The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, or the Shakers, are a small progressive communal religious group founded in the mid-eighteenth century by a woman named Ann Lee. This thesis follows the stories told about Ann Lee by the Shakers throughout their history and documents how the changing narratives reflect the changing culture of Shakerism. As a result of being both a progressive and a communal religious society, the Shakers faced the dilemma of maintaining their religious core while maintaining a progressive stance that was consistent with the dominant culture from which they strived to separate themselves. This thesis argues that the Shakers used the static form of the written narrative to balance and maintain the essential nature of Shakerism, threatened by increased interaction with American mainstream society.

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This thesis examines the fiction of Neil Bartlett, Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst, considering how they write missing voices of sexuality, gender and class back into history through re-imagining the city space. It examines the ways in which traditional, linear narratives and the notion of objectivity in historical discourse are challenged when history is presented through fiction.Waters, Bartlett and Hollinghurst are writing the past from the perspective of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, both employing and subverting traditional narrative genres. They all depict London as a symbolic, liminal space which allows for the voices of marginalized groups to flourish. Their London is a physical but also an imagined city, both grand and squalid, where the official boundaries between public and private space are often blurred.Through depicting their protagonists mapping their own ways around London, the authors all disrupt and destabilize traditional accounts of past events and city dwellers, foregrounding the imagination in the re-telling of history‘s excluded stories.

In this essay, the concern is feminism in the writings of the two revolutionary women, Germaine de Stael, who lived and wrote during the French revolutionary era, and Ding Ling, who lived and wrote during the Chinese Communist revolutionary era. The main theme of the essay is to determine whether the feminism in their work is of a similar nature despite the vast differences in the times and places in which they each lived. Concomitantly, the theme is also an attempt to discover through such similarities if feminism is of a universal nature. Through biographical sketches and analysis of selected works, the two women are compared within their historical context. The conclusion is, despite many differences in their lives and works, there are significant similarities which seem to indicate that many aspects of feminism do indeed cross lines of time and space.

Christine Jorgensen is the first known American citizen undergo sexual reassignment surgery. After her medical operations in Denmark in 1952, during which George Jorgensen Jr., a twenty-six year old man from the Bronx, New York, became Christine Jorgensen, an attractive, feminine woman, Jorgensen returned home to face the curiosity and scrutiny of the American public. As the “first celebrity transsexual," Jorgensen sparked public controversy by questioning the gender expectations that structured society in mid-twentieth century America. Jorgensen’s gender presentation closely aligned to the idealized standards of womanhood reinforced by institutional forces during the 1950s. Due to the amount of public scrutiny she faced after her transition, Jorgensen had to conform to these expectations entirely in order to achieve social acceptance. Examining Jorgensen’s gender expression critically exposes the social limits for expression of gender as well as what forces were responsible for placing these limits on women.

Diese Dissertation bietet eine Darstellung und Analyse der Handlungsfelder serbischer Frauen. Dabei werden die Frauenbildung, das Engagement von Frauen in sozialkaritativen und patriotischen Frauenvereinen, sowie ihre Teilnahme an den zwischen 1876 und 1918 geführten „Befreiungskriegen“ thematisiert. Das Problemfeld von Nation und Geschlecht ist für Serbien fast völlig unbearbeitet. Die vorliegende Untersuchung geht den folgenden Fragen nach: Wie partizipierten Serbinnen am Prozess der Nations- und Nationalstaatsbildung? Welche Weiblichkeits- und Männlichkeitsbilder wurden im Nationsbildungsprozess verwendet? Auf welche Art und Weise partizipierten sie an den Kriegen und unterstützten das Militär? Wie wirkte sich der „Große Krieg“ auf die Geschlechterordnung in Serbien bzw. Jugoslawien aus? Da die für Frauen zentralen politischen, kulturellen und ökonomischen Wandlungsprozesse im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft der Städte stattgefunden haben, konzentriert sich auch diese Darstellung auf den städtischen Raum und seine Bewohnerinnen. Das bäuerlich-ländliche Frauenleben wird nur kurz angerissen. Die Arbeit nimmt den weiblichen Gruppenbildungsprozess in den Blick, der innerhalb einer schmalen bürgerlichen Schicht stattfand. In den westeuropäischen Ländern entstanden die ersten Frauenvereinigungen am Ende des 18. bzw. zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts. Serbien, dessen Bevölkerung mehrheitlich lese- und schreibunkundig war und von einer ländlichen Subsistenzwirtschaft lebte, folgte mit einer zeitlichen Verzögerung von mehreren Jahrzehnten. Um 1900 war in allen diesen Ländern ein dichtes Netz unterschiedlichster Frauenvereine anzutreffen. Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts stieg auch in Serbien die Zahl der Frauenvereine, die sich in einem Dachverband zusammenschlossen. Dieser Bund trat den internationalen Frauenorganisationen bei.

