Women's History Commons^™

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 …

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

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. …

International Influence On The Development And Reception Of Cello Playing In England, 1870–1930: Robert Hausmann, Auguste Van Biene, And Guilhermina Suggia, Hannah E. Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The development of cello playing in England in the late nineteenth century was driven largely by the efforts of expatriate and visiting performers trained elsewhere. Performers from abroad, with the support and admiration of British institutions and audiences, elevated the technical level of cello playing and helped to increase the quality and quantity of solo repertoire being written and performed. They also expanded the degree of acceptance that British audiences held for the cello, both as a solo instrument and as an instrument that could be played in public by women. This study explores the impact that three such cellists, …

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 …

Little Egypt: A Critical Biography, Katherine Vecchio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Structured as a biography, this thesis investigates the origins of Little Egypt—a stage name assumed by multiple women performing either the danse du ventre or the hoochie-coochie—and considers the character’s cultural legacy. The work draws on nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, advertisements, photographs, and official publications and archival records from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Chapter one takes a new look at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and shows how the presence of dancers performing the danse du ventre on the Midway Pliasance was turned into a flashpoint of controversy by the popular press. This controversy would be key …

The Forgotten Comrades: Leftist Women, Palestinians, And The Jordanian Communist Party, 1936–1957, Fadi H. Kafeety

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Middle East in the 1950s was the site of major contestation for popular support and power. In Jordan, a militant anti-imperialist movement emerged with a platform centered around expelling British forces and abrogating the Anglo-Jordanian treaty. In the struggle between monarchism and republicanism, the Jordanian Communist Party and Ba’ath Party were the catalyzing anti-imperial forces in the first decade of Jordan’s nominal independence. Despite having a militant core of feminists within their ranks, women of the Jordanian Communist Party—who were instrumental in politicizing and radicalizing the first phase of the Jordanian Women’s Movement—have been systematically erased from this critical …

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 …

"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, …

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 …

Lauretta Vinciarelli In Context: Transatlantic Dialogues In Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, And Theory, 1968-2007, Rebecca Siefert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation centers on the interdisciplinary work of Italian-born artist, architect, teacher, and theorist Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who occupies a historic place in the 1970s revival of architectural drawings, Columbia University’s housing studio, Peter Eisenman’s influential Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York, and architectonic trends in contemporary painting. She was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, in 1974), she was among the first women to teach architecture studio courses at Columbia University (hired in 1978), …

The Juridical Communities Of Apulia: Communal Identity And Municipal Belonging In The Aragonese Kingdom Of Naples, Vincenzo Selleri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study intends to make a contribution to the debate concerning Jewish citizenship in Renaissance Europe by suggesting that de jure status does not provide sufficient information on the municipal belonging of individuals and groups. Citizenship in Renaissance Italy was an equivocal concept. Political rights were usually granted on the basis of wealth and “respectability” (measured in terms of lineage, and education). Jews, women, the poor, and “debased” groups may have not enjoyed such rights; nonetheless they were part of the social, economic, and cultural life of the Renaissance city.

Municipal belonging is better assessed by individuals’ de facto enjoyment …

Feminism Under And After Franco: Success And Failure In The Democratic Transition, Kathryn L. Mahaney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, through an examination of late-20th century Spanish feminism, analyzes how Spaniards’ anxieties about their nation’s post-Franco identity have influenced domestic debates about women’s rights and, eventually, gender equality policy. In this way debates about women’s rights have been central to Spaniards’ post-Franco political and cultural identity. I have also argued for a broader understanding of both the Sección Femenina and of Spanish feminism that places each in context of developments in Western European, and not just Spanish, culture and politics. The dissertation undertakes this argument over four chapters. Chapter One argues that unlike other elements within the Franco …

Everyday Violence And Women's Lives In Zambia: An Autoethnography, Amina Shikupilwa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gender inequality has been a prominent feature of human societies for the longest time. Zambia, like most countries in Africa, is very conservative and patriarchal in nature. In a typical Zambian household, the male is the head of the family. I am going to talk about my experiences as a female growing in a culture that was highly patriarchal and traditional, and how those experiences have shaped me into the person that I am today. Central to my experiences, is the issue of violence in our home which I experienced from a young age. Domestic Violence is prevalent in most …

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 …

How Lucille Ball Fought The Patriarchy, While Lucy Ricardo (Indirectly) Contributed To Second-Wave (White) Feminism, Anam Rana Afzal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Author Stephanie Coontz argues that our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms. In actuality, the happy, homogenous families that we “remember” from America in the 50s were a result of the media’s denial of diversity. Also, women’s retreat to housewifery after working during WWII was in many cases, not freely chosen. In his study of sitcoms, Saul Austerlitz claims that once television arrived in American cities after the war’s end, its impact was immediate and incontrovertible, and no sitcom caught America’s eye as …

Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy, And Italian State-Building, 1850-1890, Diana Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy and Italian State-Building, 1850-1890” is a study of Protestant and Jewish transnational reforming women who took advantage of a period of fluidity to act as non-state actors and impact Italian unification and liberation, a process known as the Risorgimento, and subsequent Italian state-building. Inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini’s spiritual brand of romantic cosmopolitan nationalism, as well as Giuseppe Garibaldi’s military campaigns, and believing that women had a god-given duty to provide education, morality, and uplift to oppressed groups, they worked to provide Italy not only with physical unification but also moral regeneration. Through an examination of …

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

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

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 …

Land Of Women: Basilicata, Emigration, And The Women Who Remained Behind, 1880-1914, Victoria Calabrese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1880 and 1914, millions of Italians emigrated to all corners of the globe in hopes of earning better wages and forging a better life for themselves and for their families. This dissertation examines the role of the women left behind in the Italian region of Basilicata when their husbands emigrated, and the political, social, economic, and legal changes they experienced in their absence. During the Liberal Period, women had few political rights, and married women were dependent on their husbands, but being left on their own put them in a unique position. I argue that the Southern Italian women …

Spectral Bodies: Women's Resistance Across Time In North America, Whitney C. Evanson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contrasts the lived experiences of feminists within the EZLN in Mexico with the historical persecution of community outsiders during the Salem witch trials. I want to explore the differences between a radical political and social movement (the EZLN), and the radical shift in history in which women were accused of witchcraft based on hysteria and rumors. There are parallels between the witch trials and the causes of the Zapatista movement in the ways that women's bodies were treated--their political usefulness to create fear and obedience from citizens by murdering them for their defiance, burying them in shallow graves. …

Clara Lemlich Shavelson: An Activist Life, Sarah B. Cohn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Clara Lemlich Shavelson is primarily known for her impassioned speeches during the 1909 Uprising of 20,000. The majority of histories written about her address her involvement in organizing women garment workers in New York’s Lower East Side from her arrival in New York in 1903 up through the eleven-week general strike in 1909. After this, the literature would have you believe she fades into obscurity, for there is only one book that addresses her life post 1909. Shavelson did not give up organizing after 1909. She got married, moved to Brooklyn, and started a family. In Brooklyn, she organized women …

The Bodies, Minds, Desires And Scorn Of Britain's "Stepdaughters Of War", Alexandra J. Lightle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis revolves around Evadne Price’s novel, Not So Quiet… Stepdaughters of War, published in 1930 under the pen name Helen Zenna Smith. The book delves into the inner life of a young female driver in a voluntary ambulance corps in France during World War I. Throughout the novel the reader is witness to the hardships of young women who left their sheltered drawing rooms only to be plunged into the apocalyptic landscape of the Western Front. They were ill informed as to what they were volunteering for and they struggled desperately to cope with the heretofore unimagined carnage. …

Evolving The Genre Of Empire: Gender And Place In Women's Natural Histories Of The Americas, 1688-1808, Diana Epelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the eighteenth century, “natural history” was a capacious genre designation that alluded to conventions as diverse in their cultural and political resonances as they were in their applications within the New Science. My project is a genre study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history text and art produced by women scientists, explorers, colonists, and early Americans writing the New World; it destabilizes rigid notions of genre that exclude women, suggesting that genre is by nature fluid, inclusionary as well as exclusionary. To this end, I return into conversation understudied naturalists Maria Sybilla Merian, Jane Colden, and Eliza Pinckney, who …

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

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 …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

Nature And Nostalgia In The Art Of Mary Nimmo Moran (1842-1899), Shannon Vittoria

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the work of American painter-etcher Mary Nimmo Moran (1842-1899), an innovative printmaker and influential interpreter of the American landscape. She began her career in 1863, studying drawing and painting with her husband, artist Thomas Moran (1837-1926). Throughout the 1870s, she exhibited works at both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, and published wood engraved illustrations in books and popular monthly magazines. Yet it was in the medium of etching that she achieved her greatest recognition: between 1879 and her untimely death in 1899, she …

The Virtue Mentality, Rachel Eckhardt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my study of early feminist fiction and contemporary queer intentional communities, highly ambitious and nearly impossible aspirations emerged as a singular uniting theme. From early feminist novelists to the intrepid founders of lesbian lands, utopian women share a passionate commitment to transform the world. This thesis engages with feminist concepts of virtue and how they influence utopian projects in both fiction and in life, whether the word “virtue” itself is used to describe the project or not. Virtue has made a lasting impact on contemporary feminist utopian projects that sometimes creates conflict and often undermines its liberatory aspirations. When …