This dissertation investigates the influence of GDR writer Gabriele (Kachold) Stötzer's visual and performance art on the texts published in her 1992 volume of experimental prose, grenzen los fremd gehen. Born in 1954, Stötzer is loosely associated with the experimental writers of the Prenzlauer Berg “Szene.” In the 1980s in Erfurt, she established the Künstlerinnengruppe, a performance group that focused on self-expression in the private spaces of apartments and self-made studios—painting, posing for photographs, creating amateur films, weaving, making pottery, and sewing clothes. I maintain that this coalition of women fashioned an indirect defiance to the GDR State by operating in arenas the Stasi did not conceive as political. As well, I argue that the techniques of bricolage—the spontaneous use of materials at hand—she devised to express that defiance that are employed in the group's visual art performances, are also central to Stötzer's textual production. Stötzer tosses together sentences built upon consonant and vowel sounds that play on meanings; she rejects the steps of revising and editing; and she uses “materials at hand”—especially the body. She uses those techniques to represent her wrenching experience of incarceration at the age of twenty-four and her ongoing discontent with the GDR. Stötzer eschews any optimistic view of the intact individual within socialism and reveals instead in her writing an exasperated figure that lacks crucial freedoms. In Chapter One I outline the prescribed tenets of socialist realism and their implementation in GDR practice and how Stötzer's texts resist them. In Chapters Two and Three I trace Stötzer's biography and her artistic production—especially with the Künstlerinnengruppe, showing how her art has always been informed by elements of bricolage. In Chapter Four I provide analyses of eight texts from grenzen los fremd gehen, particularly emphasizing their relationship to her visual and performance art. I conclude my dissertation by arguing that Stötzer's creative potential was catalyzed in very particular ways by the circumstances that reigned in the waning days of the GDR, so that her more recent post-Wende texts no longer display the experimental qualities that brought her acclaim before 1989.

This study examined moral reasoning used by nurses to resolve conflict and choice in the workplace. This study also focused on how nurses saw themselves as leaders and caregivers. Ten nurse leaders were purposively selected from a large urban acute care magnet hospital. In open-ended, semi-structured interviews, each participant discussed an actual workplace conflict that they experienced, the course of action taken, and evaluation. Nurse leaders also described themselves as leaders and as caregivers. Demographic data was gathered on age, sex, educational background and career positions. Two research questions were addressed in this study: How do nurse leaders respond to conflict and choice in the workplace? Does level of leadership influence response to conflict and choice? Interview data were analyzed using Carol Gilligan's protocol described in the Reading Guide (Brown et al. 1988). The results indicate that nurse leaders used justice and care voices to respond to conflict and choice in the workplace. Seven out of ten used both a justice and care voice. Three of the leaders responded with only one voice: two with only a care voice and one with only a justice voice. In this study, leadership level did not influence choice of moral voice in workplace conflict. Managers and executives both used justice and care in describing their dilemmas. Nurse leaders described three kinds of workplace conflict: organizational, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Four themes emerged as central to how nurse leaders view themselves: the importance of relationships in the leader role; power as a piece of the leader role; the leader as a team member; standards as guides to decision-making. Nurse leaders underscored the importance of the worksetting and its influence on nursing's ethic of care. Congruence of institutional philosophy, climate, and larger administrative presence with nursing's professional care values are the contextual influences cited by the nurse leaders.

Women have a longer life expectancy than men, yet there have been few studies exploring the multifaceted dimensions of successful aging among community-dwelling older women. In the present study, grounded theory methods were used to discover their subjective meaning of successful aging and the strategies older women use to age successfully. Participants included seventeen women between the ages of 73 and 104 residing independently in New England who described themselves as aging successfully. Data sources included tape-recorded interviews, telephone follow up calls, participant journals, and field notes. Using constant comparative data analysis, the basic social process of Transcendence in Successful Aging was discovered. The participants described experiencing individual causal conditions and characteristics that informed their selection of one of three paths of Transcendence in Successful Aging; sedulous transcendence, spiritual transcendence or sanguine transcendence. The general strategies used by these women to manage age and health related change and age successfully included accepting by being positive, surveying the options and following the path; adjusting, by charting the options, and acting by preserving interest and continuing involvement. The participants described successful aging strategies specific to each type of transcendence. The outcome of Transcendence in Successful Aging was identified as personal satisfaction with life course. Knowledge of the meaning and process of successful aging among community-dwelling older women is essential for understanding the strategies they use to manage age and health related change and age successfully. The results of this study have implications for education, practice and research. Insight into older women's personal meanings of successful aging and the strategies they use to age successfully will assist nurses and health care providers to support community-dwelling older women in the self-management of age and health related change while promoting their successful aging.

