Following the Second World War, middle-class married women in English speaking Canada became for the first time a significant proportion of the labour force. Nonetheless, society still encouraged them to take up their domestic roles as housewives and mothers. They were subjected to discriminatory government policy, justified by traditional gender norms supported by academic research and popular social commentators. As a result, their lives became increasingly divorced from the prescriptions that encouraged them to remain at home. The differences meant that their work, and its associated challenges, went unrecognized. Drawing on a broad range of sources, this thesis explores how and why middle class women – especially married ones- entered the workforce, the public’s reactions to their work, and how they negotiated the difference between prescriptions and their lives. It demonstrates that the 1950s were a watershed moment for women’s labour. Married women gained greater recognition of their place in the workforce, and obtained incremental changes to minimize discriminatory policy, practice, and attitudes. Accordingly, their efforts were foundational for the future women’s labour movements and Second Wave Feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

abstract: Scholars have written much about home and meaning, yet they have said little about the professionally furnished model home viewed as a cultural artifact. Nor is there literature addressing how the home building industry uses these spaces to promote images of family life to increase sales. This research notes that not only do the structure, design, and layout of the model home formulate cultural identity but also the furnishings and materials within. Together, the model home and carefully selected artifacts placed therein help to express specific chosen lifestyles as that the home builder determines. This thesis considers the model home as constructed as well as builder's publications, descriptions, and advertisements. The research recognizes the many facets of merchandising, consumerism, and commercialism influencing the design and architecture of the suburban home. Historians of visual and cultural studies often investigate these issues as separate components. By contrast, this thesis offers an integrated framework of inquiry, drawing upon such disciplines as cultural history, anthropology, and material culture. The research methodology employs two forms of content analysis - image and text. The study analyzes 36 model homes built in Phoenix, Arizona, during the period 1955-1956. The thesis explores how the builder sends a message, i.e. images, ideals, and aspirations, to the potential home buyer through the design and decoration of the model home. It then speculates how the home buyer responds to those messages. The symbiotic relationship between the sender and receiver, together, tells a story about the Phoenix lifestyle and the domestic ideals of the 1950s. Builders sent messages surrounding convenience, spaciousness, added luxury, and indoor-outdoor living to a growing and discriminating home buying market. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S.D. Design 2013

This study considers the analyses of diverse social and cultural critics in America in the late 1940s and 1950s. In particular, it examines their mostly jaundiced view of what they called mass culture and its related expressions. But where these intellectuals approached contemporary life with variations of skepticism and dread, this study argues that they suffered a myopia that inhibited their ability to see the so-called culture industries of postwar America as dynamic and engaging, not dominating and demeaning. To contextualize that skewed perspective, this study examines the postwar paperback industry and reconfiguring film business before delving into a specific form of mass culture, the juvenile delinquent text. The 1950s was a period of great concern about the status of teenagers within larger society. This anxiety gave birth to sociological studies offering diverse theories and true crime accounts of alienated and barbaric teenagers threatening civic virtue and the nation’s future. More importantly, it also spawned waves of novels and films devoted to both sympathetic accounts of juvenile delinquents and sensationalist tales that exploited the public’s fears and fascination. This study uses these texts to examine three topics that also worried intellectuals of the period—urban decline and suburban migration; a reconfiguration of masculinity; and the morality of a society predicated on consumption—and finds considerable overlap in the questions and analyses each pursued. Apart from making the case for widespread circulation of critical ideas in 1950s America, it argues for considerable ideological unsettledness and suggests an unacknowledged conversation of sorts between producers of mass culture and the intellectuals who treated such forms as evidence of dissenting art’s fatal decline. The stratification and segregation employed by cultural critics of the 1950s serves as a warning to contemporary scholars about the dangers in privileging high over low.

This dissertation is devoted to the Czechoslovakian entry into the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and the consequences of this membership on Czechoslovak economics in the following ten years. The thesis discourses about the reasons for the entry into the COMECON by analysing the postwar economic and political situation as well as the elements Czechoslovakia was expecting from it. The emphasis of this dissertation is on the first two years of the functioning of the COMECON, during which it was revealed to be primarily an instrument of Soviet politics, and which affected the transformation towards the preference for heavy indrustry. The intention of the thesis is to confirm that Czechoslovakia was suiting its economical structure to the needs of the Eastern Bloc, which were pursued through COMECON. The study also focuses on the analysis of changes in COMECON activity and their impact on the Czechoslovak economy over the years. The purpose of the thesis is to review the motives behind the Czechoslovak entry into COMECON along with the consequences COMECON membership had on Czechoslovakia in the first ten years of its existence.

