<p> This thesis is an analysis and exploration of the feminist themes present in select chamber music theater works by William Osborne for trombonist Abbie Conant. Before analyzing Osborne's compositions, the author provides crucial background information about the lives and experiences of husband and wife and artistic collaborators William Osborne and Abbie Conant. Specifically, the author addresses the sexism that Conant experienced as a trombonist in the Munich Philharmonic. Osborne composed a new genre of works for Conant to perform as an artistic response to the pain both he and Conant experienced during the thirteen year legal battle with the state of Munich and their desire to create fully integrated musical theater works. </p><p> The author traces the evolution of Osborne and Conant's collaboration by examining three works within the genre of chamber music theater: Winnie&mdash;Osborne's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days; Miriam: The Chair&mdash;Osborne's first completely original work; and Street Scene for the Last Mad Soprano. Through personal interviews with Osborne and Conant, the author became aware of Osborne and Conant's influences from Samuel Beckett as well as the formal structure that Osborne uses in his works, and she traces this structure in each work as a method for understanding and organizing the musical and dramatic events. Since Osborne's chamber music theater works require the performer to play a musical instrument, act, and sing, the author employs balanced musicological, dramaturgical, and theoretical analytical approaches when studying each piece. </p><p> After addressing the formal and compositional devices that Osborne utilizes in each piece, the author focuses her analysis on the feminist themes that are found in the latter two works: Miriam: The Chair and Street Scene for the Last Mad Soprano, for these two works were written as a direct response to the discrimination that Conant experienced in the Munich Philharmonic. The author provides the transcript from her interview with Osborne and Conant as an appendix to the document.</p>

This project examines the decorative/architectural encoding of women's transgressive individualist desires in nineteenth-century America as depicted in women's literature. This literature illustrates the crucial role the interior of the home and everyday domestic objects such as wallpaper, looking glasses and textiles played in the formation and expression of women's ipseity. Because of the difficulty of narrating such transgressive stories of the interior of the self as the search for selfhood, individuality, sexual or intellectual freedom, these writers told their stories through narratives of "things" with which they were intimately familiar, allowing the lives of domestic objects and spaces to express the socially subversive lives and experiences of the women who lived among them. In my examination of this literature, I analyze wallpaper as a replacement object for written text and intellectual stimulation, looking glasses as tools through which to conceptualize and find evidence of a developing individualist self, "creature comforts" as necessities in the display of an independent and sexually aware self, and intimacy with personal possessions as indicators of intimacy with the owner of those possessions. Although critics recognize the importance of women having a "room of one's own" in which to develop a sense of self, very little has been said about the importance of the actual interiors of the rooms in which these women lived, despite the fact that that there was an immense quantity of objects found in the homes of the middle and upper classes in the nineteenth century and that this quantity is reflected in literature, and despite the seriousness with which women were expected to study and utilize these objects. Theories of identity formation in literary studies lack an approach that considers how identity is mediated by and revealed through a subject's non-consumeristic interaction with objects and specifically with objects that have what I call "object individuality." Objects, social scientists argue, have a direct impact on our "selves," and, as the inherent qualities and particularizing features of an object limit and direct an object's use and meaning, object individuality has a direct impact on subject individuality and should be considered.

This work formulates a new language for speaking about the operatic voice in film. Beyond cultural signifiers, opera has a more specific purpose in film, and this thesis will provide a new language for speaking about it in such a way. Borrowing from Michel Chion's acousmetre, the current document develops a new lexicon for the way operatic music functions, beyond the traditional diegesis, and points out the agency of such voices in film. After outlining the specific attributes of the diva-acousmetre, the agent outlined in the thesis, three chapters explore its use in the films Philadelphia, The Shawshank Redemption, and Transamerica.

