This thesis analyzes the differences between the fictionalized madam of the American West and the historical madam are analyzed to understand how racial and gender hierarchies normalized themselves in the American West and disempowered women and people of color. This thesis uses Gold Rush San Francisco, and two madams, as a case study of this phenomenon.

Demographic and Health Surveys from 2015-16 as well as previous research suggest that a majority of women in Tanzania justify intimate partner violence (IPV) and that such violence is very prevalent. Semi-structured interviews with women in rural and urban Babati, Tanzania, were conducted in February-March 2016, in which women gave conditional answers to questions on justification of IPV. The aim of this thesis is thus to offer a theoretical explanation for the ambivalence informants expressed regarding IPV. To do so, the theory of double consciousness, which has not been applied to gender issues before, was applied in a qualitative content analysis of informants’ statements. This thesis will argue that double consciousness offers a plausible explanation for the conditional answers given by informants, since they reflected a two-ness among women, in the form of non-justification of IPV, but ideas about women’s obligations that are incompatible with ideals of gender equality. Women are thus aware of the gender oppression, while they still, to some extent, adapt to it.

This dissertation explores Elizabeth Barrett's dependency on the archetypal Victorian patriarch. Chapter I focuses on the psychological effects of this father-daughter relationship on Elizabeth Barrett. Chapter II addresses Barrett's acceptance of the conventional female role, which is suggested by the nature and the situation of the women she chooses to depict. These women are placed in situations where they can reveal their devotion to family, their capacity for passive endurance, and their wish to resist. Almost always, they choose death as an alternative to life where a powerful father figure is present. Chapter III concentrates on the highly sentimental images of women and children whom Barrett places in a divine order, where they exist untouched by the concerns of the social order of which they are a part. Chapter IV shows that the conventional ideologies of the time, society's commitment to the "angel in the house," and the small number of female role models before her increase her difficulty to find herself a place within this order. Chapter V discusses Aurora Leigh's mission to find herself an identity and to maintain the connection with her father or father substitute. Despite Elizabeth Barrett's desire to break away from her paternal ties and to establish herself as an independent woman and poet, her unconditional loyalty and love towards her father and her tremendous need for his affection, and the security he provides restrain her resistance and surface the child in her.

The purpose of this study has been to examine and identify a negation of the mother and the maternal body within the Hebrew Bible. The starting point has been an understanding of a denial of feminine powers related to reproduction and women being primarily presented as vessels for paternity. A selection of biblical narratives was made to elucidate this negation through the structure of the texts by using an interdisciplinary method which combines a feminist hermeneutic with Russian Formalism. Previous feminist theologies like that of Ilana Pardes, Phyllis Trible and Esther Fuchs have assisted in highlighting the presentations of the mother and her role in the texts. Formalism has allowed a rejection of authorial context and intent; the study is synchronic, i.e. focus is on the text and its internal structures.  Upon examination, the narratives have shown that the mother’s textual life span is chiefly limited to achieving maternity, but that as a mother she is in secondary position to the father, has no creative powers of her own, and lacks parental rights. The maternal body is entirely excluded from the Creation narratives, it is the sole reason for infertility, and it is rigidly controlled by the Father-God.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zelda Fitzgerald provide unique insight into the patriarchal worlds they lived in through autobiographical accounts of their lives. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the diaries of Gilman and her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, serve as Gilman’s autobiographical texts of the period before, during, and immediately after her breakdown. The correspondence between Fitzgerald and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Scott’s letters to Zelda’s psychiatrists serve as a biographical (and, in the case of her letters to Scott, autobiographical) account of her life during the period of her institutionalizations, from 1930 up to Scott’s death in 1940. These biographies and autobiographies, studied in conjunction with their fictionalized autobiographical accounts, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Fitzgerald’s Save Me The Waltz, illustrate the struggles these women, and by extension, many women of their time, experienced when they were unable to live up to the expectations a patriarchal society placed on them to be perfect wives and mothers. The construction of the feminine by the patriarchy required women to be complacent, meek, dependent, and infantile, and this construction, complicated by the issues of institutionalization and hysteria, is at the heart of the works of Gilman and Fitzgerald. The subtexts present in their fiction demonstrate that Gilman and Fitzgerald not only understood and felt the pressure of the patriarchal construction of femininity, but were acutely aware of how it could exert itself on women, particularly white, economically privileged women. Both authors, victims of the same patriarchal mechanism that dominated society during the turn of the twentieth century, provide insight into their own perspectives through their autobiographies, and then create fictional worlds in which the implications of these perspectives are realized to the detriment of their protagonists. While critics have examined this focus within individual stories by these writers, they have not been examined together in a comprehensive discussion of the patriarchal construction of the feminine and its manifestation in the autobiographical/biographical and fictional works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Experiencing a turbulence of source and subject in the variable inversions and supports of one source to another--the wreck of the U-352, Carpeaux’s Ugolino and his Sons, a movie poster for J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, and Cassiopeia mythology--these four sources as sons, in sacrifice to and surviving by way of “daddy” documentation, are here refigured to reenact and critique the patriarchally recreational, monumental, cinematic, and mythological infrastructures supporting the sources of this work and thereby serving to critique the newer patriarchies to which these sources and their subjectifications here seek to cross consumptively dead end. Following three public installations, and in service to a final publication, this text hereby functions as the myth of this work.

