This dissertation examines the role of Afro-Americans in the U.S. birth control movement in the years between 1918-1942. It argues that Afro-Americans of all classes not only supported the idea of birth control but were also a significant force in shaping the national birth control debate, educating their communities and delivering contraceptives to women. During a period when white advocacy of birth control became increasingly conservative, black birth control advocates advanced a broad, often radical, rationale for contraception. While the black and white communities often worked together to provide services to black women in many locations throughout the country, Afro-Americans worked independently of the national, white dominated birth control organizations. Additionally, the organizational strategies of Afro-American birth control advocates were found to be different from those of their white counterparts. The differences were due, in part, to Afro-Americans' strong community orientation, their belief in each person's right to good health and that the state should provide health care, and their nonhierarchial approach to the "professional's" relationship with other health providers and birth control users.

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This dispensation explores Rose Auslander's poetics through her revision of traditional myths. In many of her short poems, the 20th-century Austrian-Jewish poet is concerned with the creative process. Turning to female predecessors, she revises the role of Eve in the Biblical creation myth and uses images of an archetypal cosmic mother figure and of the Shekhina, a feminine emanation of the divine in the Kabbalah. Out of these revisions of mythology arises a new role for the woman poet, and the maternal imagery leads to an understanding of poetics which I call relational poetics. In close readings, I trace the development from the revision of Eve to the cosmic mother and to a maternal language. Eve is seen as a co-creative female power next to the divine forces of creation. Her transgression makes her a role model for the woman poet, rather than marking her as the archetypal seductive woman. She turns the knowledge acquired from the forbidden tree into the source of poetry which she shares with the world. Thus, she becomes a point of departure for Auslander and provides a bridge to the mother figure. In the mother poems, verbal creation is replaced by water and milk as the medium of creation, and Auslander shifts from the creative competition between God and Eve to the struggle between the cosmic mother and her human daughter. Finally, language takes on the mother role. Maternal voices become part of Auslander's search for a new language as images of the symbiotic relationship between the mother and the child in her womb provide access to these voices. Through the image of giving birth, female reproduction becomes a metaphor for poetic productivity. Auslander's relational poetics thus derives from the close relationship between mother and daughter. The boundaries between self and other are fluid, and in a constant process of exchange, poet and poem create each other anew with every word.

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Nursing has been identified as one of the most sex-typed occupations in the United States. Moreover, nurses typically practice in settings where there is an unequal distribution of power. These conditions make their workplace a particularly ripe environment for sexual harassment, yet some research literature suggests that sexual innuendo and even some touching is "normal" for these workers, concluding that sexual harassment does not happen to nurses. However, much of sexual harassment is embedded in gestures that are grounded and constructed both socially and culturally, implying that definitions of harassment are dependent on the context in which the behaviors occur. In this qualitative study, the term--sexual harassment--was not used at the outset of the semi-structured interviews that were conducted with thirty-seven working female nurses. Instead, respondents were asked to describe their job-related sexual advances, after which they determined how and under what circumstances they would (or would not) affix the sexual harassment label. This design allowed for analysis of the interpretive grounds under which definitions of sexual harassment are made and is predicated on the notion that harassment is not merely a list of proscribed behaviors but a range of actions subject to interpretation and constrained by factors which may be internal to the job. The respondents furnished details on 129 unwanted or unpleasant sexual acts. Yet the majority of the group equivocated when applying the label to those actions they had directly experienced. Other findings revealed that they expected that they would be sexually mistreated by male doctors and patients because they were female nurses--the treatment accorded them was "part of the job," thus their experiences were rendered invisible. Those who accept the current social definition of sexual harassment might argue that the nurses' reactions failed to appropriately label these experiences. However, the nurses' own interpretations of their situations mean that these acts and the responses available to them are constructed in light of their particular occupational situation where gender and the job are fused.

The myth of Atalanta represents the struggle for women athletes to gain legitimacy. Atalanta has strength and power that are foiled by heterosexual conventions of the sex/gender system. Thus, she functions as a metaphor of possibility and dashed hopes. This study explains the persistence of heterosexist representation of female athletes in popular press by exploring the linkages among sport, gender, and technology. Such an exploration is situated amid a body of interdisciplinary research that explores sport as a social and cultural form. As a Feminist Mass Communication study, this project explores the textual strategies employed by producers of mass-mediated content, as well as the institutional power relationships that secure them; and finally, for the exploration of the ways in which gendered ideologies are rearticulated in coverage of female athleticism. The study addresses four research questions: (a) What forms of femininity have been valorized or eclipsed in popular representations of female athleticism? (b) When and in what contexts is female muscularity addressed in the popular press? (c) What strategies does the popular press use to naturalize differences between male and female athletes? (d) Are there moments in the popular press coverage of female athleticism where the relationship between sport and gender is, or potentially could have been, transformed? To answer these questions I conduct a frame analysis on 140 articles from the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, 1921–1996. Frame analysis allows for the examination of the stability and/or change of mediated representations over time, the organizational practices of media and the representations they engender, and the politics of gender. I conclude that femininity as constituted by the popular press has limited potentially transformative moments in sport and athleticism. Furthermore, the origins of female athleticism are inaccurately represented in media, resulting in a collective amnesia about female athletic experiences. Finally, technological discourse embodies the masculinist values replicated not only in sport media, but also in the more general and popular representation of female athleticism.

Homeownership is widely considered to be of benefit both to the individual household and to society at large. Yet a number of obstacles stand in the way of successful homeownership for many women. Chief among them are familial status discrimination in mortgage lending and lack of sufficient income. This dissertation analyzes mortgage lending data from Boston and finds that women, more than men, when applying for mortgages are disadvantaged by having children. Furthermore, white working mothers are disadvantaged more than their stay-at-home counterparts, while black or Hispanic stay-at-home mothers are disadvantaged more than their working counterparts. Alternative types of tenure such as community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives are discussed as viable options for women who are underserved by conventional markets. A survey of members of eighteen such groups provides support for this conclusion.