Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Psy. D.)--Carlos Albizu University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-164).

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Birgit Maier-Katkin, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 8, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 50 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Regensburg, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 425-445).

Employed as midwives, wise women, or healers, female medical practitioners of various faiths disseminated medical knowledge and supplied information pertinent to religious and legal rulings in early modern Europe. While scholars have noted this role for Christian women, they have not studied the unique position of female Jewish healers with regard to municipal regulations, communal politics, medical knowledge, and legal consultations. This dissertation examines the role and influence of Jewish midwives in early modern Western Europe, addressing their interactions with communal leaders, physicians, Christian medical practitioners, and bureaucrats. Exploring their medical influences, their engagement with administrative knowledge systems, and their intellectual status in the eyes of prominent male leaders, this dissertation demonstrates that attention to the roles of Jewish midwives yields new understandings of the structures of knowledge and authority that undergirded early modern European society. Through archival and printed sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, Dutch, and German, the dissertation argues that Jewish midwives offer a crucial analytical lens for understanding many of the shifts in early modern Jewish communal life, medical culture, gender relations, and municipal bureaucracy. It tells the story of how a discrete body of knowledge crossed medical, legal, religious, and linguistic boundaries, allowing Jewish women to become guardians of sensitive information and powerful agents of communal authority. Drawing upon a diverse source base, ranging from notarial records and archives of medical colleges, to Jewish communal registers, personal records, midwifery handbooks, and printed rabbinic sources, I show how female Jewish medical practitioners fit into the larger landscape of medical practice in early modern Europe, as well as the ways that Jewish communal structures carved out unique roles for Jewish midwives during this period. Employing methods from the history of science, gender studies, and Jewish history, my study shows that Jewish midwives became part of an international system of scientific communication, whose content flowed between vernacular and elite practitioners. This dissertation thus sheds new light on the ways in which the inclusion of women as subjects, and gender as a lens, presents a landscape of knowledge-making and transmission whose boundaries are more expansive.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2004. / Typescript (Photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (9 85-91). Also available on the Internet.

What Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump demonstrates to be the case in early modern scientific culture is no less true of the experimental ethic of Jewish feminists today: epistemology and politics are inseparably linked and are projected onto the material of everyday life. In this study of transnational Jewish theopolitics and biopolitics, I show how women enlist their reproductive bodies to develop new forms of spiritual leadership, medical expertise, and religious knowledge and authority as they work to reshape American Judaism. I situate Jewish feminist claims to authenticity and authority within the entangled networks of bio-capital, nationalisms, the logics of classical liberalism and religious subjectivity, and scientific and Rabbinic moral economies. By contextualizing Jewish feminisms in technoscience’s politicization of the sexual body and Christianity’s elevation of the spirit over material, I elucidate how sexual, religious, and epistemic hierarchies structure formations of American religion. This dissertation contributes to growing literatures on religion and science; gender, secularism, and spirituality; transnational American studies; and feminist approaches to medicine and the body. While previous studies on religion and science have highlighted the inseparability of the categories in Euro-American Protestant history or showcased the participation of Jewish men in the development of modern science, this project draws on the “lived religion” methodology to move beyond the activities of elites in institutional spaces. In doing so, it shows how knowledge production happens in intimate, holy places and is structured by sacred and bodily cycles. By stretching the temporal and spatial boundaries of the study of American Judaism, this dissertation reveals how interconnected feminist projects are remaking Judaism as an American religion.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR29638

In this ethnographic inquiry, I examine the way in which literacy creates personal meaning in the lives of ten Hassidic women in Quebec, Canada. Using an integrative qualitative methodology, I draw from Goldberger, Tarule, Belenky and Clinchy (1996), theories of feminist notions of knowledge, current epistemological discussions about difference, power, multiculturalism, and the expression or suppression of voice. From Street's (1994) ideological model of literacy and from Barton (1994), Hamilton (1998), and Maybin (2000), I more clearly conceptualize the pivotal role of literacy practices in articulating links between individual people's everyday experience and wider social institutions and structures. Marilyn-Martin Jones and Katherine Jones (2000) provide a further theoretical lens for viewing the plurality of literacies associated with the values, understandings and intentions that people have about what they and others do. / The findings led me to four conclusions. First, in the private realm of her home the Hassidic woman commands and receives a great deal of authority and respect. Second, it is the Hassidic woman who is the final arbiter of her own information needs and her literacies encompass a diversity of purposes, materials and competencies. The third finding is that the Hassidic woman is able to successfully negotiate the various arenas of her life without compromising tradition and religious law. Finally, although many of these women in their roles as homemaker and wives, experience financial, emotional and physical hardships while raising large families, I have observed in them infinite amounts of patience, good will, serenity and love.