Despite increased interest in turn-of-the-century Austrian literature, women writers of the period have suffered the classic "Austrian fate": their works remain unrecognized. Yet a comparison of both the fiction and non-fiction by women of Vienna's Fin de siecle uncovers parallels between these works and those of eighteenth-century women. These parallels provide insight into the discrepancies between a woman's public and her private self-image in the age of male liberal humanism since the Enlightenment. Rosa Mayreder's nonfiction projects progressive ideals which are compromised in the fiction where the protagonists assume roles created for them by Western patriarchal society. Closer examination shows that women of the eighteenth century also compensated and compromised their positions in order to secure a reading public. Rosa Mayreder's utopian vision of a reformed patriarchal ideology (non-fiction) gives way to resignation in the fictional works. But where the modernists endeavor to sustain the ideals of humanistic thought even under historic conditions that prevent its realization outside the spheres of art, Rosa Mayreder does not bow to the psychology of repression or to the relentless sexism of patriarchal society. She reconciles her revolutionary feminist thought with narrative forms to which women have traditionally had access. But she attacks nineteenth century institutions associated with the patriarchal oppression of Viennese society. And her female protagonists, who neither preserve their sanity through cold and brilliant intellectualism nor balance their feminine hysteria against the dictated images of a symbolic order in which they no longer believe, are among the first who defy the exaltation of womanhood through the internalization of male humanist standards. Eighteenth century bourgeois patriarchy's predilection for liberal humanism, much like that of the late nineteenth century in Austria, lent ammunition to the growing feminist movement and to the rebirth of women's literary endeavors. It was not by chance that these endeavors were met by an onslaught of patriarchal constructions and male stereotyped images of women. By not "saving" her protagonists from resignation and despair, Mayreder forfeited her rank in the literary canon. But she should be recognized as one of the first woman writers of this century to make visible progress toward the deconstruction of stereotyped images of women.

The study finds evidence of a cohort effect in female to male wage differentials caused by a greater earnings growth across generations. This imply a steeper female wage profile than is commonly accepted in the literature. The results presented in this paper also support the findings of Gold and Vella (1991) and Vella (1991). There is a significant impact from correcting for endogeneity of experience and education in the estimation of the wage equation. This finding is important since it implies that ignoring the correction for endogeneity will lead to problems of inconsistency in the estimation of the parameters. Our results show that this inconsistency leads to underestimation of the impact of experience in the wage equation.

This research analyzes the factors influencing choice and the determinants of women's health services demand. Demand for health services in Colombia is practically unexplored, and there appear to be no studies of demand for health services by women of child rearing age in Colombia. The Colombian National Health Study of 1980 (Estudio Nacional de Salud-1980) is the data base used, supplemented by hospital data from the Ministry of Health. After a description of the Colombian Health System, the choice between traditional and modern care is studied for prenatal care, and for child's delivery assistance, emphasizing differences among insured and non-insured women. The first part of the study estimates demand schedules through a logistic specification. The choice of institutional setting for child's delivery assistance, conditional upon the prior decision of using modern care, is studied through a nested multinomial logit specification for women in different regions of the country and for urban and rural women as well. Expected prices for a delivery are estimated for all choices women face. Only few recent studies have found demand for modern health services to be price elastic and dependent on income level; this is also the case in some of the regions of Colombia. Moreover, demand for health services becomes less price elastic as income increases. Demand for Private care is generally more price elastic than demand for other types of care, and in some cases demand for Public care is significantly price elastic at lower income levels. Lower income women rely on Public hospitals when they have decided against traditional care. Then, price changes for Public care would have larger welfare effects on lower income groups. Urban women of high income groups often use Public care, indicating that government subsidies are favoring better-off sectors of the population. Meanwhile, rural women rely heavily on home care, even at higher income levels. A more rational price system for services at social security hospitals would not reduce significantly women's welfare; higher prices would help to provide better quality services and/or permit cost recovery for those institutions which very often find themselves in financial trouble.

As a significant act of U.S. imperialism, the Mexican War doubled the territory, erected an international border between the two nations, and significantly complicated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of race and gender relations. The Southwest territory, old Spanish borderlands, was the site of the first foreign war for the United States and it witnessed the most nationally-informing debates regarding the Indian question, the woman question, and how citizenship could be imagined and transformed in the age of Manifest Destiny. This dissertation interrogates the mimetic link between nation and the domestic through a reconfiguration of the republican family romance and its monomaniacal preoccupation with gatekeeping whiteness as the sole signifier of political privilege and power. I examine Manifest Destiny in the context of U.S./Mexico relations framed by the Mexican War (1846--8) and the Mexican Revolution (1910). I look specifically at how Mexican and Anglo-American women in the Southwest forge relationships between and among familial, cultural, and national spheres. Chapter one examines the role of Enlightenment ideology and the captivity narrative in post-Mexican War interracial marriages. Chapter two probes the legal and racial consequences of Manifest Destiny expressed in interracial adoption plots. The third chapter investigates female travel narratives in the Southwest. Women soldiers and spies during the Mexican War, Civil War, and Mexican Revolution (1910) comprise the fourth chapter. The final chapter looks at women's fight for suffrage during the Mexican Revolution. Among the authors and historical figures featured in this study are recovered authors Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita Gonzalez, and Maria Cristina Mena. Also featured are the personal narratives of Eliza Allen, Loreta Janeta Velazquez and the newspaper articles of Jane McManus Storms (Cora Montgomery).

