Blanche Ames Ames, an elite graduate of Smith College and a distinguished state and national leader in the woman suffrage and birth control causes, was one of a small cadre of educated women who, in the early 1900s, recast the iconography of political cartoons, long a means of discourse used only by men, to promote women's rights. In this, she was most unusual. Fortunately, because of her prominence, Ames's extensive family papers have been preserved in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. She has not slid into obscurity as other women political artists and reformers have done. As a result, Ames serves as a sort of template of how an elite woman chose to become publicly involved in issues she might have funded others to pursue and also how women cartoonists went about adapting the political cartoon to promote their goals. It becomes clear from studying her letters and diaries that Ames was an unusually logical, pragmatic and determined progressive feminist, involved and engaged, who preserved a sense of humor, of irony, of detachment that allowed her to persevere in her causes without fanaticism, while carving an autonomous place for herself in a world uncertain of the wisdom of women's rights. Part of Ames's success was that she was buoyed at each step of her life from prep school to the presidency of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts by her fascinating family, the founder of which was the brilliant and outrageous Civil War Gen. Benjamin "Beast" Butler. Ames's parents encouraged her education and allowed her a growing autonomy in which to learn to think and then to act for herself. After an early and difficult struggle for autonomy in her marriage, Blanche and her husband, Oakes Ames, became partners in a joint campaign to create a sustaining family life at their North Easton estate at Borderland, while allowing Oakes to pursue a distinguished career at Harvard and Blanche an equally distinguished career as a suffragist, a political cartoonist, botanical illustrator, painter and birth control reformer. Thus the study of the life of Blanche Ames Ames is not just one of individual artistic or political brilliance, but also of how that brilliance was nurtured, encouraged and sustained throughout the vicissitudes of a life defined by a desire for real social reform by a domestic support system that too often goes unrecognized. This family support system, along with Blanche Ames Ames's activism and achievements as a political cartoonist and a leader in the suffrage and the birth control fight, are the focus of this dissertation.

With the posthumous publication of Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf afforded her readers an intimate view of her childhood in late Victorian England. The signal event in that childhood was the death of Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen. By Woolfs own admission, her lost parent "obsessed" her until the completion of To the Lighthouse. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, which stresses the primacy of mother-child relations, and the more recent "identity theory" of Hans Lichtenstein, which postulates that one's "way of being" is dictated by early maternal experience, this study contends that Woolf's obsession never ends. Indeed, maternal loss, coupled with what Klein calls "the urge towards reparation," are central motivating factors in Woolf's continuing creative process. This reading considers the author's nine novels, in order to highlight Woolf's lifelong, recurrent "vision" of Julia Stephen. Woolf's vision is encoded in several symbolic variations of her "identity theme," including the use of the mother figure as writer, as moral progenitor, and as prognosticator of a twofold philosophy of resignation and melancholy. Virginia Woolf writes to recreate the lost figure of Julia Stephen, and to recapture the love denied by her mother's death.

Upon entering the male domain of higher education in the late nineteenth-century, college women challenged not only conservative beliefs about women's minds but also restrictive notions about the female body. By the 1920s, attending college had "become the thing to do." Using extensive primary research in college archives, this work examines female students' attitudes toward their bodies in the midst of this cultural transformation This social history makes clear that young women's attitudes toward their bodies developed in relation to a set of cultural discourses that were contested, historically specific, and continually mediated. To explore the impact of ideas about race, class, educational mission, and coeducation on women's attitudes toward their bodies, I analyzed Smith College, Spelman College, and Cornell University. Students' specific experiences were then compared to popular ideals of health, femininity, and female beauty. Prior to the early 1900s, local campus cultures shaped students' ideas about their bodies. At Smith and Cornell, in response to the feared effects of "mental work" on women's femininity and reproductive organs, efforts to prove female health included vigorous exercise, weight gain, and hearty eating. At Cornell, its controversial coeducational design compelled "coeds" to also demonstrate female propriety. For African American students at Spelman Seminary, post-Civil War efforts to counter racist stereotypes dominated bodily concerns. Spelman students resided outside the "protective," race-specific concerns that dominated discussions about white, middle-class women's reproductive health. Beginning in the 1910s, an emergent national student culture rooted in mass consumerism and the idealization of modern youth recast female students' body images. On all three campuses, students donned flapper fashions, bobbed their hair, conducted active mixed-sex social lives, and memorized new nutrition and home economics standards. Yet, even as campus cultures converged, students continued to mediate popular discourses, particularly in regard to dieting practices. While white women joined the "dieting craze," African American women at Spelman College did not.

