This anthology of nineteenth-century women’s regional fiction, written in the mode of canon revision, explores how persistent stereotypes of Appalachian women originated. These stereotypes are not merely identified but are also considered in the context of women’s studies. Works by the following six authors are included: Elizabeth Appleton, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sherwood Bonner, and Mary Noailles Murfree. Topics addressed include nineteenth-century women as authors, the influence of northern literary magazines on regional writing, the image of the Appalachian woman in fiction, and the critical evaluation of primary texts. Original work required for the completion of a master’s thesis comes by way of a thirty-page analytical introduction, six biographical headnote entries, and an extended bibliography of primary works by Appalachian women writers.

This study investigated the following key areas: women in the public sphere, women in the private sphere, and how media portrayals in these areas portray women's progress in obtaining executive positions in corporate America. Topics of interest include wage differences between genders, executive placement, and attainment in board positions throughout Corporate America.

This quantitative investigation focused on women high school principals at Jewish secular schools throughout Israel. Despite challenges, Israeli women have succeeded in obtaining over half of the principal positions at Jewish secular high schools, but the degree to which there is equal gender access to leadership roles in the school system remains unclear. This study examined whether there was clustering of women in high school principal positions in certain geographical areas, the process by which these women obtained principal positions, what obstacles the women overcame, and an analysis if respondents differed by district in terms of their career paths, career breaks, and military experiences. This study showed that although women are in principal positions in equal or greater numbers as men depending on the region, women had a different path than men to obtain this role. The key findings in this research were that 89.5% of women principals were able to return at the same level prior to taking a career break and that 31.8% of female principals had male mentors.

Late-adolescent African American students face unique difficulties on their journey to womanhood. As members of a double minority (i.e., African American and female) (Jean & Feagin, 1998), certain limiting stereotypes relevant to both race and gender pose challenges to these students. They must overcome these challenges in order to excel within the various and changing environments they move through on a daily basis (hooks, 1981, 1994). Within the context of social justice, this dissertation provides insight into the role that language and literacy practices play to help enable the positive and affirming development of self-hood of African American college freshmen. This research is qualitative and employs critical narrative inquiry to analyze data collected from six academically high-achieving African American female freshmen college students attending Ivy League, Historically Black Colleges, and private and state universities in the United States.

Recent studies have shown that a number of researchers have turned to the concept of the interpretive community to explain how audiences interpret the media within the context of their everyday experiences (Biocca, 1989; Gunter, 1989; Lindlof, 1989, 1992; Radway, 1984; Schrøder, 1994). D. A. Stout (1993) conducted a study that discovered three interpretive communities among LDS women who watch television, establishing that interpretive communities do exist among religious media audiences.In 1994, K. Schrøder showed that the interpretive community can be further understood by taking a "social semiotic" approach to analyzing interpretive community members' social interaction with other communities. This study explored the nature of the interpretive community by using qualitative methodology and a social semiotic approach to analyze the social interaction patterns of Stout's (1993) interpretive communities of LDS women who watch television.

This dissertation used queer rhetoric as a lens for studying queering gender norms on Instagram by using Lady Gaga's, Nicki Minaj's, and fan posts as case studies. The research considers how celebrities may use social media, like Instagram, for queering gender norms, and what this might look like. This research also aimed to better understand if and how fans may take up celebrities' efforts at queering gender norms and, in turn, queer gender norms in their own Instagram posts where they tag Gaga or Minaj. To conduct this research, I took a multimodal methodological approach and collected and coded 1,000 posts from Gaga and Minaj, respectively, and 1,000 posts that used the hashtag Gaga and another 1,000 posts that used the hashtag Minaj. My findings suggested that Gaga and Minaj do not engage in the queering of gender norms as frequently as anticipated, and when they do it is often in relation to their public, staged performances as musicians. Furthermore, Gaga also spoke on issues relating to gender and marriage equality whereas Minaj also spoke on issues relating to racial equality. The data collected on fans was inconclusive in part because of the large number of spam posts and also because, without interviewing fans, it was difficult to discern whether they were taking up celebrity messages in their posts given information shared in the photo and in the caption. However, I was able to note that, most often, fans were engaging with celebrities by expressing admiration. This research is useful for considering how gender performance manifests on Instagram, and possible ways celebrities can utilize Instagram to queer gender norms as well as promote other messages. With regard to fan posts, I argue for continued research in ways to support fans becoming critical rather than passive consumers of celebrity culture.