I argue that the current trend in U.S. studies to move beyond the public-private dichotomy is based on a reductive understanding of that binary as primarily a manifestation of separate spheres ideology. Recently, literary critics and historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to mistake fiction for reality. However, there is a tendency in this criticism to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of public and private consistently work to mask the gendered inequalities of public policy. I claim that these inequalities are shaped by multiple, but interconnected, spatial constructions of the public and private in U.S. culture, and that emerging and intersecting (re) definitions of key spatial concepts---the nation, the urban, the regional, and the domestic---in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provide a crucial context for understanding how the public-private binary has been constructed and contested. In chapter one, I focus on how women speakers at the World's Columbian Exposition negotiated their liminal position at the Exposition. Their understanding of the public-private binary is more complex than has been acknowledged and offers theorists new ways of understanding why the genderedness of the public-private binary. In chapter two, I show how middle-class women's anxieties about urbanization's transformation of the domestic leads to their contestation of the home-work divide that maintains the working-girl's social and economic inequality and isolates the middle-class woman. In chapter three, I argue that Ellen Glasgow challenges the southern agrarians' construction of the public-private binary by revealing its dependence on the female body and female labor. In chapter four, I contend that Zora Neale Hurston and Agnes Smedley negotiate the public-private binary by appropriating the frontier as a model of citizenship. This appropriation, however, becomes disenabling when they try to articulate the difference that the female body makes to citizenship.

This dissertation focuses on women, consumer culture, and crime in England in the early to later nineteenth century (1800-1880). As England's textile industry produced goods, especially cotton, on a larger and cheaper scale, consumer culture was also being transformed in bazaars and small shopfronts across England. Rather than serving as passive consumers of the production of English factories, English consumers, particularly women, took an active role in shaping the British economy not by more efficient production, but through their creation of a feminized marketplace. They created a realm of fashion, frippery, and display tailored to the female consumer. They demanded discounted luxuries, making products more affordable for the middling classes. Women's involvement in this seedy business of selling was especially troubling to male, middle-class critics. Accused by such male luminaries as Thackeray and Trollope of selling without substance, the new modes of retailing, including bazaar shopping, "cheap" shops, and large drapery emporiums grew in popularity and were the progenitors of the great department stores. The new culture of unchecked consumerism aroused fears of crime and fraud by both buyer and seller. According to critics, the acts of buying and selling became facades in the new marketplaces--just another opportunity for fraud, trickery, and theft--largely perpetrated by undeserving women seeking genteel status through its material symbols. This criticism of fraudulent consumption masked fears of this threatening transformation of English consumer culture, and the women who both inhabited and held positions of power in this culture. If England was once a nation of shopkeepers, by the 1860s, critics contended, it had become a nation of frauds and shoplifters with women in the lead of those satisfied with the pursuit of selling without substance. Utilizing sources from trial records, advertisements, newspaper reports, literature, popular ballads, and magazines, this study contributes to the fields of gender studies, women's history, economic history, the history of crime, and consumer culture in England.

Music in South Africa today is as diverse as its people. Due to this diversity, there are many different ways of describing the various styles of music in the country. Because of my interest in these styles and in gender and music studies, I have focused on the lives and works of three South African women composers, namely, Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph (b. 1948), Princess Constance Magogo (1900--1984), and Rosa Nepgen (1909--2000). These women come from English, Zulu, and Afrikaans circumstances respectively, and my study reflects their individual stories and how their music developed in the South African context. Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph composes mainly in classical music genres, while Princess Magogo, a performer on the musical bow, concentrates on Zulu traditional song repertoire. Rosa Nepgen's output consists mostly of art songs. While there are links between these three women, each has left her own personal "songprint" to enrich the musical life of South Africa.