black Panther Party (1)
- Blue Eagle Campaign (1)
- Broadway (1)
- Capitalism (1)
- Choreographer (1)
- Clara; Bacall (1)
- Comics (1)
- Community (1)
- Composition (1)
- Consumerism (1)
- Curriculum Studies (1)
- Dance (1)
- Dress Reform (1)
- Early republic (1)
- Embodied Nostalgia (1)
- Fashion History (1)
- Feminist biography (1)
Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Women's History
"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh
"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American society encouraged strong bonds between women. As separate sphere ideology took hold, highly-structured female relationships were created and maintained through shared rituals, language, and expectations. The resulting friendships enabled women to build a range of emotional ties with one another. At the same time, an expanding array of gender segregated educational institutions further promoted homosocial networks. Women’s college students built community through their shared experience inhabiting a collective space, forging social circles as well as one-on-one intimate relationships. This thesis examines women’s experiences of friendship within the college setting between 1880 …
The Queer Life Of Lorena Hickok, Samantha D. Leyerle
The Queer Life Of Lorena Hickok, Samantha D. Leyerle
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis explores the life of Lorena Hickok, a remarkable woman whose story has been glossed over throughout history. Hickok was an accomplished journalist and writer, and her life offers a fascinating glimpse into being queer in the early twentieth century. While much has been written about Hickok’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, this thesis aims to go beyond their connection to examine Hickok’s entire life and experiences in greater detail. Through analyzing her work as a writer, as well as her personal correspondence and unpublished autobiography, this thesis illuminates the quiet details of defining moments in history, including the Great …
The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane
The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In 1930s North America, women—for the first time—were accorded permanent principal positions in significant American orchestras. Edna Phillips, Alice Chalifoux, and Sylvia Meyer, all students of the legendary harp pedagogue Carlos Salzedo, have been celebrated as pioneers for the prestigious employment they obtained in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively, between 1930 and 1933. Despite the impressiveness of these accomplishments, however, the narrative of their “firstness” is not wholly accurate. In actuality, female harpists have occupied orchestral posts as acting principals, substitutes, and second harpists since the very inception of orchestras. The cause for their early …
Stealin' The Meetin': Black Education History & The Black Panthers' Oakland Community School, Robert P. Robinson
Stealin' The Meetin': Black Education History & The Black Panthers' Oakland Community School, Robert P. Robinson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation frames the Black Panthers' Oakland Community School (OCS) as a convergence of Black self-determination/Black Power, Black education history, and curriculum studies. Drawing from widely-cited archives, rarely-cited archives, oral history, periodicals, and secondary source material, the proposed study extends the OCS narrative by tracing its curricular trajectory and highlighting the voices of students, parents, and staff. It considers how the school’s history provides examples of educational practices—such as restorative justice and culturally relevant pedagogy—that would not become named or popularized in mainstream education until much later, asserting that histories of this sort can inform educational endeavors in the present. …
Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore
Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis will argue that New Deal legislation accounted for increased importance placed on consumers and the articulation of consumer citizenship as female during the Great Depression. Once New Deal programs and legislation determined and legitimized the consumer citizen, the consumer citizen exercised influence though purchasing power. Analyzing the ways the federal government defined women as consumer citizens through programs like the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle Campaign offers important insight into who was considered to have a voice. Notions of citizenship define groups by who has the necessary attributes and qualifications—in this case the means to purchase goods—to be …
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …
"A War Within A War": Policing Gender And Race In New York City During World War Ii, Emily Brooks
"A War Within A War": Policing Gender And Race In New York City During World War Ii, Emily Brooks
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
During World War II, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine launched aggressive policing campaigns in New York City against crimes of “vice” or “immorality” that they believed threatened the order of the wartime city. The municipal leaders argued that racialized and gendered threats posed by prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, gamblers, and disorderly persons weakened the nation’s ability to mobilize healthy troops and to compete in a postwar world. While the war disrupted racial and gender hierarchies in the increasingly interracial city, Valentine and La Guardia connected America’s global security to policing at home. This dissertation follows patrolmen, policewomen, …
Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey
Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation, I claim the collective emotional connections and historical explorations characteristic of musical theatre constitute a nostalgic impulse dramaturgically inherent in the form. In my intervention in the link between nostalgia and musical theatre, I look to an area underrepresented in musical theatre scholarship: social dance. Through case studies that focus specifically on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, I ask what social dance is doing in musical theatre and how the dancing body functions as a catalyst for nostalgic thinking for …
Throwing Off The "Draggling Dresses": Women And Dress Reform, 1820-1900, Laura J. Ping
Throwing Off The "Draggling Dresses": Women And Dress Reform, 1820-1900, Laura J. Ping
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In 1851 a group of woman’s reformers adopted a radical garment called the bloomer costume and thus launched a dress reform movement. During this era women typically wore corsets and layers of underclothes beneath dresses with tight bodices and voluminous skirts. In contrast, the bloomer costume included a loose dress, shortened to the knee, and harem style trousers. Underclothes, including corsets, were discouraged. The purpose of adopting such clothing was twofold; social reformers believed that women were in need of comfortable garments and they also hoped that by rejecting fashion woman’s rights activists could cast off the stereotype that women …
Women And Work: African American Women In Depression Era America, Sarah Ward
Women And Work: African American Women In Depression Era America, Sarah Ward
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project explores whether African American women met similar public sentiments as Caucasian women during the Depression Era and how gender dynamics changed within African American households in urban America as well as the effect of the crisis on a populace that was not new to the work force. Historical statistical analysis and emphasis on labor policy are used to garner information. The Great Depression sparked an abrupt shift in not only the American economy but also American ideology regarding male and female gender dynamics. Despite discouragement from entering the workforce due to dominant masculinity, employment rates rose amongst Caucasian …
Women’S Suffrage In American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920, Elsie Y. Heung
Women’S Suffrage In American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920, Elsie Y. Heung
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In 1920, women in the United States finally won the right to vote. The campaign for suffrage, which began in the 1848, with the first women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, NY, involved the efforts and enthusiasm of countless women who believed that they both deserved and needed the right to vote. This dissertation investigates the ways in which women artists both responded to and contributed to this divisive movement through painting and sculpture during the final decades of the campaign, when visual culture and propaganda played a crucial role in advancing the suffrage and anti-suffrage agendas. The literature …
Butch Between The Wars: A Pre-History Of Butch Style In Twentieth-Century Literature, Music, And Film, Karen Allison Hammer
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. …
Féminisme Oblige: Katharine Susan Anthony And The Birth Of Modern Feminist Biography, 1877-1929, Anna C. Simonson
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 …
An Alliance Of Ladies: Power, Public Affairs, And Class Construction In Early National New York City, Alisa J. Wade
An Alliance Of Ladies: Power, Public Affairs, And Class Construction In Early National New York City, Alisa J. Wade
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The dissertation studies elite women’s political consciousness in New York City between 1783 and 1815, contextualizing women’s position within the city’s social strata and the rise of market capitalism in the post-Revolutionary era. In a period of deferential politics, women within the leadership class played a unique role in remodeling the structure of republican government and determining who belonged within it. Building on the foundation of learned femininity, they constructed the etiquette that undergirded men’s political careers and oversaw the marriage market. They mediated divisions between new merchant capital and more established landed wealth, reinforcing dynastic stability. Moreover, they were …
Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan
Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …