The Mississippi Married Women's Property Acts of 1839, 1846, and 1857 reflected the desire of the Mississippi patriarchy to protect themselves from economic instabilities. Analysis of women's deeds in Jefferson county, Mississippi, from 1792 to 1871 and the rulings of the Mississippi High Court of Error and Appeals demonstrate the patriarchy's attempt to balance their desire for preservation of power with honor's demands that patriarchs provide for their families. The MWPA gave women the right to own property in their own names but restricted their ability to use and alienate that property. This made women property owners in name only, an action that preserved a portion of a family's estate which husbands controlled but which could not be taken from them. Women benefited in small ways from men's desire to protect personal wealth in Jefferson county. Women's property transactions there rose over the century—the increase roughly correlating with the passage of the 1839 law and its amendments. Court cases reveal that men and women acted as it best suited them financially employing the MWPA pragmatically rather than deliberately to widen women's sphere. The 1846 amendment essentially constitutes the legislature's response to these individual interpretations of the law, and the 1857 amendment is a digest of further additions and clarifications of the MWPA by the High Court itself. Legislative action and High Court rulings clarify the intent behind the MWPA regarding women's place and role in family and society. It is evident that the design of the law was not to bring gender equality to property law or to recognize the wife as a separate entity within the marriage This is the message of the various versions of the Mississippi MWPA and the resultant court decisions: vesting property in an inert owner ensures that it will be safe from the claims of predacious creditors and therefore available in perpetuity. The Mississippi MWPA in essence designated married women as a sure investment for their families' financial preservation.

The methodological approach used to tell the Smith sisters’ story is first and foremost a case study of women in the nineteenth century and the gendered categories that were constructed to define women. The story will be told through a biographical narrative, which will allow Hannah, Julia, and Abby Smith’s to tell their story in their own voice. Also, included within the biography is an examination of the nineteenth-century theories that defined women’s lives, and what effect, if any, these theories had on the Smiths. Each chapter is layered with three different narratives in an attempt to unravel the world that women lived in the nineteenth century. First, the chapter provides a description and analysis of the specific theories such as Republican Motherhood and cult of domesticity to ground the Smith women in the discursive world in which they lived. Then the chapter closely examines the practice or the way the Smith women lived their lives and what they thought about their world. Lastly, each chapter explores the secondary sources that have been written about each subject, such as the new female seminaries that opened in the nineteenth century. By combining these approaches, I hope to avoid some of the shortcomings that dominate the study of women today. First, the theoretical models and the study of real lives of women actually leave women out of their own stories. Second, historians tend to evaluate women’s lives from the past based upon their own political agendas and their own beliefs of what freedom and rights mean completely discarding what it might have meant to women in their own time period.

Anne Brontë died in 1848, having written two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Although these novels, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, initially received a favourable critical response, the unsympathetic remarks of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell initiated a dismissive attitude towards Anne Brontë’s work. For over a hundred years, she was marginalized and silenced by a critical world that admired and respected the work of her two sisters, Charlotte and Emily, but that refused to acknowledge the substantial merits of her own fiction. However, in 1959 revisionist scholars such as Derek Stanford, Ada Harrison and Winifred Gérin, offered important, more enlightened readings that helped to liberate Brontë scholarship from the old conservatisms and to direct it into new directions. Since then, her fiction has been the focus of a robust, but still incomplete, revisionist critical scholarship. My work too is revisionist in orientation, and seeks to position itself within this revisionist approach. It has a double focus that appraises both Brontë’s social commentary and her narratology. It thus integrates two principal areas of enquiry: firstly, an investigation into how Brontë interrogates the position of middle class women in their society, and secondly, an examination of how that interrogation is conveyed by her creative deployment of narrative techniques, especially by her awareness of the rich potential of the first person narrative voice. Chapter 1 looks at the critical response to Brontë’s fiction from 1847 to the present, and shows how the revisionist readings of 1959 were pivotal in re-invigorating the critical approach to her work. Chapter 2 contextualizes the key legal, social, and economic consequences of Victorian patriarchy that so angered and frustrated feminist thinkers and writers such as Brontë. The chapter also demonstrates the extent to which a number of her core concerns relating to Victorian society and the status of women are reflected in her work. In Chapter 3 I discuss three important biographical influences on Brontë: her family, her painful experiences as a governess, and her reading history. Chapter 4 contains a detailed analysis of Agnes Grey, which includes an exploration of the narrative devices that help to reinforce its core concerns. Chapter 5 focuses on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, showing how the novel offers a richer and more sophisticated analysis of feminist concerns than those that are explored in Agnes Grey. These are broadened to include an investigation of the lives of married women, particularly those trapped in abusive marriages. The chapter also stresses Brontë’s skilful deployment of an intricate and layered narrative technique. The conclusion points to the ways in which my study participates in and extends the current revisionist trend and suggests some aspects of Brontë’s work that would reward further critical attention. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / English / Unrestricted

