<p> Resting in the southeast corner of the Arkansas state capitol is the Little Rock monument honoring the women of the Confederacy. Known as the Southern Mother, the Arkansas division of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) erected this monument to commemorate the sacrifices of Arkansas women during the Civil War. Sculpted by J. Otto Schweizer, a Swiss-American from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this monument represents two versions of Arkansas&rsquo; Civil War history: that of the sculptor, and that of its patrons. Arkansas broke away from the national UCV in 1906 and proceeded on its own to memorialize Confederate women&rsquo;s war time sacrifices. Paid for by a state appropriation of $10,000, the Arkansas UCV were able to commemorate in stone a specific memory of Arkansas history during the Civil War. The monument effort began on a national scale in 1896, but did not come to fruition in Arkansas until May 1913. Several conflicts occurred with members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who opposed the monument idea and preferred that donations were routed into more social programs like retirement homes and scholarship programs. This monument occurred during a time of vast memorialization during the height of the Lost Cause, but the history behind it shows a more individual nature of healing traumatic wounds.</p>

Since the 1940s historians have rewritten theories that positioned Puritans as sexually repressed and repressive. The current assumption, heralded in the foundational works of Morgan (1942), Demos (1970), Flaherty (1971), and Bremer (1976), is that married persons entered enthusiastically into their sexual relationships and that sexual intercourse between single women and single or married men was common. These historians hold that Puritan enthusiasm for marital sexual activity is reflected in sermons and didactic literature and in extramarital sexual activity, as evidenced by the large numbers of persons prosecuted for sexual offenses by the Quarterly Courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1640–1692. Historians have also asserted that Puritans rejected the traditional sexual double standard, even to the extent of punishing men for sexual lapses with greater frequency and severity than women. Neither thesis can withstand close empirical analysis. I conducted a group study of women prosecuted for fornication or bastardy, and men prosecuted for fornication or named in paternity cases in the Essex County, Massachusetts, Quarterly courts between 1640 and 1692. I analyzed prosecution and conviction rates, sentencing patterns, and socio-economic and attitudinal data. Puritans brought the impressive machinery of the Quarterly Courts to bear, in the form of fornication prosecutions, against the small number of women who bore illegitimate children and couples whose first child arrived within 32 weeks of marriage. The official language of the courts represented sexual intercourse as “uncleanness,” “filthiness,” and “incontinence,” hardly suggestive of a sexually approbative society. Ministers and magistrates successfully curbed the sexuality of young persons who conformed to the dominant ideology that marriage was the only appropriate venue for sexual intercourse. The ideological conflation of femininity and chastity placed a heavy burden on the few women who bore illegitimate children. They were punished more severely than their male partners and regarded with contempt by the majority of women who made successful transitions from adolescence to marriage. Couples who married following out-of-wedlock sex faced less opprobrium. Usually husband and wife received the same punishment and were reintegrated into the Puritan community following a series of humiliating shame rituals.

This study explores President Woodrow Wilson’s evolution between his 1912 presidential campaign and the mid-point of his second term from staunch opposition to a federal woman suffrage amendment to an active advocate for the cause. Besides clearly identifying the array of forces within and outside Congress that pressured Wilson and the extent to which he was, in turn, able to influence Congress and voters, this study more fully integrates the suffragists and anti-suffragists into American political history and situates the issue of woman suffrage in the broader context of Wilson’s two administrations. I argue that the National American Woman Suffrage Association, not the National Woman’s Party, was decisive in Wilson’s conversion to the cause of the federal amendment because its approach mirrored his own conservative vision of the appropriate method of reform: win a broad consensus, develop a legitimate rationale, and make the issue politically valuable. Additionally, I contend that Wilson did have a significant role to play in the successful congressional passage and national ratification of the 19th Amendment, though powerful currents of sectionalism, race, and economic interests sometimes limited the extent of his influence. A deeper understanding of the final stages of the woman suffrage movement holds relevance for our understanding of both Progressive Era America and our present times. Observing Wilson treading the fragile line between executive interference and reasonable influence provides great insight into Progressive Era conceptions of separation of powers and presidential power and leadership. Furthermore, debates over woman suffrage contributed to the larger late-19 th and early-20th century debates over the meaning of citizenship and the role of the state in an increasingly industrialized nation. Enfranchising one-half the population marked a significant moment in our nation’s history. This study deepens and enriches our understanding of the process by which that momentous event came to pass.

In October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785-1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained: “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.” Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework – primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States – made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this dissertation explores how Fiske and women like her experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America, and probes their personal reactions to growing older. Falling at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study and the history of aging, this dissertation brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapter 1 explores the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework. It considers samplers modified later in life through the removal of the maker’s age or the date when the sampler was made. Chapter 2 examines epistolary needlework, that which relates a message or story in the form of stitched words. Chapter 3 focuses on technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period, particularly indelible ink and the rise of the sewing machine, and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production. Chapter 4 considers how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. The materials, style and techniques represented in these gifts often passed along an embedded message, allowing the maker to share her opinions, to demonstrate her skill and creativity, and to leave behind a memorial of her life. Far from being a decorative ornament or a functional household textile, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. In the end, the study argues that these “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source on the lives of mature antebellum women.

