Women's History Commons^™

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. …

Vintage Red.Docx, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

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 …

The Ideal Of Liberation: Women In Sri Lanka’S Civil War, Akeela Makshood

History Honors Program

In the 1990s, videos emerged from the war-torn Northern peninsula of Sri Lanka of young, female LTTE¹ cadres graduating from basic military training. Donning tiger-striped attire, groups of young girls and women were garlanded for their accomplishments by a woman standing out in stark contrast to the Tamil²fighters. Known endearingly as “Aunty” amongst the Tigers, Adele Ann Wilby came to be known internationally as the “White Tiger.” Here she was, the Australian-born former nurse, in the epicenter of an island’s civil war, garlanding female volunteers during a ceremony where they received their cyanide capsules. Adele herself wore …

Three Women, Two Spheres, And A Contract: A Comparative Study Of Mary Astell And Mary Wollstonecraft Through The Lens Of Carole Pateman's "The Sexual Contract", Robyn Burke Dabora

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This project examines the writings of Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) regarding women in light of ideas articulated by Carole Pateman (1940- ) in her book, The Sexual Contract (1988). In her work, Pateman critiques the prescriptions for the management of society suggested by classic contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) and cites that their solutions focus solely on men in the public sphere of society. Pateman illuminates the condition of women in the private sphere of the home, and asserts that this realm operates by mechanisms radically different from those of the …

"Let's Get Together And Chew The Fat": Women, Size And Community In Modern America, Amelia Earhart Serafine

Dissertations

"Let's Get Together and Chew the FAT: Women, Size, and Community in Modern America" argues that between 1948 and the 1980s, women in America formed communities around issues of size in order to claim agency over their bodies. Primarily concerned with losing weight, many women in these groups nonetheless created new tools and abilities with which to resist oppression based on body size. Some women went as far as to form explicitly positive fat identities and reject compulsory slenderness. This dissertation investigates four cases studies: TOPS (Take off Pounds Sensibly), Overeaters Anonymous, Weight Watchers, and the Fat Liberation movement of …

Not Mine Alone, Nor Mine To Own: Some Reflections On The Young Girl, Jacqueline Mabey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay looks at the role of the young girl in the curatorial practice of Jacqueline Mabey. Mabey reckons with the young girl as the signifier of a spectrum of mutable cultural signifieds and young girls as subjects on their own terms in the two exhibitions under review, Miss World and Utopia Is No Place, Utopia Is Process. In doing so, she recognizes a shift in motivations from an interest in what the young girls mean as a narcissistic reflection to how she could work in service of the development of young girls.

Más Rudas Collective, 2009-2016 (An Archival Epilogue To An Epic Pachanga), Josh T. Franco

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Contemporary artists Más Rudas Collective (MRC) were active in San Antonio, Texas, from 2009 to 2016. This essay looks to primary source documents from preceding decades and keystone exhibitions of Chicana/o art to articulate MRC’s position in a network of art production and curatorial activity that takes Chicana/o identity as a conceptual framework and/or departure point. Specific examples of MRC members’ reappropriations of Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicana/o cultural elements are analyzed and considered as “weaponizations” against cultures of body shaming and misogyny. Their approach is compared to that of other artists and curators in order to highlight the variety …

Nonconsensual Collaborations, 2012-Present: Notes On A Shared Condition, Aliza Shvarts

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

"Nonconsensual Collaborations, 2012-present: Notes on a Shared Condition" is an extended performance text. It investigates the unmarked gendered dynamics of artistic collaboration, documenting a series of “nonconsensual collaborations”—that is, performances with other artists who did not agree to their participation. Presented here as written narratives, these nonconsensual collaborations frame everyday occurrences of violation, erasure, and misrecognition, exploring how discourses of consent arise from the raced and gendered histories of property relations. They call into question the politics of representation, the status of the document, the formation of evidentiary truth, and the interpenetration of sexual and aesthetic economies. These nonconsensual collaborations …

Women's Hit Cheating Songs: Country Music And Feminist Change In American Society, 1962-2015, Madeline Rachel Morrow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines songs about cheating performed by women in country music that appeared on year-end country songs charts in Billboard magazine from 1962 through 2015. The study of a total of fifty qualifying songs included a focus on their lyrical and musical content, the performers' personae and careers, and the way the particular outside factors of feminism and changing gender relations in American society may have influenced them. These songs do not show a purely linear progression of or emphasis on social change, in spite of country music's pride in conveying the truth about the lives of its songwriters, …

The Parton Paradox: A History Of Race And Gender In The Career Of Dolly Parton, Lindsey L. Hammers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With a career that has spanned over five decades, country music artist Dolly Parton has continually redefined her image and her music to remain relevant. By incorporating the musical and lyrical stylings of disco and other popular music genres into her songs, Parton moved beyond music’s color line to increase her popularity as an artist. This thesis shows how Parton established a distinct career that catered to different audiences as she traversed the musical color line and repackaged what feminism looked like to country music fans during the Women’s Movement of the 1960s. Placing Parton’s actions in conversation with music’s …