Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

No abstract / Thesis (LLD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Public Law / LLD / Unrestricted

This report describes the project background, design process plus the final result of my MFA degree thesis in Advanced Product Design at Umeå Institute of Design. A breast pump is generally a mechanical or electrical suction device for withdrawing milk from the breast of a lactating woman. Even though the first pumps were patented in the mid-19th century as medical devices for in-hospital use, breast pumps as widely available consumer products have only been around for a little more than 20 years. Existing breast pumps do not address functional as well as emotional needs of many mothers and there is great potential for improvements and innovative solutions to transform pumping into a more enjoyable and positively associated experience. The main purpose of this project is to rethink the way breast pumps are currently used in order to push the boundaries, and come up with a forward-looking, conceptual design solution as a final result. This human-centered design project was carried out in close collaboration with various experts in the areas of pediatrics, breastfeeding and lactation counselling. Moreover this project was done in cooperation with leading design and innovation consulting firm IDEO. San Francisco basted design director Thomas Overthun provided mentoring throughout the design process. Regular check-in calls and feedback sessions were set up throughout the project to discuss project milestones. Anders Smith, an experienced industrial designer from Denmark, closely followed throughout the project as an external design tutor at Umeå Institute of Design. Several tutoring sessions were held on a regular basis. Continuous involvement of experts and external project advisors helped to make sure that the project remains valid and provided a great source for relevant insights, expert knowledge and professional feedback. "Being able to develop an impactful and forward-looking design solution that can encourage positive change both on an individual and societal level has been my main motivation to tackle this design challenge".

Avant l’arrivée des colons, la division sexuelle du travail dans la communauté traditionnelle gabonaise est basée sur le partage spécifique des tâches : il y a des tâches réservées aux femmes et des tâches réservées aux hommes. Les tâches domestiques sont assignées prioritairement à la femme. Les relations dans la communauté sont fondées sur le lien social renforcé par les normes traditionnelles. L’activité individuelle apparaît vraisemblablement comme faisant partie intégrante de l’activité des membres de l’ensemble de la communauté. C’est ce qui fait la cohésion sociale. Cependant, des transformations s’introduisent dans la société gabonaise avec l’arrivée du salariat. De nouveaux modes de production et de nouvelles configurations du travail s’imposent et mettent en évidence des changements dans les relations de production, dans la division sexuelle du travail, notamment dans les rapports sociaux de sexe. Il importe pour nous d’analyser, à partir de la vieille problématique de la division sexuelle du travail et le discours de socialisation qui présente la femme comme le pilier de la famille par le biais de son rôle de nourricière et d’épouse, et qui présente l’homme comme le chef de famille et le premier pourvoyeur de ressources du ménage, si l’intégration des femmes au salariat serait de nature à modifier ces rapports, qui sous-tendent l’ordre social. Nous appellerons ce processus la "patriarcalisation" que nous allons analyser dans les deux parties de notre travail. En effet, à la production agricole et artisanale qui ravitaillaient le foyer en produits de première nécessité, succède l’économie capitaliste où tout s’achète et s’échange contre de l’argent. La contribution financière de la femme gabonaise par le biais du salaire ne participerait-elle pas au renversement des rapports sociaux de sexe dans le ménage ? / Before the capitalist economy’s arrival, the gender-divided repartition of labour in the traditional Gabonese community is built around tasks that are specifically devolved to one or the other sex: there are tasks that are meant to be done by women and others to be done by men. The housework is primarily assigned to women. Relationships within the community are based on a social fabric strengthened by traditional norms. Individual activity appears to be in all probability an integral partof the activity of all community members. That is what holds the social fabric together. Yet Gabonese society is transformed by the advent of the wage system. New modes of production and new labour configuration are gaining over old ones and highlighting changes in production relations, in the gender-segmented repartition of work, notably in the social relations between the sexes. It is important that we analyze, starting with the previous state of the repartition of labour by genderand the view on socialization that makes women the mainstays of the family through her roles as feeder and wife and makes men heads of the family and the main providers for the household, whether women’s integration in the wage system might bring about changes in these relations which underlie social order. We will call this process “patriarcalisation” and we will analyze it in the two parts of our work. In fact, to the home-grown and home-crafted production that used to provide first necessity products succeeds capitalist economy where everything can be bought and sold for money. Could the financial contribution of the Gabonese woman through her wages be instrumental in the reversal of social roles among the sexes in the household?