In 1930, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in shaping a new art form: modern dance. Confrontational and experimental, modern dancers questioned their own roles in society, the role of art in America, and the place of America in the world. This dissertation is about how modern dance developed in the midst of debates about national identity. In the wave of cultural nationalism of the 1930s, modern dancers attacked ballet because of its elitist roots in European courts. Influenced by communist and socialist politics, they danced in bare feet, with unadorned costumes, and privileged individual expression and portrayals of abstract concepts over fairytale narratives and escapist entertainment. White women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and some African American men and women populated modern dance. Separate chapters explore how each of these groups negotiated what it meant to be an American through dance. Challenges to gender, sexual, racial, and class norms coalesced in idealized visions of American democracy and pluralism such as Graham's 1938 "American Document." Dancing American heretics, pioneers, and workers toppled corps of European swans, sylphs, and snowflakes. The convergence of these marginalized groups in modern dance demonstrates the critical role that social identities played in this movement of cultural nationalism. Modern dancers found in dance the medium through which they could explore what set them apart from the white male so often depicted as the consummate expression of American individualism: their bodies. The case of modern dance highlights the interplay of different identities--as women, Jews, or African Americans--that undercut a unified national identity. In this art form that attracted physically distinct groups of people, those distinctions, particularly of race, fractured ideas of a national culture. In the wake of World War II, Merce Cunningham led a new phase of modern dance that rejected nationalist themes and social purpose. In dancing America, modern dancers exposed the physical and social dimensions of nationalist beliefs in 1930s and 1940s American society.

This dissertation examines the lives of indigenous women in early colonial Peru, residents of the cities of Lima and Trujillo as well as nearby rural regions, between 1532 and 1700. It does so by interweaving two major thematic concerns. On one level, it includes historical investigations, based upon archival records (in particular some two hundred indigenous women's wills from these two cities), into the multiplicity of economic, political and social roles that made up women's daily lives. Their possessions, occupations, values, social networks and strategies for survival are compared, discussed and placed in historical context, without inappropriately generalizing or universalizing their experiences. On another interconnected level, the dissertation examines the hybridity of colonial relations, taking the cultures and institutions of colonial society as fields of contestation and power and investigating them genealogically. By counterpointing chronicles of conquest, notarial documents, and legal and bureaucratic records, the work develops a strategy for reading colonial history that is not predicated upon a neat but false distinction between “European” and “traditional” societies. The contribution of this dissertation is thus not only a rich base of information about colonial women but also the expectation that any such investigation must be creative and open-ended. The five chapters include analyses of the political causes and effects of representations of prehispanic indigenous society in the chronicles of conquest and early histories of Peru; the role of weaving and the development of a gendered division of labor in the colonial economy; urban women's economic roles and networks according to their wills; the cultural significance of their possessions, especially indigenous and European-style clothing; legal and extra-legal strategies regarding property and inheritance; and a genealogy of the “cacica,” indigenous women who held elite office during the colonial period via their claim to continuity with prehispanic political traditions.

I place the political career of one woman through an examination of her public rhetoric. Frances Perkins served as Secretary of Labor for twelve years, an accomplishment more impressive than that of being the first woman to serve in this post. I examine her career as the Secretary of Labor (1933-1945) in terms of selected portions of the speeches she delivered, articles and full-length works she published, and the legislation she helped to enact. To establish the characteristics of Frances Perkins's arguments, it is important to discuss the individuals who influenced her and how she interacted with them. The list includes: Professors Annah May Soule and Simon N. Patten; photojournalist Jacob A. Riis; politicians Timothy D. Sullivan, Alfred E. Smith, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; social reformer Florence Kelley; and Democratic Party organizer Mary W. Dewson. The terms that frame the study are: (1) placement, drawing upon the Greek notion of topoi, that is, the place one goes to find arguments; (2) public; and (3) memory. The questions about Frances Perkins that most intrigue me are about: (1) the nature of the arguments she discovered which then inspired her to choose and sustain a long political career; (2) the way she developed her public persona; and (3) ways the accomplishments of admirable political women from the past can be woven into the fabric of time that is history. The following views of particular theorists dominate the theoretical framework of the study: (1) Kenneth Burke's notions of terministic screens and creative circumferencing; (2) Ernesto Grassi's belief in ingenium, "the source of the creative activity of topics"; (3) Lucy F. Townsend's concentric circle approach to the writing of biography; and (4) Carolyn G. Heilbrun's appeal to scholars to tell heroic tales of women. A topical philosophical view, informed by feminist criticism, maintains that logic and imagination are inseparable, that first principles precede deduction. Sophocles's Antigone is utilized to explicate this belief and to highlight the guiding principle in Frances Perkins's career--maintaining a balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the state.