On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, LA, causing catastrophic damage to the metropolitan area. The hurricane also exposed many of the racial, ethnic, and class-based vulnerabilities experienced by many New Orleanians. However, as is typically the case, gender was ignored in most media accounts in the aftermath of the disaster. This project examines the gendered dimensions of the disaster experience using New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as a case study. Evidence from University of New Orleans Survey Research data indicates various gender differences from the initial response to the recovery efforts months later. Few gender differences were found regarding physical loss and displacement after the storm; however, psychological effects did often differ along gender lines, with women more likely than men to experience psychological symptoms directly after the storm, while men were likely than women to be affected approximately one year later. Interestingly, gender differences in evacuation plans and behavior varied according to whether or not a disaster had recently occurred. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, women were more likely than men to report having evacuated for Hurricane Georges, though no other variable was statistically significant. After Katrina, men were more likely than women to have an evacuation plan in place, while women were more likely than men to report a willingness to evacuate when recommended by local level officials, which they did when Hurricane Rita threatened the area. Public policy implications are discussed.

This thesis employs the most recent and best available data on human trafficking, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s Trafficking in Persons Global Report 2006, as well as nine independent variables to determine what their effects are on countries’ volumes of human trafficking outflows. By completing a cross-sectional analysis via an OLS regression, I found statistically significant support for three factors that I hypothesize lead to greater outflows of human trafficking. My findings suggest that countries that are less corrupt, have more seats in parliament held by women, and score higher on Cho, Dreher, and Neumayer’s Anti-Trafficking Policy Index are less likely to experience high outflows of human trafficking. Additionally, while they narrowly avoid statistical significance, this study also suggests that states that have a legal stance on prostitution and have fewer women employed in the non-agricultural sector experience less human trafficking outflows.

The murders of Pela Atroshi, Sara Abed Ali and Fadime Sahindal, started a debate concerning the underlying motives of honour related violence. This paper aimed to describe and explain in what way honour related violence is perceived in publications by academics, public authorities and voluntary organisations to name a few. Different types of literature were thematically analysed as well as analysed using a model by Lorentzon. The scope of this paper was narrowed down to Swedish conditions and excluded men as victims of honour related crimes. The conclusion suggests a definition of honour related violence as a result of general patriarchy with different features. For example, men’s honour is connected to women’s behaviour and retaining of virginity. The only way to restore a lost honour is to eliminate the woman physically or socially. The use of postcolonial theories in analyzing the definition resulted in an understanding of honour related violence perceived as something different from Swedish culture.

Thesis advisor: Andrew Sofer / In this thesis, it is my task to explore Shakespeare’s social analysis concerning the patriarchal structure of the family and the economic implications of this system. Four plays in particular, King Lear, Henry IV, As You Like It, and The Tempest resonate with these thematic elements. At the heart of these plays is the issue I call the paternal dilemma; the father or patriarch is a mere human, cannot live forever, and therefore needs to rely on an inheritance scheme to ensure the continuation of his line. This problem sees the institution of inheritance (namely, primogeniture) as a solution or antidote to mortality. In an investigation of these issues, I place myself in an already rich field of secondary criticism, examining how genre and family structure combine in what is ultimately a conservative understanding of the Elizabethan family. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English Honors Program. / Discipline: English.