Women's History Commons^™

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.

Seekers And Observers: Life Histories Of Three Female Antebellum Historians, Annmarie Valdes

Dissertations

This dissertation provides a history and analysis of the educational experiences and scholarly texts of three female historians. The study employs the combined frameworks of Haraway's €˜situated knowledges' and Life History for examining three female historians who were involved in three integrated aspects of knowledge production: scholar, educator and author. The three case studies examine the lives of Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894), Caroline Dall (1822-1912), and Mary L. Booth (1831-1889), with an analytical focus on their Antebellum Era, mid-nineteenth-century historical publications. A core contention is that knowledge production by women and, in particular, historical texts produced for schools and public consumption …

The Rhetoric Of Transgression: Reconstructing Female Authority Through Wu Zetian's Legacy, Rachael Rothstein-Safra

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study examines representations of Wu Zetian in the biographical tradition of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, as well as within the subsequent vernacular literature of the Ming and Qing periods. I analyze the traditional use and construction of female stereotypes (and female-oriented flaws and vices) in the rhetoric of official histories and fictional narratives and their application to representations of Wu Zetian. I argue that authors, anxious of discord engendered and caused by women occupying positions of political authority, sought to delegitimize Wu Zetian’s reign and subsequently cultivated a “rhetoric of female transgression.” I further argue that the …

Creating A Female Athlete: The Power Of Societal Reimaging And Advertising In The All American Girls Professional Baseball League, Kaitlyn M. Haines

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The All American Girls Professional Baseball League introduced an acceptable form of female sport to the United States during World War II. The All American Girls Professional Baseball League’s feminine image and high standards of the league provided a new quality team sport that the ever popular softball diamonds of industrial recreation had failed to reach. One of the reasons for their success was the attention to detail in the visual representation of the baseball league. Appearing in a time of heightened advertising and branding, a visual representation of the League was created to fit within the societal norms of …

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

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & 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 …

Utilizing This New Medium Of Mass-Communication: The Regional Film Distribution Program At The Cleveland Public Library, 1948-1951., Suzanne Marie Stauffer

Faculty Publications

In 1948, the Carnegie Corporation made grants of $25,000 to the Cleveland Public Library and $15,000 to the Missouri State Library to set up 3-year regional educational film distribution programs in northern Ohio and in Missouri. In Cleveland, films were distributed among a consortium of 10 library systems in the region; twenty library systems participated in Missouri. These successful programs served as models for other library systems, and lasted well into the last quarter of the twentieth century, when films in libraries were replaced with videocassettes and later DVDs. This paper explores the antecedents of the program at the Cleveland …

Behind The Shadows, Selena Ramirez Ahilon

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The nineteenth century is classified as the Victorian era, a period in which the middle class rose in power as a result of industrialization. As the middle classes living standards rose the middle class became reliant on utilitarianism values. This ideal appeared to offer a more comfortable life for both men and women, however, by classifying the position of women as the “heart” and men as the “head” of the house, women were hindered to a society in shadows. Women were restricted in every aspect of life because men were in power, and the ideal Victorian woman became the one …

She Shot Him Dead: The Criminalization Of Women And The Struggle Over Social Order In Chicago, 1871-1919, Rachel A. Boyle

Dissertations

From 1871 to 1919, Chicago emerged as an epicenter of a struggle over social order as municipal officials and self-proclaimed reformers fought for the power to decide which people and what behavior should be designated as criminal. Studying the criminalization of women in Chicago reveals how contested categories of crime and gender changed over time and provides insight into broader battles over moral, political, and economic power in the United States. In the late nineteenth century, an intimate economy of public women fighting, drinking, and having sex for money profoundly shaped daily life in the streets, saloons, and brothels of …

Gloria Anzaldúa’S El Mundo Zurdo: The Necessity Of A Historical Assessment, Malik Raymond

Honors College Theses

This thesis revolves around Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldúa and one of her more important theories, El Mundo Zurdo. El Mundo Zurdo was a theory that focused on the marginalized people and the need for unity amongst them; however, up to this point, no historical analysis has been done on this theory. Through piecing together information from interviews and Anzaldúa’s literature, this thesis serves as a biography of her first forty years of life to address from where the theory came and becomes a bridge to link Anzaldúa to the wider Chicana, Third World feminist, and gay and lesbian …

Campus As Home: An Examination Of The Impact Of Student Housing At The University Of Kentucky In The Progressive Era, James W. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

This dissertation explores how student housing impacted the college campus of the University of Kentucky in the Progressive Era. Student housing has long been part of the college ideal but lacked full engagement by many administrators. Through three examinations, housing will be shown to have directly influenced the administrative, social, and staffing elements of the college campus. The role student housing played in the interaction of political, rural, and sociological changes on the campus during the time period allows exploration in detail while addressing the changes within those areas of the state as well. While housing was an afterthought by …

American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War.

