The purpose of this research is to examine the ways in which mentoring affects black graduate students' completion of programs of study. Performance is measured by completion of their graduate program, length of time taken to complete the program, grade point average (GPA), and overall attitude about their graduate school experience. On average, over half of all black graduate students leave their programs of study before completion compared to 25% attrition (non-completion of program of study) of white students. A review of the literature suggests that any form of mentoring improves completion rates among black graduate students. Existing research further suggests that when paired with like mentors, such as same race or gender, black graduate students complete their programs at even higher rates. The existing research is, however, limited due to the age of the research and factors such as attrition by discipline. Updated research is needed to determine why, despite being admitted to graduate programs of study at the highest rates in United States history, black students are leaving without graduate degrees more than any other race. Vincent Tinto's theory of social adjustment states that students who are not socially adjusted are less likely to persist (complete their program of study). Because black students are attending Predominately White Institutions (PWFs) at the highest rates since Reconstruction, this research will examine ways in which black graduate students become socially adjusted and how it affects their persistence. The anticipated results of the study are that black graduate students who had mentors completed their programs more often than those who did not have mentors. Additionally, those who had mentors of the same race, gender, or socio-economic backgrounds may report even higher percentages of completion. In contrast, those who did not have mentors may report lower percentages of completion.

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A survey of the first two decades of the French Communist Party's propaganda reveals a wide range of female imagery, from the androgynous, Soviet-style militant of the 1920s to the fashionable, feminine figure of the 1930s. Earlier scholars noting this discrepancy argued that the Party first adopted the Soviet "new woman," based on the Marxist principle of absolute gender equality but rejected it just over a decade later in order to broaden their appeal to the French masses. These studies, however, were restricted by the limited access to the French Communist Party's interwar-era archives. Using recently-digitized Party meeting records, reports, letters, and propaganda material, this MA thesis takes a second look at the Party's attitude toward gender roles and mobilizing women in the interwar period (1920 – 1939). Finding that female Party members directed the work among women according to a complex internal logic which justified dropping the Soviet new woman for a more conventional model, this thesis argues that the Party's changing stance on gender roles reflected the strength of the French republican notions of gender and politics which shaped the Party's response to the Soviet model of womanhood.

archives@tulane.edu / Pillars of elite white supremacy, wealthy southern white women, through their work on social welfare projects, transitioned from their roles as influential dependents and stakeholders within individualist economic systems to unselfconscious political citizens in the early twentieth century. This dissertation traces that transition through a single, elite women’s organization: the Junior League. The following chapters tell the stories of the oldest Leagues in the Deep South: the Junior Leagues of New Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; Montgomery, Alabama; Birmingham, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and Savannah, Georgia. The Association of Junior Leagues of America (AJLA) is an elite women’s voluntary association born out of the settlement movement in late 1890s New York and experienced explosive growth in the decade following suffrage. Out of regional pride and a desire for class solidification, southern debutantes formed Junior Leagues in their own cities. By tracing members’ relationship to gender, race, and class, this dissertation contributes to the larger narrative of the twentieth century women's rights movement through the addition of supposedly apolitical Junior Leaguer's unselfconscious claim to political citizenship. Their administration of health clinics in the Deep South is especially revealing because it was through this work that they performed their citizenship via community investment and collaboration with the state. Junior Leaguers built, constructed, and maintained their projects with the goal of demonstrating their usefulness to the State, which they hoped would, in turn, take the project and its work under the umbrella of state-run services. / 1 / Anna Morgan Leonards

archives@tulane.edu / Pillars of elite white supremacy, wealthy southern white women, through their work on social welfare projects, transitioned from their roles as influential dependents and stakeholders within individualist economic systems to unselfconscious political citizens in the early twentieth century. This dissertation traces that transition through a single, elite women’s organization: the Junior League. The following chapters tell the stories of the oldest Leagues in the Deep South: the Junior Leagues of New Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; Montgomery, Alabama; Birmingham, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and Savannah, Georgia. The Association of Junior Leagues of America (AJLA) is an elite women’s voluntary association born out of the settlement movement in late 1890s New York and experienced explosive growth in the decade following suffrage. Out of regional pride and a desire for class solidification, southern debutantes formed Junior Leagues in their own cities. By tracing members’ relationship to gender, race, and class, this dissertation contributes to the larger narrative of the twentieth century women's rights movement through the addition of supposedly apolitical Junior Leaguer's unselfconscious claim to political citizenship. Their administration of health clinics in the Deep South is especially revealing because it was through this work that they performed their citizenship via community investment and collaboration with the state. Junior Leaguers built, constructed, and maintained their projects with the goal of demonstrating their usefulness to the State, which they hoped would, in turn, take the project and its work under the umbrella of state-run services. / 1 / Anna Morgan Leonards

This thesis examines psychological war trauma nurses experienced during the First World War. Psychological war trauma, or shell shock, as it was commonly known during the war, has largely been identified as a male affliction. In this thesis, I demonstrate that women too, suffered trauma and we can better understand nurses' trauma by applying some of the same analytical techniques that scholars have previously used to examine male combatant trauma. Moreover, I analyze the ways in which contemporary actors, including medical professionals and the public, imagined female trauma, specifically the way nurses' psychological trauma could be understood and articulated. Additionally, I examine how those suffering from trauma or treating it sometimes confronted it and sometimes avoided it. Utilizing official British War Office documents, personal papers, medical journals, and newspapers, I have found that no matter the circumstances surrounding nurses' trauma, the language and diagnoses applied avoided language that minimized these women's characters or war service. These women's behaviors had to be framed in keeping with 'womanly' notions of sacrifice, selflessness, and duty to their country. With this thesis, I bring together the history of nursing and the history of psychological war trauma—making clear that nurses fit into the larger narrative of trauma.