The Early Years in England has seen heavy investment since New Labour came into power in 1997. This distinct educational stage has been highlighted in the media as having the potential to alleviate socio-economic inequalities. The first year of compulsory schooling in England, the Reception year, is the period in which children are inducted into becoming both learners and pupils in a formalised system. It is also the period during which children are considered to be in the high season of imaginative play. Play forms a fundamental part of the Early Years Foundation Stage guidelines, though the nature of what constitutes play is contested by critics and practitioners. With the EYFS framework document stating that all areas of learning must be implemented through planned, purposeful play, tensions arise between freely-chosen, child-led play and adult-led activity. Critics of government interventions have decried the ‘schoolification’ of the Early Years and claim a ‘squeezing out’ of opportunities for freely-chosen play, which they warn has the potential to damage children’s learning dispositions. This ethnographic case study focuses on the freely-chosen socio-dramatic play of seven children, in the context of their Reception classroom culture. This is based on a socio-cultural theoretical framework and the premise that such play is where rich experience resides; play which is socially, emotionally, and cognitively challenging. Socio-dramatic play comprises children involved in imitative role-play, which lasts longer than ten minutes, uses objects in a make believe context, is between two or more players, and centres on verbal communication (Smilansky, 1968). Data generation took place over 8 months, employing fieldnotes generated through participant observation, loosely-structured interviews, and researcher reflections. This is set alongside discourse analysis exploring how play and role-play are conceptualised in policy documentation. Microethnographic analyses are made of video data gathered during socio-dramatic play. To put the child’s experience at the centre of the study, artefacts created by children, images, and children’s dialogue are incorporated in the analysis. Findings are presented through a combination of evocative ethnographic prose and a multi-modal analysis of video data. Through an inductive analytical process, themes emerged from the data highlighting the complex nature of the socially situated play activity. The negotiation of social relationships through play is explored, identifying play as a liminal activity in an identity transition stage through which children are learning how to do school and how to be pupils. Socio-dramatic play is proposed as offering a unique conceptual space in which players can explore expressions of bodily freedom alongside the requirements of the bodily comportment and control which are demanded by school routines. I argue that practitioners should pay attention to the materiality of play: spaces and artefacts which are provided for, and used by, children. Drawing on the analysis, implications for practice are suggested, with reference to techniques by which adults can interact in play in ways which prioritise the child’s emerging needs and interests.

This thesis examines the development of the Irish child protection system up until the present day. It argues that child protection law and policy has continually reconstructed children, and the risks that they face. In particular, it posits that there has been a radical revision of social and legal thinking about children owing to the reflexive nature of late modernity. In essence, the thesis argues that child protection work has come to be characterised by a new discursive practice. This new approach draws on high levels of legal regulation and recognition that such work takes place in a risk society. Historical literature on the conceptualisation of children within child protection has tended to adopt a binary approach, whereby children are seen as either a threat or as a victim. Additionally, the last twenty years have seen occasional attempts to analyse Irish social policy in the context of the transition from simple to late modernity. However, these studies have not considered the role played by law in significant detail, as most have been considered from a historical or sociological perspective. The result of this is that one of the main factors influencing how children lived, and the risks they faced, has been ignored in writing about childhood. Additionally, child law has also only recently developed as an area of study in its own right within legal research. This thesis therefore aims to contribute to the existing literature by assessing the historical development of legal rules governing child protection practice in light of sociological theory. Drawing on both legal and sociological literature, the thesis seeks to argue the binary approach to childhood rooted the victim/threat duality is incomplete, and that a greater role need to be afforded to the conceptualisation of children as agents. I argue that this binary should be replaced by a more complex understanding of how children were thought about by law and by social policy under the conditions of simple modernity. I argue that children were first regarded as objects of discipline, subjected to rigid systems of control. Latterly, they were regarded as objects of concern, whereby they were recognised as having interests that required protection, but were simultaneously denied any level of agency. The final stage in the transformation of social and legal thinking about children in Ireland was the transition of children from object to subject. With the movement from simple to late modernity came an outbreak of child protection scandals, focused on the lack of intervention by the social services in abusive families, and on abuse in community organisations, most especially by the Roman Catholic Church. These scandals occurred against a backdrop of a radical realignment of social relations whereby traditional sites of institutional power were challenged and traditional social and familial hierarchies problematized. This thesis claims that child protection scandals were an intrinsic part of these social and cultural changes, which created the conditions whereby the socio-political construction of children could be revisited. Children now came to be recognised as rights-bearing subjects of the law, not only morally deserving or worthy, but capable of exercising agency in a meaningful sense. As children increasingly came to be recognised as having interests (and later on as having rights) the concerns of child protection law changed to focus more on the risks faced by children. Under conditions of simple modernity, children were recognised as being vulnerable to dangers, but these were frequently deemed to be “moral dangers” leading to the disciplining of children themselves and their families, and to attempts to eliminate risk through severe punishment. As reflexivity took hold, however, the understanding of these risks changed, with traditionally respected authority figures now regarded as the prime sources of risk. Risk has gradually, therefore, come to play a dominant role in legislation affecting children, and the attempted elimination of risk has yielded to the management and assessment of risk as a primary aim of child protection law and social work. The thesis draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources including legislation, case law and official reports and media reports of child protection inquiries. It also utilises insights developed through an extensive examination of parliamentary debates on child protection matters. These materials are assessed through the lens of critical discourse analysis in order to explore in an original fashion the relationship between law, social policy and social theory as they effect child protection. In doing so, it makes a contribution to both social policy and legal literature about children. While the thesis utilises Irish sources, its claims about the reconstruction of children and child protection could be applied in other societies that have undergone the transition to reflexive modernity.