I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring …

Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, …

The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper imagines the Internet as a potentially utopian girl-space by looking at how girls, and pop-cultural depictions of girls, use the language, signs, and symbols of the Internet, an inherently patriarchal system, in transgressive ways. I propose the 1990s media representations as the touchstone moment when the conditions of possibility for imagining the hacker as a weaponized girl emerged visually in popular culture. The girl, exemplified by various figures within popular television and film culture, is a precursor to and postulates an entry point into the ways Internet today is used in transgressive nature.

From Weak Woman To New Woman And Back: The Long Struggle To Legitimize Women Athletes In The U.S., Rashaun Debord

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper details the complicated history of women in sport by looking at the changing popular image of women athletes from the late 19th century to today.

Fashion And Court-Building In The Sixteenth-Century Florentine Ducal Court: Politics, Agency, And Paleopathology In The Wardrobes Of Eleonora Di Toledo And Giovanna D'Austria, Leah Rachel Jeffers

Scripps Senior Theses

Fashion in the Renaissance became intensely political, highly gendered, and anatomized (i.e. emphasizing human anatomy rather than masking it). Court culture placed a particular emphasis on the body of the courtier, as skills such as dancing and dressing fashionably became crucial to political success in states throughout Europe. In sixteenth-century Florence, the Medici attempted to install a duchy in what was at the time a republican city (with strong republican heritage). Florentine fears of foreign domination and resentment towards non-republican forms of government made the Medici’s task nearly impossible. Fashion became a primary pillar of the Medicean political agenda, as …

Fourth Time’S A Charm, Ardennes Vickery

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The sources I used to create my short story, Fourth Time’s A Charm, were essential for all aspects of its development. My story concerns the awkward first meeting of King Henry VIII and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. As with all historical fiction stories, striving for period appropriate details and accurate representations of historical events was crucial. The resources that I was able to access through the UNLV University Libraries not only assisted me throughout my project by streamlining the research process, but proved indispensable for obtaining various primary sources that I may not have been unable to access …

A Right To Motherhood? Race, Class, And Reproductive Services In The Jim Crow South, Cynthia Edmonds-Cady

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This research examines birth control and sterilization practices aimed at low-income black women in the United States from 1939-1950, within the framework of specific race- and class-based constructions of motherhood in the Jim Crow South. How these social services aimed at reproductive health were grounded within differential ideals about family, childbirth, and motherhood for White versus African American women is explored. Evidence is presented from archival collections containing records for Planned Parenthood’s Negro Project, The Association for Voluntary Sterilization’s programs, and The American Social Health Association’s public health programs. Birth control services in the South were delivered within a framework …

0839: Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Papers, 1941-2006, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

This collection contains the personal, educational, and professional possessions of Mildred Mitchell-Bateman. The collection includes correspondence, newspaper articles, association newsletters, professional planners, financial documents, plaques, and other personal memorabilia. The materials document Bateman’s various roles within local, state, and national psychology and psychiatric organizations. The collection is organized into six series: Series 1, Personal; Series 2, Education; Series 3, Professional Experience; Series 4, Correspondence; Series 5, Associations; and Series 6, Bound Books, Bound Volumes and list of Newspapers.

To view materials from this collection that are digitized and available online, search the Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Papers, 1941-2006 here.