There are growing numbers of women in the workforce, with increasing numbers of working mothers. The numbers of women with multiple role responsibilities, such as wife, mother and paid worker, is on the rise. To date, the multiple role literature reveals seemingly contradictory findings in regard to the impact of women's different role experiences on their overall well-being. Some suggest that the more roles that a woman occupies, the greater the likelihood that she will experience the harmful effects of role conflict, stress, depression, and even physical illness. Others suggest that the as women's number of roles increases, she may develop internal resources to 'buffer' against any potential negatives. Hence, these researchers find increasing roles related to higher self-esteem. The specific findings of the multiple role literature will be explicated in the review. The purpose of this study is to provide a phenomenological approach in order to derive meaning from the apparent discrepancy in the multiple role literature. Eighteen working mothers, between the ages of 35 and 50, volunteered to participate in in-depth interviews about their role experiences. Each of these women have been in the roles of wife, mother, and paid worker for at least five years. These middle-class, Caucasian women have at least two children living in their homes. Through the interview conversations, these women described what it means to be a multiple role woman, identified the benefits and costs of their life roles, and discussed how they negotiate and manage their role responsibilities. A cognitive developmental framework, Self-Knowledge Theory, was used to explore the processes and meanings of women's role experiences. The Experience Recall Test (ERT2) combined with an in-depth interview was used to elicit how certain women make meaning of their multiple role experiences. Results were analyzed both thematically and developmentally, with particular attention to the influential variables identified in the multiple roles literature. This data supports the premise that the perceived quality of the multiple role experience is related to whether the perceived outcomes will be more positive or negative. This project also suggests that self-knowledge capacity impacts how people experience, understand and describe the quality of their role experiences. As the stage of self-knowledge increases, the quality of role experiences is described with greater personal agency, more breadth and depth, and more insight into the relationship between inner states and outside experiences. Higher self-knowledge stage is associated with a greater utilization of tools for managing role conflict, a lower frequency of reported distress, and a more sophisticated, systematic approach to negotiating conflict with their partners. The findings of this project informs future interventions for the growing numbers of working women. Employee assistance programs, mentoring programs, family support services, higher education support services, and other resources for multiple role women benefit from the findings of this study.

Using a feminist poststructuralist framework, "the self," language, gender, writing, and schooling are retheorized in this study. An undergraduate course focused on developing thinking in writing was taught to nine female students. The intent of the study was to learn more about writing as an active socio-cultural site where writers could be found negotiating their ways through networks of power relations. Data were gathered to provide a description of the content and process of the course and the creative space it provided for students to develop their own writing practices; to examine subjectivity in flux and how writing came to influence it; and to consider the students' thinking as conveyed in their writing in terms of its discursive content. Several significant features of the course emerged. Most importantly the course was structured around an array of intertextual layers, including continual opportunity for writers to hear each other's in-class writing and feminist readings. Other aspects that are discussed include the teacher-student relationship and the provocative edge that emerged in the course by setting aside a more traditional disciplinary focus and dramatically increasing polyvocality. The writing of two students across the semester is examined in-depth. Feminist poststructuralist theorists describe subjectivity as pieced together, as in process, and under construction. By looking at the students' writing, these features were found but from the point of view of lived subjectivity. Using Foucault's theory of discourses as a starting point, the following content was discovered in the students' writing and is explored as a function of discourse: struggles within heterosexual relationships; preoccupation with the female body; and New Age Thinking. The intertextual layers of the course together offered these female student writers an alternative version of the social world. The writing did not bring the students to any definitive point, but rather it became a way for each to articulate and follow her own movement in and out of struggle. These writers negotiated their way through these relations of power at the same time that a new subject position--that of female thinker/writer--presented itself through the course structure.