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T19:25:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Clori Antonio Pontello.pdf: 3010074 bytes, checksum: 5e0d1daabf222439b9ee242e767883cf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-05-31 / Manioca starch mills generate a high amount of outflow and environmental concerns due to its high pollutant wastewater. Use of stabilization ponds is very common for the treatment of wastewater on the transformation of manioca root sector. However, in winter time, coincidently with the harvesting and crushing period a fall on the treatment system may occur due to the decreasing of environmental temperature. The present study aims at evaluating the effect of plastic canvass on the stability and keeping the anaerobic pond temperature treating the outflow of cassava. The system consisted of two reactors simultaneously supplied, with net volume of 15.98m3 each, 10 day hydraulic retaining time, continuously supplied, without pH correction and without temperature control. Air temperature and daily outflowing and inflowing of the reactors were monitorized for a period of one year. Both physical and chemical analyses were performed measuring pH, BOD5, COD, TSS, FSS, and VSS of the reactors outflowing and iinflowing in monthly frequency. The daily temperatures measured on the covered reactors were superior than on the uncovered ones. An efficiency of 10% on COD, and 15% on BOD5 were observed on the covered reactor. The plastic canvass covered reactor showed less oscilations with greater stability in keeping temperatures, mainly in periods of low temperature, showing a better performance on the treatment of cassava processing outflow. / As fecularias de mandioca geram um volume de efluente significativo e de elevada preocupação ambiental, devido a sua elevada carga poluidora. É muito comum a utilização de lagoas de estabilização para o tratamento de águas residuárias do setor de transformação de raiz de mandioca. Entretanto, nos períodos de inverno, coincidindo com o período de safra e esmagamento, observa-se uma queda na eficiência dos sistemas de tratamento que podem ocorrer em razão da diminuição da temperatura ambiente. O presente trabalho buscou avaliar o efeito da cobertura plástica na estabilidade e manutenção da temperatura de lagoa anaeróbia, tratando efluente de fecularia de mandioca. O sistema foi constituído de dois reatores alimentados em paralelos, com volume útil de 15,98m3 cada, tempo de detenção hidráulico de 10 dias, alimentação contínua, sem correção de pH e sem controle de temperatura. Durante o período de um ano, foram monitoradas as temperaturas do ar, entrada e saída dos reatores com medições realizadas diariamente. Efetuou-se análise físicoquímica medindo-se o pH, DBO5, DQO, SSS, SST, SSF e SSV do afluente e efluente dos reatores com freqüência mensal. As temperaturas diárias medidas no reator coberto foram superiores ao descoberto. Observou-se eficiência de 10% na DQO e 15% na DBO5 superiores para o reator coberto. O coberto com lona plástica apresentou menores oscilações com maior estabilidade na manutenção das temperaturas, principalmente nos períodos de baixas temperaturas, mostrando maior desempenho no tratamento de efluente de fecularia de mandioca.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-12T14:48:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Clori Antonio Pontello.pdf: 3010074 bytes, checksum: 5e0d1daabf222439b9ee242e767883cf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-05-31 / Manioca starch mills generate a high amount of outflow and environmental concerns due to its high pollutant wastewater. Use of stabilization ponds is very common for the treatment of wastewater on the transformation of manioca root sector. However, in winter time, coincidently with the harvesting and crushing period a fall on the treatment system may occur due to the decreasing of environmental temperature. The present study aims at evaluating the effect of plastic canvass on the stability and keeping the anaerobic pond temperature treating the outflow of cassava. The system consisted of two reactors simultaneously supplied, with net volume of 15.98m3 each, 10 day hydraulic retaining time, continuously supplied, without pH correction and without temperature control. Air temperature and daily outflowing and inflowing of the reactors were monitorized for a period of one year. Both physical and chemical analyses were performed measuring pH, BOD5, COD, TSS, FSS, and VSS of the reactors outflowing and iinflowing in monthly frequency. The daily temperatures measured on the covered reactors were superior than on the uncovered ones. An efficiency of 10% on COD, and 15% on BOD5 were observed on the covered reactor. The plastic canvass covered reactor showed less oscilations with greater stability in keeping temperatures, mainly in periods of low temperature, showing a better performance on the treatment of cassava processing outflow. / As fecularias de mandioca geram um volume de efluente significativo e de elevada preocupação ambiental, devido a sua elevada carga poluidora. É muito comum a utilização de lagoas de estabilização para o tratamento de águas residuárias do setor de transformação de raiz de mandioca. Entretanto, nos períodos de inverno, coincidindo com o período de safra e esmagamento, observa-se uma queda na eficiência dos sistemas de tratamento que podem ocorrer em razão da diminuição da temperatura ambiente. O presente trabalho buscou avaliar o efeito da cobertura plástica na estabilidade e manutenção da temperatura de lagoa anaeróbia, tratando efluente de fecularia de mandioca. O sistema foi constituído de dois reatores alimentados em paralelos, com volume útil de 15,98m3 cada, tempo de detenção hidráulico de 10 dias, alimentação contínua, sem correção de pH e sem controle de temperatura. Durante o período de um ano, foram monitoradas as temperaturas do ar, entrada e saída dos reatores com medições realizadas diariamente. Efetuou-se análise físicoquímica medindo-se o pH, DBO5, DQO, SSS, SST, SSF e SSV do afluente e efluente dos reatores com freqüência mensal. As temperaturas diárias medidas no reator coberto foram superiores ao descoberto. Observou-se eficiência de 10% na DQO e 15% na DBO5 superiores para o reator coberto. O coberto com lona plástica apresentou menores oscilações com maior estabilidade na manutenção das temperaturas, principalmente nos períodos de baixas temperaturas, mostrando maior desempenho no tratamento de efluente de fecularia de mandioca.

During the long eighteenth century, married women in England were subject to the rules of coverture, which denied them a legal identity independent of their husbands and severely curtailed their acquisition, possession and disposition of property. There is a consensus among historians that married women circumvented the restrictions of coverture both in their daily lives and by use of the legal mechanism of the separate estate. This study reviews contemporary legal and social attitudes towards women’s property rights in marriage to examine the extent to which married women had economic agency under coverture. Through a review of reported cases, treatises on the law of property, and a contemporary fictional representation of pin-money, I assess the foundations justifying the law of coverture, and the challenges presented to coverture by the separate estate. I argue that there is a distinction between the theory and practice of the separate estate; the separate estate must be understood as a type of property set aside for a special purpose rather than a type of property separated from a husband’s control. More precisely, the existence of the separate estate generally, and pin-money in particular, did little to advance married women’s economic agency. / Graduate