"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 …

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

Narrative Pleasures And Feminist Politics: Popular Women’S Historical Fiction, 1990-2015, Victoria Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation contributes to a developing body of work on women’s historical fiction and its significance to feminist discourse. Building from Diana Wallace’s 2005 study The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000, I offer a modified definition of “the woman’s historical novel” and a transatlantic consideration of several of the most popular titles in the contemporary period, including The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), Outlander (1991), A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), and Scarlett (1991). Several studies have followed Wallace’s, notably Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2007) and Katherine Cooper and Emma …

The Enigmatic "Cross-Over" Leadership Life Of Dr. Mary Mcleod Bethune (1875-1955), Greer Charlotte Stanford-Randle

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The dissertation is a deep study of an iconic 20^th century female, African American leader whose acclaim developed not only from her remarkable first generation post-Reconstruction Era beginnings, but also from her mid-century visibility among Negroes and some Whites as a principal spokesperson for her people. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune arose from the Nadir- the darkest period for Negroes after the Civil War and three subsequent US Constitutional Amendments. She led thousands of Negro women, despite social adversity, to organize around their own aspirations for improved social and material lives among America’s diverse citizens., i.e. “the melting pot.” The …

"The Best Bad Things": An Analytical History Of The Madams Of Gold Rush San Francisco, Sophie Breider

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the differences between the fictionalized madam of the American West and the historical madam are analyzed to understand how racial and gender hierarchies normalized themselves in the American West and disempowered women and people of color. This thesis uses Gold Rush San Francisco, and two madams, as a case study of this phenomenon.

Red Lights, White Hope: Race, Gender, And U.S. Camptown Prostitution In South Korea, Julie Kim

CMC Senior Theses

U.S. military camptown prostitution in South Korea was a system ridden with entangled structures of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. This thesis aims to elucidate the ways in which racial ideologies, in conjunction with gendered nationalist ideologies, materialized in the spaces of military base communities. I contend that camptowns were hybrid spaces where the meaning and representation of race were constantly in flux, where the very definitions of race and gender were contested, affirmed, and redefined through ongoing negotiations on the part of relevant actors. The reading of camptown prostitutes and American GIs as sexualized and racialized bodies will …

Who Really Said What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary As Liminal Learning Space, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article explores the complexities and affordances of historical representation that arose in the process of designing a mobile augmented reality video game for teaching history. The process suggests opportunities to push the historical documentary form in new ways. Specifically, the article addresses the shifting liminal space between historical fiction narrative, and historical interactive documentary narrative. What happens when primary sources, available for examination are placed inside of a historically inspired narrative, one that hews closely to the events, but creates drama through dialogues between player and historical figure? In this relatively new field of interactive historical situated documentary, how …

History Reclaimed: Sister Betty Ann Mcneil, D.C., Tells The Hidden Story Of The Daughters Of Charity During The Civil War

DePaul Magazine

This article excerpts from Sr. Betty Ann McNeil, D.C.'s “Balm of Hope: Charity Afire Impels Daughters of Charity to Civil War Nursing,” based on her finds while serving as the archivist for the Daughters of Charity, Province of Emmitsburg, Md. The collection is valuable for it gives names which have been suppressed in later transcriptions.

Artists’ Expression Of Women’S Unresolvable Internal Conflict, Diedre Miles-Girod

Senior Theses

The Victorian period (1837 to 1901) was a time of great change in the United States. The country was growing with the Louisiana Purchase and the addition of several states to the Union. Railroads were connecting together the vast lands. Unprecedented economic and manufacturing changes were unfolding; it was the time of the Industrial Revolution. This period also brought about a revolution for women by opening up new possibilities in many spheres of life. However, these new possibilities, ironically, exacerbated a timeless women’s struggle of finding balance between their traditional roles as caregivers and their human need for self-­‐ expression. …

“A Flower Which Blossoms And Fades”: Depictions Of Tuberculosis In 19th-Century Opera, Daniel Goldberg

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The romantic period in art and music is a time that focused on the regular person and had a fascination with nature, emotion, and death. One of the most common themes used was disease. One of the more common diseases of the time in both opera and real life was tuberculosis. In opera tuberculosis is always brought upon the same type of person time and time again and is always shown both by the character, and also though a series of metaphors. This character is always a woman and these “tubercular heroines” always are young, beautiful, frail people who need …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

"The Quality Of Women's Intelligence" : Female Humanists In Renaissance Italy., Julie Myers-Mushkin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the advent of humanism in Renaissance Italy impacted women, namely those who were raised within intellectual families and granted educational opportunities not before afforded to members of their sex. In quattrocento Italy, learned women began to circulate their writings and participate in the humanist milieu, and the intellectual lives and published works of these female humanists all in some manner contested Renaissance patriarchy and gender perceptions. As such, this thesis challenges the conception that the Renaissance further disenfranchised women and offers a framework for analyzing and appreciating the ways in which women participated in the academic …