During the past two decades women have entered the workforce in record numbers; they currently comprise nearly 48% of the workforce. Although their presence has been felt in occupations that have been traditionally held by men, their numbers remain concentrated in occupations that have been traditionally held by females. Using a grounded theory approach, this qualitative research looked at women's career decision-making to see to what extent marriage and family issues played a role in their career decisions. Although previous research has focused on such factors as personal characteristics and parent-child relationships as they relate to women's choices of traditional or nontraditional occupations, few studies have explored the relationship of women's career choices and potential marriage and family. Through a comparison of women who are currently working in traditional occupations with women who are working in nontraditional fields, this study explored women's perceptions of balancing future marriage and family roles; the role that sequencing plays in future role balancing; and the impact of women's concerns about future role balancing on their choices of traditional or nontraditional careers. Ten college graduates who chose traditional occupations and ten graduates who chose nontraditional occupations were interviewed. The tape recorded interviews were transcribed, marked, labeled, and grouped in categories. Passages within each category were then reviewed to synthesize the material. The final part of the process involved a review of the interview material in order to identify new learning regarding the impact of potential marriage and family on women's career decisions. The themes identified through the interviews are consistent with the summary of major barriers to and facilitators of women's career choices that are identified by Betz (1994). Those participants who chose to major in fields that are nontraditional for women indicated that they chose those fields based on their skills and interests and believed that they could "fit" family into their careers. All of the participants discussed the need for flexibility of schedules to accommodate roles associated with marriage and family.

This dissertation is a historical analysis of politics of state building and health in Palestine and in Jordan. The study contributes to contextual studies of constructions of gender and health as a central aspect of modern nation-state building in the twentieth century. Processes of modern state building in the region of Bilad al Sham brought about significant transformations in definitions of health, development of health care systems, and medical practices. The study examines three aspects of these changes. First is a gender analysis of ways in which science and medicine contributed to colonialist processes of state building. Second is an exploration of particular effects of war, displacement and expulsion, and changing socioeconomic political conditions, on Palestinian women's health. Third, the study looks at the significance for Palestinian women healers, midwives, and others, of changes introduced in the health system by the British in Palestine and in Transjordan and by UNRWA in refugee camps in Jordan. A study of women and health requires a shift in dominant historiographical approaches. This dissertation develops an analytic framework that takes as its starting point questions raised by feminist epistemology. In the period addressed, the struggle for control of health systems is also a struggle for control of knowledge making. Aspects of this struggle disadvantage and invalidate knowledge bases of women healers. A central question of the study is: how do specific Palestinian refugee women construct meaning and authorize knowledge? This dissertation examines the particular relationship of Palestinian women to historical processes of war, citizenship in the modern nation-state, refugee status, relief efforts, and development processes. In addition to archival research, findings are based on oral histories with Palestinian women refugees in Jordan in order to understand how they interpret history and construct health. Findings show that Palestinian women represented in this study construct health as a socio-political phenomenon, rather than in purely biological terms, and that health is a metaphor for homecoming. Health concerns are central to Palestinian women's resistance: nationalist struggle is a historical reality informing their struggle for self definition, a struggle central to defining health. Oral histories represented in this study clarify the need to address Palestinian women's health in the context of gender, race, class politics dominating the region.

