Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990.

This dissertation takes as its subjects East European Jewish women who sold sex in their homelands and/or abroad and situates their engagement in sex work within the broader structures these women navigated – labor markets, state laws on residence and migration, community and family. This project turns working-class Jewish women, who migrated within and from Eastern Europe and sold sexual services, into protagonists in their own story and writes them back into modern Eastern European Jewish economic and migration histories. Between 1870 and 1939, Eastern European Jews suffered from consistent official and unofficial anti-Jewish discrimination in the labor market. This discrimination, combined with ongoing economic changes and crises, hindered Jewish socio-economic advancement and instead drove more and more Jews into poverty. Both married and single women were pressed financially to find gainful employment but encountered a labor market with too few opportunities. In these circumstances, the state-sanctioned sex industry, which was Jewish madams and pimps had their part, provided them with economic prospects and facilitated their physical mobility, which was a privilege in this period. By 1914, Jews, especially women, found it almost impossible to leave the Russian Empire legally. After the Great War, immigration restrictions became a virtually global phenomenon, again severely limiting the options of Jews for leaving Eastern Europe. In the interwar years, anxieties about trafficking turned into laws restricting single women's movement and preventing immigration to popular destinations, such as the United States or Argentina. Despite these challenges, some Eastern European Jewish women who sold sex turned out to be particularly mobile. They moved within Eastern Europe, crossing borders between empires, and regularly circulated across seas and oceans to the Middle East and the Americas. By viewing these women as economic actors and labor migrants, this dissertation seeks to reconceptualize prostitution as one of the ways in which Eastern European Jews from the working poor navigated the transformative and increasingly challenging period between 1870 and 1939. This rewriting of Jewish prostitution as a rich social history of Eastern European Jewish women from the lower classes relies on a wide range of sources that, on the one hand, provide access to the women’s voices (though rarely unmediated) and, on the other, expose how class-biased and moralistic interpretation has been imposed on their life stories. Unlike most of the previous studies on this topic, this project looks at Jewish prostitution from the Eastern European perspective and uses materials produced by this Jewish population and the surrounding society – Jewish and non-Jewish press in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew; Habsburg, Russian, and Polish state-produced labor and prostitution reports as well as ministerial and police records.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

This study traces the adaptation of the traditional gathering practices of Anglo/Celtic women to the landscape of Colonial Australia, thus developing a context for contemporary land-based art practices. Traditional gathering practices became one of the important forces that influenced and shaped the work of many women artists in post colonial Australia. Interacting with the landscape on a personal level helped contextualize women's gathering role into a contemporary theme, which linked past knowledge to present day voices. The author's art work is an interpretation of this traditional gathering practice. By relating herbal knowledge to present day concerns, she is able to extend the knowledge of past generations of women gatherers into present day images. The art work is also a diary of experiments, that are concerned with preserving the dye making recipes that have been handed down for generations. These botanical experiments have enabled the author to re-present herbal knowledge that took hundreds of years to glean, and to extend the use of the dyes obtained to create the art works. / Master of Arts (Hons) (Creative Arts)

My thesis explores the social construction of identity of 50 second generation migrant-Australian women aged 17 to 28 years using a qualitative methodology. I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 women from Latin American backgrounds and 25 women from Turkish backgrounds. My study investigated the intersections of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nationality. I found that the Latin women constructed their ethnic culture in reference to their country-of-origin traditions, and that they also identified with a pan-ethnic Latin culture that included migrants from other South and Central America countries. I found that the Turkish women constructed Turkish culture in reference to their religious practices, and they saw themselves as �Muslim-Turks� who identified with an Islamic pan-ethnic culture that included Muslim migrants from different national backgrounds. The women in both groups drew upon Anglo-Australian culture when it came to their gender and sexuality constructions. The Latin and Turkish women did not see themselves as �typical� women from their migrant communities. Instead, their sense of femininity was informed by what they saw as Australian egalitarianism. The women in both groups saw Anglo-Australians� gender relationships as an ideal, and as one woman said of Anglo-Australians, �how much more equal can you can get?� The women�s social construction of the nation was equally influenced by multiculturalism and an Anglo-Australian identity. They highly valued their Australian citizenship and felt positive about their lives in Australia. At the same time, they had faced ongoing racism and they reported that other people judged their Australian identities through racial characteristics. One woman said that in order for people to be accepted as Australian, �you have to be Anglo and not look like me�. Despite this sense of social exclusion, the majority of my sample held hybrid migrant-Australian identities. I develop a threefold typology of the women�s identities, and I found that 13 women did not see themselves as Australian, 36 women saw themselves as partly-Australian, and one woman held an exclusively Australian identity. I argue that narratives of multiculturalism and Anglo-Australian identity influenced the women�s social construction of identity. Their belief that Australian identity was multicultural was at odds with their experiences of racism and their own self identities, and so I examine the women�s beliefs in reference to an �ideology of multiculturalism�. This ideology supported the women�s contribution to the nation as second generation migrants, and ultimately, they expressed an unwavering support for Australian multiculturalism.