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Over the course of his first six years in office, President Woodrow Wilson evolved from an opponent of woman suffrage to an advocate for a federal woman suffrage amendment. This study explores what transpired to bring about such a dramatic change in Wilson's position. It seeks to understand the array of forces that pressured Wilson and the extent to which he was, in turn, able to influence Congress and voters.

The prospects for the future of voting in the United States include the likelihood of internet voting and its potential to alter voter participation. This thesis provides a critical overview of past experiments, current studies, and the possible consequences of implementing voting over the internet. As internet use increases for education, personal communication, business and commerce, the assumption is that the public and elected officials will view the internet as the practical venue for local, state, and national elections. The potential consequences of utilizing the internet for voters to cast their ballots from personal computers from remote locations, as one future process of voting, are vital to the decisions regarding electronic elections. Challenges inherent to the technology and social consequences concerning internet voting are paramount to the debate. The internet voting process, perceived as convenient with the possible consequence of halting or reversing a declining voter turnout, must be balanced with potential risks to internet voting security and reliability. With emphasis on reports from the California Task Force and the National Science Foundation, as well as current literature regarding electronic voting, research is cited designed to address the issue of internet voting. The history of the United States to enfranchise more of its citizens and eliminate barriers that have kept voters from the polls is discussed in the context that there has been a national objective in extending the right to vote and making the ballot box accessible to all adults. Implementing a voting process that has the potential to give more voters access to elections can be viewed as a natural extension of that American legacy, and is therefore important to research and develop. / Master of Arts

This study considers the nature of life and society in the Indian and Oklahoma Territories and the factors contributing to the narrow defeat of the women's suffrage proposal in the Constitutional Convention.

This thesis investigates the works of the London-based suffrage theatre group, the Actresses' Franchise League (AFL). Examining the period between 1907 and 1914, it considers the immediate influences on its foundation in 1908 up to the start of the First World War, when the League changed its focus from that of women's enfranchisement to the entertainment of troops. It analyses in particular the influence of the contemporary debate concerning the sense of humour, and women’s supposed lack thereof, on the focus and style of the playwrights' work. In contextualising the AFL's negotiations with ideas of women’s sense of humour, this thesis represents a shift from the prevailing critical caution shown towards the politicisation of literary humour and laughter. I challenge distinctions between offstage political activity and laughter in the theatre, as well as definitions of radical suffrage action and the privileging of the tragic or violent within feminist discourse. The League displayed a sensitive and, sometimes, angry understanding of the impact of anti-suffrage humour. In a politically motivated move, playwrights consciously rejected the narrative of the tragic and bitter woman both to emulate and defiantly invert such jokes, in order to assert the strength of women's humour. Not without debate within the League’s own circles, the AFL and the wider movement's various politics are manifested in this construction of women’s sense of humour. These theatrical negotiations impacted on the internal strength of the suffrage community and on its political reception. In uncovering suffrage humour as a critical area in its own right, this thesis reinvigorates the categories by which this theatre has been defined and challenges the demotion of its political contribution. Bringing together little known, unpublished, and formerly lost plays into dialogue with each other, it also contributes to the ongoing recuperation of suffrage theatre, such as Cecil Armstrong’s staging of jujitsu. Setting this in conversation with more established playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw and with suffrage playwrights who have already received considerable attention, such as Cicely Hamilton, this thesis actively resists the isolation of suffrage theatre within critical discourse. In addition, its reconsideration of Shaw's relationship with the suffrage movement challenges prevalent deprecation of his playwriting contribution that invites further re-evaluation of his literary politics, while the survey and application of humour theory contributes to the evolving and exciting area of literary humour studies. Overall, through the close documentation of the AFL's alliances with offstage debate, a fuller conception of this political theatre is detailed in ways that also capture the variety of its membership, as indeed of its humour too.

This dissertation is a historical biography on the life, suffrage and educational contributions of Mary Carroll Craig Bradford, a wife, mother, suffragist, teacher and educational administrator in the state of Colorado. The purpose of this dissertation was to find out exactly what Bradford?s contributions were to her state. The initial observation was that she was an educator, but after analyzing the data, it was learned that she was so much more. She began as a woman?s rights activist and had a part in the Colorado and national suffrage campaigns. Her activism and popular reputation gained her the respect of the Colorado Democratic Party and she was nominated to run for political office. The research was accomplished by collecting and analyzing many documents. Data was found in the town of Leadville, Colorado, where she first lived and in the archives in Denver, Colorado, where she lived the remainder of her days. Pictures, letters, newspaper clippings, superintendent reports and various other documents were found that gave a perspective on her life. This dissertation described her journey to becoming an elected official and focused on her roles as a suffrage activist and eventually State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The role of state superintendent is one that is not often written about as noted in this dissertation. Several studies have been done on county or city superintendents, but very few have been done on female state superintendents. This dissertation will make a contribution to this field of research.

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Foucault's argument in the short work "Of Other Spaces" suggests that rhetoric can be defined as how language is used to create and foster power inequities in hierarchical systems. Further, rhetoric enables individuals or groups to gain credibility and mobility within those systems--and to deny that same credibility and mobility to others. The nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period of transition for women, particularly middle- and upper-class white women. During this time, activist activities conducted by and on behalf of women were considered a threat to U.S. society. As a result, rhetoric was used with the intention of limiting American women's credibility and mobility.Although women had always been considered physiologically and intellectually inferior, diagnoses with a variety of "female-only" ailments became more common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For men threatened by women's increasing political activism, this became a very effective method of arguing that women should be denied access to power. Because women were considered outside of the structure of society by virtue of a physiological state they were unable to change, then by definition women could only be regulated, and never regulate. Moreover, the postbellum expansion of civil society into a mass-market structure was an extremely efficient means of distributing that message.In this work, I use Foucault's "science of discipline" as the heuristic to analyze these debates. Foucault lists numerous categories and subcategories that can fall under the science of discipline--far too many to productively and coherently apply here. Therefore, I have modified the science of discipline into a four-pronged process. Applying this heuristic to the definition of rhetoric put forth here, I argue in this work that the medical profession, the magazine industry, and activist women engaged in dialogue with one another within the context of the suffrage movement. I argue that these specialized discourses responded to and built upon ideological allegiances, both explicitly and implicitly, to address the issue of woman's place in society--the "woman question."

This thesis explores the use of architecture in the ghost story "Episode of Cathedral History" by Montague Rhodes James. The focus entails an examination of the architectural theories of John Ruskin, which impacted James's personal views on education, female empowerment, and Modernism. These views are reflected in "Episode of Cathedral History" as story elements that bear symbolic values that James hides under the auspices of entertainment for the purpose of creating a commentary and warning about the chaos of the emerging Modern world.