In the last decade, labor migration of women from the former Soviet Union has grown exponentially. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Moldova, where 1/3 of the population works abroad, most illegally, and where about 1/2 of these migrants are women transnationally "commuting" to work for 6 to 12 months at a time. This dissertation examines the effects of the neoliberal global economy in this region on women's migration and questions how notions of gender inform this new economy. Bridging ethnographies of postsocialism with those on migration and gender, and drawing upon poststructural feminist works, I show how shifting ideas about gender play a key role in the moral economies of supply and demand for these labor migrants, in the experience of this migration on the ground, and in state and organizational responses to it. I offer a comprehensive view of one particular migration pattern—(Gagauz) Moldovan women who work as domestics in Turkey—drawing on multi-sited and transnational ethnographic dissertation research and interviews conducted in 2004–5 with these migrant women at home and abroad, their village compatriots at home, their employers and employment agents in Istanbul, and employees of the foremost institution dealing with migrants in the region, the International Organization for Migration. I deploy Bourdieu's concept of social fields of values—here conceptualized as gendered moral economies—to show how notions about women, wealth, migration, and work play out in discursive practices at these sites, conditioning the experiences of this migration from these various perspectives and helping this illegal labor market to function. This dissertation also problemmatizes claims about 'postsocialist women' by specifying their experiences in terms of overlapping and various subjectivities. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on 'postsocialism' in this region and 'postsocialist women' as a special case of migrant women to identify problems and processes of neoliberal globalization that hold wider significance. In this, I am concerned with relating the common dilemmas of migrant women, the ambiguities of all female labors, and the complexity of women's agency.

Women make up a significant minority of the homeless population in the United States. This dissertation examines the social and health characteristics of homeless women, the data having been obtained from the National Health Care for the Homeless Program (HCH), sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Pew Memorial Trust. This program is designed to provide health care and social services to homeless people in 19 U.S. cities. The data are gleaned from medical and social service records on the entire HCH client population (over 20,000 individuals), and from a supplemental questionnaire completed on a sample of the HCH client's. The findings indicate that there are at least five types of homeless women in the HCH population. The first, and largest group includes the single, significantly mentally impaired women, most closely fitting the stereotype of the "bag lady." Two-thirds of this group are receiving government entitlements, but only one-half are receiving mental health counseling. Release from a mental institution is a reason for homelessness for nearly one-third of these women. The second group of women are the women with dependent children in their care. Only half of these women receive AFDC benefits, but they are in better physical health and are rated as having better chances at employment and finding housing than any other type of women. The very young, single women make up the third, and smallest, group of HCH women. Findings suggest that this group may be the most difficult to reach and to maintain contact with, given their low average number of contacts with the HCH program and the lack of information available in their files. The fourth type includes the women with adult family members but no dependent children. The adult support they were presumed to have appears to be of little benefit in their homeless state. The fifth type of women, single, with no significant mental impairment, no children, and no adult support, are by far the most deviant and addicted of any group. The implications of the findings are significant for both service providers and policy makers. Interventions for homeless women must be tailored to their specific problems, and can be guided by the health and social characteristics found here to be associated with each type of homeless woman.

