published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This thesis contributes to debates on the changes and continuities affecting women's lives in mid-twentieth century Britain, examining the factors that shaped what was possible for women coming of age in the immediate post-war years. Within the developed historiography on the coalfields, women's histories have been limited to broad overviews of women's social history. This thesis enriches these overviews by offering a close reading of a small cohort of women's composure of their life narratives. It thus promotes an understanding of a fuller 'life history', as affected by changes with the onset of the welfare state and the impact of community on women's well-being. The thesis contributes to the growing body of literature combatting the silencing of women in the male dominated historiography on industrial working-class communities. Specifically, it does so in the context of the interplay and tensions between a community and its individuals, and the impact of that community on women's life trajectories. The south Wales community of the Rhondda is utilised as a case study. Culturally and economically significant, the Rhondda has been the focus of much of the historiography on the coalfields. I conclude that the impact of gender ideology and community structures on Rhondda women's experiences were diverse, complex and contradictory. In composing their life narratives, the cohort negotiated aspects of their lives experienced as poor, unchallenging and unsatisfying. Rhondda's poverty had a detrimental impact on the women's lives. Relationships between community values and individuals emerged as structures enabling and constraining the potential of women in the cohort to live their lives freely and satisfactorily. The pressure for respectability within the community was a major constraining force. Early experiences were influential in how they conducted themselves in adulthood. Yet evidence of happiness is present, particularly around experiences of married life, which presents as an antidote to the frequently pessimistic discourses surrounding the debates on companionate marriage. Utilising their own experiences of struggle and disadvantage, many of the cohort emphasised their support for increased opportunities for subsequent generations of Rhondda women.

This thesis endeavours, first of all, to examine the attitude of English and Scottish Protestant reformers towards the problem of poverty as it existed in the sixteenth century, and more particularly between the years 1528 and 1563. This period represents a logical phase in English social history marking at one end the start of the Reformation and at the other what might be referred to as the Elizabethan settlement of 'commonwealth' matters. In Scotland the same period witnessed the beginnings of a national awareness of social problems, together with the steady growth of the reform movement culminating in the Reformation of 1560 and the compilation of the first Book of Discipline. [...]

The Jewish group offers a picture different in certain ways from other racial and ethnic minorities in Montreal and in Canada. The main period of its history in Canada begins about 1900. In Montreal a small, compact nucleus of Jewish population in the nineteenth century has expanded and developed into a large, comparatively heterogeneous and widely scattered, yet solidly integrated, self-conscious community. The changing ecological pattern of the Jewish community is traced, in relation to the growth of the city of Montreal as a whole* Informal habits, as well as formal structures, reveal the differences in adjustment and assimilation between different elements within the Jewish community, these differences being shown to coincide rather closely with those of successive areas of settlement in the city. Complete assimilation has been achieved by few, if any, of the members of this community; the completely unassimilated type is likewise practically non-existent.

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Masculinity is a set of meanings, and also an aspect of male identity. Understanding masculinity in history, therefore, requires attention to culture and psychology. The concept of a "crisis of masculinity" cannot address these dimensions sufficiently and is of little use to the historian. / This analysis of evidence from late medieval England begins with the social world. Legal records show men defending, and therefore defining, masculine identity through interaction among male peers and with women. Defamation suits suggest a fifteenth-century identification of masculinity with "trueness": an uncomplicated, open honesty. A "true man," in late medieval England, was not just an honest man, but a real man. / Social masculinity constituted honest fairness, permitting stable social relations between men. Transparent honesty, good management of the household ("husbandry"), and self-command preserved males' social substance, their metaphoric embodiment represented tangibly by money and property. Lawsuits and personal letters show how masculine social identity took shape through competition and cooperation with other men. "Power," "dominance" and self-fulfilment were less important than sustaining this network of relations. / Men's relations with women are best understood within this homosocial dynamic. Men's adultery trespassed on other males' substance, while women's adultery indicated poor management of one's own. Sexual slander against men could injure their social identity, but was unlikely to demolish it, as it would for a woman. The celibate minority of men shared these concerns. / Medical texts, late medieval men's clothing, satirical poems, and courtesy texts prescribing self-control show that the male body provided important meanings (phallic and otherwise), through failure, inadequacy or excess as often as not. Sexual activity, and other uses of the body, might be managed differently as self-restraining or self-indulgent discourses of masculinity demanded. / A psychoanalytic reading of medieval romances reveals fantasized solutions to the problem of males' desire for feminine and masculine objects. Romance literature displays a narcissistic subjectivity created in defensive fantasies of disconnection. Such features derive from a culture demanding incessant social self-presentation of its men, which permitted very little in daily life to be kept from the scrutiny of others.

This research focused on the gap in data and theory on occupational mobility between historians researching the nineteenth century and sociologists researching the twentieth century. City directory listings on Muncie, Indiana provided the source data for a re-assessment of the blocked-mobility thesis asserted by Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd in the Middletown (1928) study of Muncie. The Middletown Index of Association was developed to analyze rates and trends in intra-generational occupational mobility.The results showed that the rate of upward mobility varied on the basis of the rate of industrialization, and both phenomena declined in the period under study. Thus, while upward mobility was decreasing, as reported by the Lynds, that decrease occurred with the deceleration rather than the advent of industrialization.Out-migration significantly increased through time contributing to a decelerating rate of urbanization, but low-status laborers continued to migrate out of the labor force at a significantly greater rate than skilled and white-collar workers. The "floating prolitariat" continued as a phenomenon in Muncie into the twenties. As a city declining in regional dominance, Muncie served as a "stage" in the movement of rural populations into increasingly larger cities.The association of high status to persistence in the labor force was matched with significantly greater residential persistence by skilled and non-manual workers. Social control was found to be more plausible than affluence as an explanation of the strong individualistic faith of the Muncie working class.

This is an examination of the position of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633--1694) with regard to contemporary societal gender-paradigms, which were the conditions under which she produced her literary work; these same conditions are also reflected in her texts. / The first chapter includes a methodological discussion and establishes the importance of applying a socio-historical approach in order to better understand the situation of women in the Baroque period, and of Greiffenberg in particular, in order to answer the question, how it was possible for the author to write and publish at a time that generally excluded women from such activities. / The second chapter provides a brief biography of Greiffenberg and a review of secondary literature, with the main focus on the positioning of the poet within patriarchal society. / The socio-historical framework includes the religious, social, and legal position of women. These include: the hierarchy of power based on gender-roles, definitions of women in marriage, educational paradigms, as well as characteristics typically attributed to women. An analysis of the moral and theological view of women, as outlined by Martin Luther and presented in sermons by Johann Michael Dilherr, evaluates the general conditions for women during the Baroque period and the specific position of Greiffenberg (chapter three). With a similar aim in mind, chapter four examines the genre of "Hatisvaterliteratur" through the example by Wolfgang Helmhard von Hohberg. / This provides a framework for the investigation of Greiffenberg's expressions of her views regarding gender politics. She made the restrictions placed on women a topic in both her published and unpublished texts. She also developed strategies to overcome these restrictions. She found the courage to act against the proscribed role for women by defining her writing as God's will and thus based her profession on a higher authority. She also affirmed the gender-paradigms, while at the same time transgressing their boundaries, whereby she was able to negotiate the roles of both a woman and a publishing writer at a time when one identity conflicted with the other (chapters five and six).

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