The third revised edition (2004) of Annotations, the Alternative Press Center's Guide to the Independent and Critical Press edited by the staff of the Alternative Press Center in collaboration with Marie Jones, M.L.S. is available. Foreword by Robert McChesney. This companion to the Alternative Press Index has been dubbed by librarian Sandy Berman as "the best single way to make the Library Bill of Rights real: providing access to the myriad opinions, movements, and activities that the orthodox, conventional media either distort or ignore." This expanded third edition of Annotations surveys 385 periodicals of the Left from around the world and provides detailed descriptions of content, history, noted contributors, contact information, guidelines for writers and detailed statistics for each publication. Entries are accompanied by concise, insightful annotations that fill out the history, ideology, content, and unique features of each of these important periodicals.

This dissertation examines the production, use and preservation of medieval charters and cartularies with regard to what we can know about women's economic activities in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Picardy, France. Charters (medieval records of property transactions) and cartularies (medieval books compiled of charter copies) from three religious institutions located in southern Picardy provide evidence for the case studies examined here. Each institution retains a surviving partial archives of loose charters, as well as a thirteenth-century cartulary. The comparison of their contents enables the creation of two separate sets of charters for each institution—the charters that have been copied into the cartulary and those that have not. This study's findings indicate that those charters absent from the cartulary provide important information about the cartulary charters, particularly regarding women's identities, networks, and activities. Placing the archives charters alongside the cartulary charters offers an opportuntity to reunite and examine multiple charters that focus on either a single transaction, a single woman, a single family or a single charter issuer. In this way, unidentified women in the cartulary can often be linked to natal and marital families, revealing networks of women's activities. Moreover, evidence for non-noble women's participation in economic transactions emerges alongside that of their better-known noble counterparts. This dissertation argues for a broader scope of women's participation in the alienation and acquisition of property in southern Picardy and calls for more research into charter production and its implications for the study of medieval women.

The National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896, during a period when the Negro was encountering a great amount of difficulty in maintaining the legal and political rights granted to him during the period of reconstruction. As a result of this erosion· of power, some historians have contended that the Negro male was unable to effectively deal with the problems that arose within the Negro community. It was during this same period of time that the Negro woman began to assert herself in the affairs of her community. In the beginning, her work was done in conjunction with church groups and ladies auxiliaries to Negro male secret societies and fraternal organizations. In the 1890's, however, she began to form clubs of her own. This did not mean that the other organizational ties were severed, but rather that she added new priorities to her varied interests. Generally speaking, the women who participated in these groups were middle class women who saw needs within the Negro community and attempted, with their limited resources, to alleviate the problems. There were many clubs of Negro women formed during the period from 1890 to 1895, and there was a general feeling that unification of the clubs would be beneficial to the overall movement of Negro women. The major goal of the National Association of Colored Women was the uplift of the Negro race in all facets of life. The organization declared that it was not drawing the color line but that all clubs of women whose goal was to improve the life of the Negro were eligible to join. From the beginning, the goal that the National Association of Colored Women set up for itself was too broad in relation to membership and resources of the members. Instead of concentrating on one or two specific areas, such as kindergartens, reformatories for Negro youth, homes for the aged, or civil rights, the women divided their forces to such an extent that their effectiveness in dealing with the problems that plagued the Negro community was extremely limited. It is true that many fine examples of their dedication and unselfishness brought relief and in some cases institutions were established to aid their people, but more often than not the lack of unified efforts failed to produce the desired results. Besides the diffusion of goals, there was also the human factors of pettiness, un-co-operative spirit and a desire for self-recognition that disrupted the movement. Later, with the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the N.A.A.C.P . , the National Urban League and other similar organizations dedicated to the improvement of the life of the Negro, the National Association of Colored Women lost much of its impact. In part this was caused by the limiting of the goals pursued by the new organizations. They concentrated their efforts on a few specific areas and refused to be distracted by a multiplicity of causes. Furthermore, the personnel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League were generally more professionally qualified to handle the problems that they attempted to solve. The thesis is based largely upon original sources: memoirs, autobiographies of the founders of the N.A.C.W. and periodicals and newspapers published between 1890-1930.

Changes in women’s relationship to caring labour, and changes in societal attitudes towards women as nurses during the period when they became union members and aspiring professionals, are revealed in thirty-seven oral history interviews with women who became nurses between 1958, a pivotal time in the development of the publicly funded health care system, and 1977, when the last residential school of nursing closed in Calgary. This study challenges the historiography that suggests that nursing programs of nursing in the 1960s and early 1970s were sites of unusual social regulation, and that nursing was a career choice that women made because of a lack of other more challenging or rewarding alternatives. This study also challenges assumptions that women in nursing were unaffected by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and instead passively accepted a position of gendered subservience at home and in the workplace. Instead, I argue that nurses skilfully balanced work and other social responsibilities, primarily domestic caregiving, and also were active in unionization and professionalization in advance of other Canadian women workers. The ability of nurses to maintain a prominent position in health care, to advocate for the conditions needed to provide the best nursing care possible, while also fighting for improved working conditions and higher professional status is an impressive story of how women in these decades used gender, and class, as tools to enact social change. These efforts are all the more impressive when considered within the context of social opposition faced by nurses as they both resisted and conformed to expectations that their primary role was as wives and mothers. Nurses negotiated this challenging political terrain by framing their work in terms of its practical necessity and gendered suitability as women’s paid employment. In making these claims, I position nursing and nursing education as a form of women’s labour that exemplifies employed women’s struggles to promote fairer wages, better working conditions, and access to the full benefits of economic and social citizenship for all women. This challenge to the prevailing assessment of nursing during this period establishes the main thesis of this dissertation. / Graduate / 0334 / 0569 / 0453 / mrgrtscaia@gmail.com