Martha Root (1872-1939) was an exceptional religious and spiritual activist, a leading figure in the international women's peace movement, and a new organism of a new world in the early twentieth century. This thesis represents Martha Root from three aspects: the early life of Martha Root, her four world teaching trips from 1919 to 1939, with a focus on her peace advocacy, and an investigation into her gender awareness and identity construction by reflecting on Tahirih the Pure, Iran's Greatest Woman, Martha Root's only book.

The purpose of my research is to analyze the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (LTRC) lack of attention towards accessing rural Liberian women's voices as opposed to privileged Liberian women residing in urban and Diaspora spaces. By analyzing the LTRC and its Final Report from a critical global feminist perspective, I was able to not only illuminate, but bring a spotlight over issues including access, privilege, and multicultural insensitivity related to Liberia's indigenous tribal cultures. Liberia, being a country founded by American colonials, is socially constructed by Western ideological norms. As Western ideology is mainly normalized and enforced by the privileged class, Americo-Liberians, the LTRC and Final Report were also constructed within Western constructions. Given Liberia's historical colonial ties to the United States and its current relations to the global community, the LTRC decided to include Liberians in the Diaspora to its focus group. The Diaspora, also referred to as Liberia's 16th county, is made up of privileged Liberians displaced in overseas countries including the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. As with any progress, fashion, or business, attention is given to the newest, most profitable merchandise, or in the case of the LTRC, population. I hypothesized, and feared, that the LTRC did not provide indigenous Liberian women, many of whom reside in rural Liberia, equal access and effort as they did privileged Liberian women residing in urban and Diaspora spaces. To prove this, I conduct a feminist content analysis of the LTRC Final Report, recorded public testimonies which are available on the LTRC website (www.trcofliberia.org) and quantitative data collected and processed by, Benetech, a human rights statistics organization based out of Minnesota... a city which happens to be home to the highest number of Diaspora Liberians in the world. After conducting my investigation, I was able to conclude my thesis with reasons as to why underprivileged women's voices in Liberian should be included in doctrine, like the LTRC, and suggest ways to improve methods like the LTRC to ensure indigenous women's voices are fairly accessed and heard.

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We all have stories to share, to build, to pass around, to inherit, and to create. This story - the one I piece together now - is about a Thai-/Bengali-/Muslim-/American-/Feminist looking for home, looking to manage the tension and conflict of wanting to belong to her family and to her feminist community. This thesis focuses on the seemingly conflicting obligations to kinship on the one hand and to feminist practice on the other, a conflict where being a good scholar or activist is directly in opposition to being a good Asian daughter. In order to understand how and why these communities appear at odds with one another, I examine how the material spaces and psychological realities inhabited by specific hyphenated, fragmented subjects are represented (and misrepresented) in both popular culture and practical politics, arguing against images of the hybrid body that bracket its lived tensions. I argue that fantasies of home as an unconditional site of belonging and comfort distract us from the multiple communities to which hyphenated subjects must move between. Hyphenated Asian-/American bodies often find ourselves torn between nativism and assimilationism - having to neutralize, forsake, or discard parts of our identities. Thus, I reduce complicated, difficult ideas of being to the size of a thimble, to a question of loyalty between my Asian-/American history and my American-/feminist future, between my familial background and the issues that have become foregrounded for me during college, between the home from which I originate and the new home to which I wish to belong. To move with fluidity, I must - in collaboration with others - invent new stories of identity and belonging.