The goal of this research was (1) to identify the patterns or pattern pieces of development for heterosexual, dyadic, romantic relationships that emerge from mixed-sex, friendship groups and (2) to compare and contrast those patterns or pattern pieces to patterns in existing stage theories. To address these goals, data were collected from students at a mid-sized, northwestern, land-grant university. Grounded theory was selected to analyze the data to allow the potential emergence of new perspectives and patterns. Two conclusions about relationship development emerged from the collected data. First, some participants did not identify the friendship and the romance as two distinct relationships. On the other hand, a second set of participants indicated the friendship and romance were, in fact, two distinctly different relationships. Differences in conclusions drawn by these two groups generated six possible revisions to existing relationship development stage theories. / Graduation date: 2003

In 19th-century Britain, women as compared with men, did not have equal professional and educational opportunities; therefore, they were often outside the center of politics and the economy, and were regarded as being subordinate in the household. This Woman Question had been fervently discussed in the press since the 1880s. And it was Ouida who ¡§christened¡¨ the ¡§New Woman¡¨ for this new class of women in 1894 from Sarah Grand¡¦s essay ¡§The New Aspect of the Woman Question.¡¨ The ¡§New Woman¡¨ was abhorred by traditional British society and condemned as a temptress who, so it observed, tended to satisfy her own sexual needs, regardless of social mores and household responsibilities. In contrast to ¡§the good angel in the house¡¨ or ¡§the proper lady,¡¨ the New Woman was accused of neglecting her female virtues of a selfless housewife, wife, mother, and daughter. Traditionally, women were economically dependent, and that was the reason why the grace of a Victorian proper lady lay in her submission to social morality, but not in her assertion of individualism. Since she was only considered part of the family instead of herself, it was important for a woman to be a virgin before marriage in order to guarantee her chastity and loyalty to her husband. According to Mona Caird, the ideal of virginity was worshipped in order to reinforce the idea that women¡¦s virginity belonged to their husbands-to-be instead of to themselves. This ideology satisfied the male possessive attitudes toward their wives. In her essay, ¡§Marriage,¡¨ Caird related virginity to marriage as a historically situated institution, which was temporary and challengeable. So once the gender barrier between the male master and the female housekeeper was questioned and even dismissed, women could claim the same freedom of choice, both of their life and of their bodies. With the intensification of capitalism and the individual economic unit, women seemed to represent men¡¦s property. It was in this skewed relationship between the two sexes that the feminine ideal was erected and institutionalized in order to maintain masculine domination. From a man¡¦s point of view, a modest woman, or a proper lady, should repress her sexual desire so that she would seem to have no desire for men at all. The basic reason for women to suppress their desire was because the Victorians regarded human desire as solely masculine; in other words, they saw women as the objects of desire, not the agents from which the desire originated. Women¡¦s subordinate position constrained their individualism. In this way, women became selfless and functional. The loss of virginity out of wedlock was the primary cause of a woman¡¦s tragedy. This happened to two of Hardy¡¦s ¡§New Woman¡¨ heroines, Tess d¡¦Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead. The two heroines were chosen to represent the New Women because both of them, to a large extent, acted against the decorum of a traditional proper lady. Tess of the d¡¦Urbervilles dealt with the relationship between men and women and the problems in conventional marriage. Presenting the emancipation of the heroine Sue, Jude the Obscure dealt with the inequality women suffered in marriage and the possible solution of ¡§free union¡¨ (couples living together out of wedlock) as an alternative to conventional marriage. ¡§Free union,¡¨ as this novel suggested, was a means of accommodating sexual relations with fairness to both sexes and with a more permanent relationship than traditional marriage. Hence Tess and Jude the Obscure were designated as the New Woman novels whose protagonists--Tess and Sue--illustrated the predicament encountered by the New Woman on her way to emancipation. In order to penetrate into the male psychology toward virginity in the two novels, I will delineate the different attitudes toward female virginity through the seventeenth to the nineteenth century in England to provide a historical perspective. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the legal status of women remained family-oriented, which was based on the precepts of Roman law. The Puritans deplored adultery and further stressed the importance of virginity. Compared with the Puritans, the Evangelicals further idealized female nature as morally more self-restrained than men¡¦s. On a larger social scale, the religious ideals of the Evangelicals helped reinforce the social hierarchy. Because if the poor and women embraced those ideals largely to gain spiritual salvation, their governors could thereby control their labor and productivity by means of propagandizing morality. In the Victorian society, women tended to obey the rigid law and conformed to their narrowly defined domestic roles. To this dogma much had been contributed by the Puritans and the Evangelicals, from whose doctrines the ideal of a dutiful wife arose. The entire social machinery helped promote this censorship on female sexuality and individualism, while consolidating male authority simultaneously. Women, realizing that they could hardly alter the male-centered society, considered the best policy as submission and conformity to the traditional values so as to gain social acknowledgement. Hardy¡¦s presentation of Tess aroused severe criticism, because he refused to condemn her for her misbehavior. Instead of making Tess a completely helpless victim, Hardy endowed her with her own sense of strength to protect herself against the misfortunes. Sue practiced the New Woman ideal of ¡§free union,¡¨ and she herself was a well-learned student of philosophy. Sue felt herself doomed as a fallen woman, with the loss of all her extra-marital children murdered by the legitimate child of her lover. That was the reason why she considered it a compromise with the society to return to her legal husband. New Woman heroines became the scapegoats of the social machinery, in which patriarchal value was the center and women¡¦s rights were cast aside. Hardy reflected this feminist issue on the two different New Woman heroines, especially their relationship with the men around them. Readers might feel ambivalent toward both Tess and Sue, who were far from evil but were degraded. Finally, both of them were executed, Tess physically while Sue mentally. Tess paid her price for love and justice, but Sue gave up love and justice for shelter. In the thesis, I will, first of all, discuss the differences between the so-called New Woman and the proper lady in the context of Hardy¡¦s two novels, Tess and Jude. I will discuss Tess¡¦ and Sue¡¦s desires, centering on their suppressed sexuality. In the first chapter, ¡§¡¦New Women¡¦ in the Victorian Era,¡¨ while examining the function of a proper lady, I will also delineate the origin and exhibit the traits of the so-called New Woman. In the second chapter, ¡§Tess¡¦ Subjectivity and Revenge,¡¨ I shall re-evaluate Tess¡¦ tragedy by focusing on her sense of responsibility and her New Woman subjectivity. In addition, Tess¡¦ murder of Alec will be interpreted as a New Woman¡¦s revenge on male chauvinists. In the third chapter, ¡§Sue¡¦s Experiments of ¡¥Free Union¡¦ and the Final Defeat,¡¨ I will argue that Sue epitomizes a typical New Woman in her advocacy of ¡§free union¡¨ and her subsequent defeat by traditional society. In the conclusion, in addition to my personal feedback on the New Woman issue, I will make comparison between Tess and Sue as the unconventional New Woman heroines and discuss Hardy¡¦s intention in portraying the two heroines the way they are.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-65). Also available via World Wide Web.