This social historiography tells the story of the origin of the Newborns' and Mothers' Health Protection Act of 1996. In the 1980s when the federal government reduced allocations to states' Medicaid programs as a cost saving measure, hospitals, initiated early discharge of patients to save costs. Given four million births annually, childbirth is the most frequent reason for hospitalization in the United States. Hospitals discharged Medicaid insured mothers and newborns very early at twenty-four hours for a normal birth and seventy-two hours for a cesarean. Other insurers adopted similar managed care strategies in the early 1990s. By 1995, unionized nurses from New Jersey, bolstered by a national outcry against early maternal discharge, and individual states legislative actions, met with staff in Senator Bradley's (Democrat, NJ) Washington, DC office to request a federal law that would extend hospital length of stays for maternity patients. The result was the creation of the Newborns' and Mothers' Health Protection Act of 1996 (Newborn's Act). Insurers must now reimburse hospitals a minimum length of maternity stay of forty-eight hours for a normal birth and ninety-six hours for a cesarean birth. This historical investigation found that a revival occurred in professional nursing organizations' voice in health care policy. The American Nurses Association, the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, and the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nursing, not only testified at the congressional hearing for the Newborn's bill, but also helped craft the bill that became law. One nursing specialty, Public Health Nursing, at one time a cornerstone for autonomous nursing practice, was omitted from the NMHPA policymaking. As a nursing section of the American Public Health Association, it is now considering options to become more visible in health care policy development. Second, this study suggests that the federal government may have attempted price-fixing when it recommended in 1982, and again in 1983, that other insurers also limit reimbursements to hospitals to contain costs. In one last finding, congressional lawmakers omitted costly Medicaid insured mothers from the NMHPA law, but regulations formulated in 1999 captured this vulnerable group of mothers and newborns.

<p>Illustrated Ladies examines the figure of the tattooed woman in nineteenth century America and Britain within Victorian social and cultural constructs. Western exploration and imperialism dovetailed with developing criminal, medical, and human sciences. The tattoo became a central image within these elements. Appearing on the bodies of the foreign "savage", the criminal, and the lower class - the tattoo carried "uncivilized", criminal, and masculine connotations. At the same time, white women marked their bodies as a means of public and private rebellion against proscribed gender roles and Victorian ideals of femininity in a need to reclaim bodily agency that transcended class lines. Some women manipulated the tattoo as they displayed their marked bodies in public venues for profit, creating a level of financial independence that was rarely achieved during this period. The tattoo served as a means in which women could manipulate racial and gender identities, transform themselves into spectacles, and control the male gaze. Representative of an emotive experience - the tattoo is an image created through pain that illustrated the corporal and psychical suffering of working and upper class women. Illustrated women reclaimed control of their external experiences by taking control of their suffering and displaying in on their bodies in the form of the tattoo.

One of the early leaders of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) was working-class woman and veteran trade union organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (1864-1943). When she joined with several other trade unionists and social reformers to form, in 1903, the WTUL, Kenney O'Sullivan had already spent more than a dozen years attempting to forge a coalition between male-dominated organized labor and the social reform community in which Progressive-minded women played a vital role. Throughout, her primary goal was to improve the conditions of labor for women such as herself, primarily through trade unionism. In the early 1890s, then Mary Kenney was living in Chicago, working as a bookbinder. Frustrated by low wages and poor working conditions, Kenney formed Women's Bookbindery Union No. 1 as early as 1890. She went on to organize women in other trades, utilizing her connections with both the Chicago labor community and the social reform community, especially with the Chicago settlement, Hull House, and its founder, Jane Addams. In 1892, Kenney was briefly appointed the first national woman organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). After her 1894 marriage to Boston labor leader, John O'Sullivan, and now known as Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, she would continue her trade union activity in that city, repeating the pattern of coalition building by relying upon both the Boston Central Labor Union and the local social reform community, particularly the settlement Denison House and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. While she had some success in organizing women workers, Kenney O'Sullivan's personal efforts at coalition building were often frustrated by the sharp class and gender distinctions of her day. In 1903, she joined several other trade unionists and social reformers in an attempt to institutionalize this fragile coalition of labor and social reform through the formation of the WTUL. The WTUL, on the national level and through its principal local branches in New York, Chicago and Boston, sought to cooperate with the AFL in organizing wage-earning women into trade unions, as well as provide education and agitate for protective labor legislation. It also attempted to bridge the gap between working-class and reformist middle-class women. Kenney O'Sullivan was a leader in both the National WTUL and its Boston branch and, as such, she attempted to insure that the WTUL concentrate on trade unionism for women. The possibilities and limits of doing so within a cross-class, cross-gender alliance are especially evident during the WTUL's early years. From the Fall River strike of 1904 to the Lawrence strike of 1912, the efforts of Kenney O'Sullivan and other like-minded women continued to be frustrated by the class and gender contraints of this period. This dissertation attempts to reveal the complexity of those gender and class constraints during the Progressive Era by focusing on the efforts of Mary Kenney O'Sullivan at organizing wage-earning women.