One of the early leaders of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) was working-class woman and veteran trade union organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (1864-1943). When she joined with several other trade unionists and social reformers to form, in 1903, the WTUL, Kenney O'Sullivan had already spent more than a dozen years attempting to forge a coalition between male-dominated organized labor and the social reform community in which Progressive-minded women played a vital role. Throughout, her primary goal was to improve the conditions of labor for women such as herself, primarily through trade unionism. In the early 1890s, then Mary Kenney was living in Chicago, working as a bookbinder. Frustrated by low wages and poor working conditions, Kenney formed Women's Bookbindery Union No. 1 as early as 1890. She went on to organize women in other trades, utilizing her connections with both the Chicago labor community and the social reform community, especially with the Chicago settlement, Hull House, and its founder, Jane Addams. In 1892, Kenney was briefly appointed the first national woman organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). After her 1894 marriage to Boston labor leader, John O'Sullivan, and now known as Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, she would continue her trade union activity in that city, repeating the pattern of coalition building by relying upon both the Boston Central Labor Union and the local social reform community, particularly the settlement Denison House and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. While she had some success in organizing women workers, Kenney O'Sullivan's personal efforts at coalition building were often frustrated by the sharp class and gender distinctions of her day. In 1903, she joined several other trade unionists and social reformers in an attempt to institutionalize this fragile coalition of labor and social reform through the formation of the WTUL. The WTUL, on the national level and through its principal local branches in New York, Chicago and Boston, sought to cooperate with the AFL in organizing wage-earning women into trade unions, as well as provide education and agitate for protective labor legislation. It also attempted to bridge the gap between working-class and reformist middle-class women. Kenney O'Sullivan was a leader in both the National WTUL and its Boston branch and, as such, she attempted to insure that the WTUL concentrate on trade unionism for women. The possibilities and limits of doing so within a cross-class, cross-gender alliance are especially evident during the WTUL's early years. From the Fall River strike of 1904 to the Lawrence strike of 1912, the efforts of Kenney O'Sullivan and other like-minded women continued to be frustrated by the class and gender contraints of this period. This dissertation attempts to reveal the complexity of those gender and class constraints during the Progressive Era by focusing on the efforts of Mary Kenney O'Sullivan at organizing wage-earning women.

The dissertation investigates the embodied experience of fatness in spaces between subjectivity and subjection on one Internet newsgroup and one listserve. Literature on identity politics, computer-mediated communication, and the social construction of the body is reviewed as it relates to the possibility of individuals with shared characteristics and/or interests utilizing technology to transform meanings for their corporeal experience. Using the methods of critical ethnography, I provide an interpretation of the ways in which site participants fluidly invoke and reject dominant meanings for the fat body within their project of resignifying fat bodies. Emergent themes include narratives of personal fat experience, comparisons of fit within cyberspace and "real" space, discussions of the pleasures and pains of fat bodies, attempts at guarding borders of identity and community, explorations of the mutual constitution of identities and oppressions, and finally, strategies for reconceptualizing fat.

Popular novels by women during the Weimar Republic have been accused of creating a discursive climate among women that glorified motherhood and encouraged political apathy. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that, on the contrary, these novels contained important social criticism and provided advice and role models for women. I also show that critics of these novels have misunderstood the discourse of "organized motherhood," long used within the women's movement to encourage women's entry into the public sphere in the name of civic activism. After situating the texts historically and culturally, my analysis of four texts: Stud. chem. Helene Willfuer by Vicki Baum, Die mit den 1000 Kindern, by Clara Viebig, Die Madels aus der Fadengasse, by Lisbeth Burger, and Thea von Harbou's Metropolis--works all influenced by the philosophies of the bourgeois women's movement--demonstrates a concept of women's role common to authors of the Weimar Republic's older generation. Here, women have the inherent potential to redeem and reform a society damaged by war and modern civilization through their entry into the public sphere and civic activism. Works of Weimar's younger generation of authors--Gilgi-eine von uns and Das kunstseidene Madchen, by Irmgard Keun, Die Mehlreisende Frieda Geier, by Marieluise Fleisser, Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm, by Gabriele Tergit, and Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen, by Christa Anita Bruck--were written mainly in a neusachliche style by authors who did not experience the pre-war fight for women's rights but instead came of age during the harsh economic and social realities of the Weimar Republic. These works, devoid of bourgois utopias, instead contain strategies for individual survival and bitter criticism against modern conditions for women. Then as now, the personal was political for women. A novelistic description of the hardships suffered due to an unwanted pregnancy was as surely a protest against existing legislation and social conditions for women as a political speech--and one more likely to be accessed and understood by other women. Rather than contributing to political apathy, these novels criticized political and social realities, intervening into discourses about modern women and their role within society.