Thesis advisor: Oliver P. Rafferty / Thesis advisor: Robert J. Savage / Irish Republicans found themselves at a crisis moment in 1949. Legislation enacted by each state on the island affirmed the political reality of Ireland’s partition. The Southern state declared an Irish Republic while the Northern state affirmed Northern Ireland’s continuing integration with the United Kingdom. The partition of island between these two governments was reinforced by the Irish border in the 1950s as it had been for the previous three decades. The Irish Republican Army remained committed to ending the separation through force while the Northern Ireland security apparatus steadfastly safeguarded the realm against any foreign incursion or domestic insurrection. Irish Republicanism reorganized and the IRA launched a disastrously planned and under-resourced Border Campaign between 1956 and 1962. The IRA was fully repelled by the Northern security forces: the Royal Ulster Constabulary supported by the Special Constabulary with security assistance from the governments in Belfast, London and, eventually, Dublin. The militant aspect was accompanied by political measures that reaped electoral gains and signs of public support peaking in the mid-1950s before a clear repudiation of the movement by the end of the decade. By the start of the 1960s, the IRA had been defeated and Irish Republicanism was reeling, unsure of its future political vitality and social relevance. Northern Ireland and the Irish border was more secure than at any point in its previous 40 years of existing, ruled by a strong, confident British Unionist hegemony. For Irish Republicans living on the frontier of the Northern Ireland state, new modes of political thinking and confrontational actions with the state had been attempted and ultimately abandoned. This project examines the main dynamics at play along the Irish border between 1949 and 1961. Focus will be on the Sinn Féin, the IRA and Liam Kelly’s Republican splinter group Saor Uladh, the RUC, B-Specials and militant-political Unionism, and the role of governments in Belfast, Dublin and London during the costly decade of the 1950s. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

The beginning of the space-age in the 1950s led to interest in the effects of radiation on semiconductors. The systematic investigation of defect centres in semiconductors began in earnest over 30 years ago. In addition to defect identification, information was also obtained on energy-level structures and defect migration properties. When designing electronic systems for operation in a radiation environment, ~tis imperative to know the effect of radiation on the properties of electronic components and materials comprising these systems. In some instances, the effects of irradiating electronic materials can be used to obtain desired material properties (mesa isolation, implantation, etc.). However, when electronic devices are exposed to radiation, defects may be introduced into the material. Depending on the application, these defects may have a detrimental effect on the performance of such a device. For this study, the semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) was used and the defects were introduced by electrons, alpha-particles, protons, neutrons and argon sputtering. These particles were generated using radio-nuclides, a high-energy neutron source, a 2.5 MV Van de Graaff accelerator and a sputter gun. The influence of particle irradiation on the device properties of Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) fabricated on GaAs is presented. These device properties were monitored using a variable temperature current-voltage (I-V) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) apparatus. In order to have an understanding of the change in electrical properties of these contacts after irradiation, it is necessary to characterize the radiation-induced defects. Deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) was used to characterise the defects in terms of their DLTS "signature", defect concentration, field enhanced emission, and thermodynamic properties. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 1994. / gm2014 / Physics / unrestricted

Bc. Markéta Šebestová: Conception of Czechoslovak Jews' Identity in Židovská ročenka (1954-1968) Abstract This thesis is concerned with Židovská ročenka (Jewish Yearbook, JY), mostly literary periodical published by Rada židovských náboženských obcí v zemích České a Morav- skoslezské (Council of Jewish Religious Communities in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia), during the 1950s and 1960s. Main subject of the thesis are the contents of JY, which I set in historical social, political and ideological context. In the thesis I concern myself with question, how image of Czechoslovak Jews provided by JY corresponds to the structure of contemporary Jewish community. Further I inquire, whether and how JY reflects the official limitation of Jewish identity solely to religious denomination. I also address question, how are represented relations of the Czechoslovak Jews to majority culture, especially Czech, and to the German culture, which historically constituted minority in the Czech lands. I concern myself with the presentation of Shoah, which was most linked to official ideological concerns. I also inquire about the diversity of artistic representations of the Shoah, included in JY. I conclude, that in correspondence with general gradual loosening of ideological pressure JY presents the variety of Czechoslovak Jewish...

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The omission of boredom from 1950s cultural and literary discourse is somewhat glaring, especially considering the frequency with which terms such as banality, conformity, and uniformity appear in scholarly and popular representations of the era. Such evocations of social and personal malaise derive from postwar sociological and theoretical critiques that rather uncritically dismiss mass culture as hostile to expressions of individuality. For Frankfurt school theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Herbert Marcuse, the capitulation of individuals to a contented (and thoroughly dull) status quo is symptomatic of the disappearance of culturally distinct localities into a standardized national space, the parameters of which are determined by commodity culture. I argue that a closer inspection of filmic, literary, and archival texts from the era reveals the limitations of such macro geographies; texts often acknowledge such mass cultural rhetoric while at the same time offering a more nuanced and optimistic appraisal of the potential for meaningful engagement with the marketplace. Texts such as Norman Foster’s Woman on the Run, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” attribute postwar boredom to passive, diversionary consumption habits that mediate and inhibit the consumer’s ability to find fulfillment within local environments. By scrutinizing setting, characterization, narration, and other formal concerns within the context of boredom theory and Michael de Certeau’s spatial phenomenology, it becomes clear that these texts encourage a mode of spatial and cultural literacy capable of revealing opportunities for meaningful engagement within local environments that remain vital.

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