This thesis addresses fissures in language, ideology and subjectivity as they are manifested in the dramatic construction of the category of 'Woman' in four major Jacobean texts. The first section of my project deals with the way 1n which the opposition of male and female underlies the perception and construction of order at every level. In a scheme of thought characterized by the use of antithesis and analogy, the opposition of gender proves to be one of the most richly extensible. All analogies are connected by the great chain of thought which consti tutes the Great Chain of Being. Once any element 1n this scheme is undermined there is the danger (or for my purposes, the analytic advantage) that there will be something like a domino ef:ect. That is to say, relations of power become more visible at the problematic i~tersec~ion of gender. In section two, I propose a construction of tragedy rela~2d to female transgression as an alternative to the '.va'! in which feminist critics tend to equate gender with genre, dubbing comedy 'feminine' and tragedy 'masculine.' My construc~ion also counters the ~raditional notion of tragedy as a ~ixed, pr i vi leged genre category. I f',lrther examine the construc~ion of woman in tragedy through absence, silence and utterance. The final sect.ion explores the nature of the cont':'nuous process of gender di£ £erentiation which serves to produce and maintain gender categories. Gender differentiation occurs most manifestly in misogynistic discourse which I address using Lacan I s theory of the construction of the human subject. The production of misogyny in its various forms constructs the feminine as 'Other,' and 1n this its function can be seen as one of policing the boundaries 'of gender ideologies. Here I also treat the construction of masculinity against femininity since the production of the former is dependent upon the latter. The preceding analyses serve to break down unities of gender by recognizlng that discourse simultaneously constructs and disperses concepts of gender. Gender is thus crucial '=.0 the cuI tural dynamic of Renaissance drama, and in this we find authority for new direc~ions in feminis~ literary studies.