This dissertation is an ethnography of communication, situated in the context of a feminist utopian community, that examines members’ use of communication and communicative embodiment to counter what they consider to be oppressive United States gender practices. By integrating speech codes theory and cultural discourse analysis with theories of the body and gender, I develop analyses of spoken and written language, normative language- and body-based communicative practices, and sensual experiences of the body. I argue that there are three key ways communication and communicative practices are used to counter gender oppression: the use of gender-neutral words, the “desensationalization” of the body, and egalitarian nudity practices. Additionally, I argue that “calm” communication, as a normative style of communicating on the farm, underprivileges both male and female members of color and of the working class. From the perspective of members, gender was understood to be a category distinct from sex and analyses demonstrated that sex as an identity was a factor in interpretations of gender performances. Sex identities were also necessary for community feminist practice. Communication practices in the community articulated with feminist, health, environmental, and egalitarian discourses to normalize forms of embodiment such as female shirtlessness and public urination to counter dominant U.S. forms. It was found that making sense of normative communication practices required a cultural understanding of how both spaces and bodies were constituted as public and private. Community spaces were understood by members to be either relatively public or private with the public spaces being the more regulated spaces. Members contested the meanings of bodies as public (and therefore able to be regulated) or private (and therefore not able to be regulated). Normative communication practices in the community indicated that members work to preserve boundaries between private bodies in public spaces by developing rules for privacy, confidentiality, and non-communication. Community feminist communicative practices were understood to be liberatory because (1) the small size of the community allowed members to co-create feminist discourses that resignified body parts and gendered identites and (2) the community provided a space in which women could embody feminist discourses as everyday, sensual performances. This study has implications for the theorizing of embodied verbal and nonverbal gender-based cultural communication practices and for understanding community-based counter discourses as well as sex and gender as cultural identities.

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This study was undertaken in order to explore the writing experiences of poor and working-class, non-professional women writers and the issues of power, self-esteem, and social class. The study was focused on this population because their writing experiences had not been investigated. The study was qualitative, having a naturalistic inquiry perspective and employing in-depth, phenomenological interviewing as a method of data collection. The population for the study were five white and five Black working-class and poor women, ages twenty to seventy-five. The data were collected in a series of three audio-taped interviews. Profiles of each woman were made from the transcripts of their interviews, and these were analyzed for emerging patterns. Issues of trustworthiness were addressed in order to avoid bias. The women exhibited powerful personal voices when writing journals and letters where they were able to express their emotions as well as get things done for family members or other people in like circumstances. They experienced self-esteem when writing personal letters, fiction, and poetry. When they first tried to share their public voice in school it was an overwhelming experience of powerlessness. However, they did report success with writing on the job, and their self-esteem was generally good when they talked about their advocacy writing. One group, members of an advocacy group for the elderly, was able to make significant changes in health care for the elderly. However, all of the women still had conflicting feelings about their experiences with public voice. One function of social class was that most of the women did not finish school. The wishes and dreams they had for their lives were not realized. The writing of poor and working-class women centered around the events in their daily lives, such as: letters to teachers, politicians, those in the health care system; journaling about events in their daily lives and writing poetry. Poor and working class women should write on topics connected with their life experiences. In order to overcome problems with writing, they need the support of each other collectively, both privately and publicly.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not there is any significant shift in mothers' stage levels, according to Gilligan's (1982) model of women's development, as a result of taking the course, "Developing Capable People". The research was developed from the narratives resulting from interviews that were examined by raters for stage assignment and empowerment statements. The results of the research are organized according to the five research questions. A demographic survey contributed other pertinent data. The sample was composed of 30 mothers in two communities in CT and MA who had taken the course from facilitators trained by the author of the course H. Stephen Glenn. The results of the research confirm that the majority of mothers reported that the course had changed their self-concept and impacted on the manner in which they related to others. Language changes were evident and the numbers of empowerment statements made confirmed the stage assigned to each mother. Statistical findings involved a chi-square analysis with a Cramer correlation coefficient to determine the extent of association between the stage assignment and the number of empowerment statements made. The association was significant. The results of the study indicate that when the mother is motivated, an in depth involvement examining interpersonal and intrapersonal skills can initiate a change in developmental level. Implications for future research are indicated with suggestions for expanding the content and context of parenting programs.