Erotic stimuli in the consumer's environment can lead to affective responses, which produce traits such as erotophobia-erotophilia and lovestyle. Individuals can be classified as one of six main lovestyles, as well as erotophilic (having a positive view towards sexual behaviors) or erotophobic (having a negative view towards sexual behaviors). A person's style of loving may affect which products he or she perceives to be helpful in attracting potential sexual and relationship partners. I investigated this possible correlation by examining (1) whether each lovestyle is erotophilic or erotophobic and (2) which products erotophilic individuals are more likely to buy as opposed to those that erotophobic individuals are more likely to buy in (a) attracting sexual partners and (b) attracting relationship partners. The study indicated that lovestyle did not predict erotophobia-erotophilia, nor did the erotophobiaerotophilia trait predict which products an individual bought. However, a significant relationship was found between gender and erotophobia-erotophilia, as well as between gender and many of the products. Overall, the findings suggest that gender is the biggest predictor of what products were perceived as helpful in attracting sexual and relationship partners.

Among many peoples in the Far East, masuline domination has been flagrantly exhibited. Women have been, until lately, relegated to the background in social, economic, and political affairs. By their customs, traditions, and laws, most women have been held in utter subjection to the men. That women in the Philippines are on an equal footing with the men socially, economically, and politically would seem incredible to people in the Wast who grow up with the conception that Oriental women lead secluded and downtrodden lives and are generally slaves to the man. In their opinion, the Philippines, being in the Far East and exposed to the Oriental ideal which renders woman inferior to man, would naturally produce women who are repressed, degraded, and forever dependent upon the male. This is far from the truth. Quite the contrary, even before the Spaniards set foot on Philippine soil, the Filipino woman enjoyed a relatively high position in so- ciety as well as in the economic and political life of the people; and, although her position suffered somewhat a setback during the Spanish rule, it grow in importance as the years rolled by. Today the Filipino woman is fully emancipated; she has achieved equality with men.

Since the publication of Laura Mulvey's influential article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' in which she identifies the pervasive presence of the male gaze in Hollywood cinema, scholars have sought to account for the female spectator in her paradigm of gendered vision. This thesis suggests that women writers have long debated the problem of the female spectator through literary depictions of the female artist. Women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Johnstone, and Virginia Woolf'recognized the power of the woman artist to undermine the trope of the male gazing subject and a passive female object. Examining Phelps's The Story of Avis (1877), Johnstone's A Sunless Heart (1894), and Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) illustrates how the woman artist's active vision disrupts Mulvey's 'active/male and passive/female' binary of vision. Phelps's painter-heroine Avis destabilizes the power of the male gaze not only by exerting her own vision, but also by acting as an active object to manipulate the way she is seen. Johnstone uses artist Gasparine to demonstrate the dangers of vision shaped by either aesthetic or political conventions, suggesting that even feminist idealism can promote the objectification of its heroines. Finally, Woolf redefines the terms of objectification through painter Lily Briscoe, whose vision imbues material objects with subjectivity, thereby going beyond the boundaries between male and female to blur the distinction between subject and object. Through their novels, Phelps, Johnstone, and Woolf suggest that depictions of human experience need to be radically re-thought in order to adequately represent the complexity of subjectivity.

As people become aware that society treats women unfairly, they also perceive related shortcomings in the way that Modern English references women. For example, many have objected to the so-called generic he, the third-person masculine pronoun employed to refer to a person of unknown gender, and provided several alternatives, few of which have been widely adopted. Nonetheless, change is evident in the case of they becoming an increasingly common solution to refer to a person of unidentified gender. The intentional reform of the Modern English language, both in the past and present, has been a result of people's reactions to what is often perceived as a bias or a deficiency with what is possible to say given the words at their disposal. The rhetorical significance of reform is profound, and scholars continually broach the subject from the perspective of different disciplines. Explored here are the approaches of three of those fields, feminism, linguistics, and rhetoric; how each reacts to and even influences reform is an important part of the study. What is evident is that, regardless of the particular field, reform remains a force of change, even while it may not be broadly recognized. Further, traditional grammatical rules provide an insufficient means for tackling inequalities in Modern English, and are in part responsible for such imbalance. As such, writers must be aware of the present expectations of their audience and the situation of particular words.