In Russia today, conservative views about gender are often promoted through reference to the past, to show that supposedly ‘traditional’ gender roles are intrinsic to Russian history. Frequently, this idea is upheld in scholarship. My work explores the historicity of commonly held assumptions about gender. This dissertation focusses on gender and sexuality in Russia from the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. It shows that ideas about what constituted a virtuous marriage were established by reference to ideas about brotherhood. Brotherhood here refers not to biological siblings, but to a church rite of ‘spiritual brotherhood’ known in Russian as bratotvorenie. This rite has not been studied in any depth before. Based on archival work, this dissertation offers a detailed account of the tradition in Russia until its ban in 1650, when it was prohibited by leading ecclesiastical figures for being too like marriage. One churchman complained: ‘The priest, joining together these two men, unites them in matrimony’. The dissertation shows that bratotvorenie was conceived of in premodern Russia as a form of same-sex union, and that it was through banning this tradition that churchmen came to express in a coherent way which kinds of partnership were legitimate and why. The first chapter challenges the idea that marriage was always a monogamous union between a man and a woman for the creation of children, an idea that is often encountered in academic literature on Russian marriage history. It shows that the church rite of marriage was edited in Russia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ideas about the sacramental nature of marriage changed. The second chapter builds on these observations, suggesting that marriage and ‘spiritual brotherhood’ were understood as analogous in the premodern period. The final two chapters look at depictions of marriage and brotherhood in hagiography and iconography respectively. They focus on Petr and Fevroniia, the first married couple to be canonised in Russia in 1547. In 2008, their feast day was reworked into a state festival called the ‘Day of Family, Love and Fidelity’, now widely celebrated across Russia. Petr and Fevroniia have been cast as the patron saints of so-called ‘traditional moral-spiritual values’. This view is generally upheld in existent scholarship on the saints. This dissertation responds to the way the saints are being represented today, arguing that they were initially venerated for subverting normative ideas about gender and sexuality—that they were queer. What is more, their veneration paralleled the veneration of holy brothers. Their hagiography seems to have been based on the Life of a monastic brotherhood, and icons depicting Petr and Fevroniia standardly showed them in monastic robes. Focussing on marriage and brotherhood in premodern Russia, each chapter of this dissertation challenges a preconceived idea about the immutability of supposedly ‘traditional’ gender roles in Russian history.

<p> This dissertation explored Korean mass politics through neighborhood associations from the late 1930s to 1960s, defining them as a nationwide organization for state-led mass campaigns. They carried the state-led mass programs with three different names under three different state powers -Patriotic NAs by the colonial government and U.S. occupational government, Citizens NAs under the Rhee regime and Reconstruction NAs under Park Chung Hee. Putting the wartime colonial period, the post liberation period and the growing cold war period up to the early 1960s together into the category of "times of state-led movements," this dissertation argued that the three types of NAs were a nodal point to shape and cement two different images of the Korean state: a political authoritarian regime, although efficient in decision-making processes as well as effective in policy-implementation processes. It also claimed that state-led movements descended into the "New Community Movement" in the 1970s, the most successful economic modernization movements led by the South Korean government. </p><p> The beginning of a new type of movement, the state-led movement, arose in the early 1930s when Japan pushed its territorial extension. The colonial government, desperate to reshape Korean society in a way that was proper to the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere and wartime mobilization, revised its mechanism of rule dependent on an alliance with a minority of the dominant class and tried to establish a contact with the Korean masses. Its historical expression was the "social indoctrination movement" and the National Spiritual General Mobilization Movement. Patriotic NAs, a modification of Korean pre-modern practice, were the institutional realization of the new mechanism. To put down diverse tensions within a NA, patriarchal gatherings made up of a male headman and male heads of household were set up. </p><p> Central to their campaigns&mdash;rice collection, saving, daily use of Japanese at home, the ration programs and demographic survey for military drafts&mdash;was the diverse interpretation of family: the actual place for residence and everyday lives, a symbolic place for consumption and private lives, and a gendered place as a domestic female sphere. The weakest links of the imperial patriarchal family ideology were the demands of equal political rights and the growing participation of women. They truly puzzled the colonial government which wanted to keep its autonomy from the Japanese government and to involve Korean women in Patriotic NAs under the patriarchal authority of male headmen. </p><p> The drastic demographic move after liberation, when at least two million Korean repatriates who had been displaced by the wartime mobilization and returned from Japan and Manchuria, made both the shortage of rice and inflation worse. It led the U.S. military occupational government not only to give up their free market economy, but also to use Patriotic NAs for economic control&mdash;rice rationing and the elimination of "ghost" populations. Although the re-use of NAs reminiscent of previous colonial mobilization efforts brought backlash based on anti-Japanese sentiment, the desperation over rice control brought passive but widespread acceptance amongst Koreans. </p><p> Whilst renaming Patriotic NAs as Citizens NA for the post-Korean War recovery projects in the name of "apolitical" national movements and for the assistance of local administration, the South Korean government strove to give it historical legitimacy and to define it as a liberal democratic institution. They identified its historical origins in Korean pre-modern practices to erase colonial traces, and at the same time they claimed that Citizens NAs would enhance communication between local Koreans and the government. After the pitched political battle in the National Congress in 1957, Citizens NAs got legal status in the Local Autonomy Law. The largest vulnerability to Citizens NAs lied in their relation to politics. While leading "apolitical" national movements as well as assisting with local administration tasks, they were misused in elections. Consequently, they were widely viewed as an anti-democratic institution because they violated the freedom of association guaranteed by the Constitution and undermined local autonomous bodies. In the end, they lost their legal status in Local Autonomy Law, with Rhee regime collapsed. </p><p> When Park Chung Hee succeeded in his military coup in 1961, he resuscitated NAs in the name of Reconstruction NAs for the "Reconstruction" movement with the priority being placed on economic development. However, civilians were against the re-use of NAs, with the notion that the governments politically abused them. Finally, the arbitrary link between state power and the NAs waned throughout the 1960s, passing its baton to the "New Community Movement" which began in 1971and swept through Korean society until the 1980s. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)</p>

<p> The purpose of this paper is to explore medieval gender roles through the discourse and conduct of warfare. Some modern historians such as John Keegan have maintained that medieval warfare was a masculine activity that precluded female participation in all but the most exceptional cases. Megan McLaughlin asserted that the change from a domestic to public model of warfare resulted in a disenfranchisement of women after the eleventh century. This paper shows that medieval warfare was not male exclusive, and women's active participation throughout the period was often integral to a combat's outcome. By analyzing both the military activities of female combatants and changes in academic dialogues over war in the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, an ongoing disparity unfolds between the ideological gendering of warfare and its actual practice. </p><p> This disparity informed an accepted norm in which women were seen as inherently weak and unfit for combat, requiring a "masculinization" of women who successfully engaged in battle. This in turn led to the establishment of the <i>virago</i> image of female warriors; paradoxically, women who therefore defied the normative expectation of feminine behavior could be held in high regard for their masculine virtues. At the same time, the contributions of individual women to warfare are often left with minimal mention or treated as anomalous by some later chroniclers. </p><p> The paper is divided into seven sections. Part I explores the eleventh century military career of Matilda of Canossa, and subsequent treatment of her activities by apologists and canonical reformers. Part II discusses the means by which women had access to military activity in a changing climate of gendered social roles, through marriage, inheritance, and the influence of the <i>Pax Dei</i> movement. Part III discusses the military activity of women during the Crusades, and the differences in how that activity was noted in Western versus Islamic sources. </p><p> Parts IV - VI discuss the thirteenth century academic dialogues over women's participation in combat in the wake of the Crusades, through the work of Giles of Rome and Ptolemy of Lucca. As well, it analyzes the enfolding of knighthood as a construct of feudal vassalage into the noble class, and the changing access to military orders granted to women as armies became professionalized. Part VII looks at the formation of a new kind of war rhetoric and an attempt to resolve the disparity between the theory and practice of warfare in regards to women through the fifteenth century work of Christine de Pizan. </p><p> The conclusions of this work are that war may be understood to be a masculine activity, yet is not male exclusive. Writers and war chroniclers were forced to complicate gendered social norms in order to justify or refute women engaging in combat. This only resulted in a continued re-evaluation of the proper ideological place of women in war, and was not necessarily reflective of a change in the actual circumstances or frequency with which women took part.</p>

Paolo Giovio wrote his text in the aftermath of the sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527, although the work remained unfinished at the time of the author's death some twenty-five years.