The stereotypical concept of womanhood is tethered to childbearing and motherhood. Even though childlessness is becoming more common, the belief seems to be that all women must want and should have children as well as should assume the role of primary caregiver. I explore and argue against the belief that bearing and raising children is essential to the concept of womanhood. I pinpoint four reasons why childbearing and motherhood are thought to be rightly tethered to the concept of womanhood: that childbearing and mothering are the “norm” for women, that women’s potential to bear life is considered a sufficient and necessary condition to reproduce, that the presence of a “maternal instinct” means women want to bear children and they exhibit maternal behaviour, and that it is “natural” for women to want to procreate and mother. I then present a series of arguments showing why childbearing and mothering must be extricated from the concept of womanhood. I focus on the concern that the concept of womanhood demanding procreation means a woman cannot independently meet the criteria for womanhood, the oversimplifying consequences of making a biological possibility a defining characteristic of women, the oppressiveness of prescribing the demanding role of motherhood to all women, and the freedom associated with the child-free life. I argue against the existence of the maternal instinct and point to the coercive manner in which the term “natural” is employed. After illustrating the social pressures women face to procreate and mother, I argue that such pressure would not be needed if procreation and mothering were indeed “natural” for women. Allowing for the possible existence of the “maternal instinct” I argue that its existence is irrelevant in light of the wax and wane of the importance placed on what is “natural” and the ability of social pressures to overcome what is deemed “instinctual” and “natural”. Finally, I argue that both a belief in the “maternal instinct” and the idea that wanting and raising children is “natural” undermine belief in women’s intelligence. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2008-08-27 00:43:24.991

<p> This thesis attempts to relate the kind of female figures in Dickens's works with the images of womanhood current in Victorian Society and Art.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation is a cultural history of how race and gender influenced nineteenth-century citizenship. The gender ideology of true womanhood is generally described as a practice of white middle-class women; however it was also used to define racial difference and to attach a civic purpose to the everyday practices of women. The antebellum prominence of true womanhood relied upon a female focused print culture and created a shared identity among white middle-class women and those who sought to emulate them. This dissertation provides a new interpretation of the cultural importance of true womanhood. First, it argues that women understood their everyday life to hold a civic purpose. Second, while activists tried to overturn legal curtailments to equality, non-activist women saw their civic status as different -- although not inferior to -- that of men. They made forays into the public sphere through print culture and actively redefined the private sphere by linking their domestic work to nation building. Finally, evolving interpretations of womanhood were not simply a reflection of the changing labor of middle-class women in the emerging market economy, but also linked femininity with class and race. Middle-class white women sought to differentiate themselves from immigrants and women of color by enhancing the significance of the home and by distinguishing between household labor and household management. Middle-class African American women also pursued true womanhood to enhance their own status and to argue that their well-ordered homes proved that African American men were patriarchs in their own rights and worthy of citizenship and the vote. This dissertation rewrites our understanding of women's influence over definitions of citizens and citizenship in the nineteenth century. To do so, I interpret the intersections of black and white constructions of "true womanhood" by applying a cultural (citizenship as lived experience) instead of a political interpretation of citizenship. Doing so re-conceptualizes domesticity as a political force in the nineteenth century and explores how home, race and gender transected to create individual identities of Americans as Americans. An overarching goal of this project is to chart the evolution of citizenship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it followed the dual tracts of judicial and legislative construction in juxtaposition with cultural understandings of what makes a citizen.

The fact of death is universal. So too is the fact of womanhood. Yet each age aims to ameliorate the fear of death, and to cope with the construction of womanhood, in its own way. This study explores the female experience of death in Early Modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it aims to advance our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. The underlying hypothesis of the study is that the process of dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of defining, enabling and elevating her. The thesis is divided into three sections. The first section, comprising three chapters, takes a cultural and historical overview of death in Early Modern England, examining the means by which the inescapable fact of human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. The female experience of death is considered, and the advantages, to both dying women and their supporters, of achieving a death well done are examined. The power of the deathbed is recognised, as is the empowerment of motherhood, in allowing women to speak out from the deathbed in order to bestow dying maternal blessings upon their offspring, or to leave instructions and advice to their survivors, including their children. The second section of the thesis explores, in two contrasting chapters, examples of good and bad female deaths. The motivation behind the reporting of deaths is discussed, and the veracity of such accounts is scrutinised. The societal need to create posthumous images of women, both good and bad, is highlighted, and the ways in which such reports could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes is considered. The main body of the research concludes, in the final section of the thesis, with a consideration of how death, as well as confining women within a patriarchy, could also paradoxically liberate them, albeit within accepted gender boundaries. Chapter Six evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites, funeral sermons, elegies and epitaphs. Chapter Seven focuses upon two specific areas of posthumous female representation: will-making and the posthumous marital status of women. In the final chapter, the genre of women's literary legacies is discussed. In this chapter it is argued that death could be a catalyst by which women were privileged into print and an assessment of the female response to this unusual opportunity is made. Throughout the thesis it is understood that perfect femininity is an unachievable icon, an artificial construct of its age, and that Early Modem women were necessarily living, and dying, within this construct. Whilst accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. It is this opportunity for expression, coupled with the power of the deathbed, that provides the focus for the thesis.

Woman of Dust: An Exodus is a collection of themed non-fiction experiences and stories with themes, characters, and ideas that coincide deliberately and verge on the cohesiveness of memoir. The overarching themes of this collection are womanhood and coming of age. The stories examine the ways in which childhood crushes, current relationships, parenting, religion, and pets influence the growth of a child into an adult, in this case, a girl into a woman. They take individual moments, conversations, conventions, and thoughts and explore how they shaped the woman who now writes them. Stories range in content from how the standards of a southern Baptist church raised a girl who was afraid to date, drink, or kiss, about the role of God in the narrator's private life, to stories that explore how cartoon Disney prince crushes turn into crushing on neighbor boys and classmates, discovering the narrator's current conceptions of love as different from her early conceptions and questioning the ways in which those conceptions came into existence in the first place. These stories look at the domestic implications of religious life that dictate specific roles for women in a marriage relationship, and how the narrator interprets these implications in terms of her own love and pending marriage. Still other essays investigate how a mother's overbearing fear of sex, men, and drugs drove one daughter to be a small town porn star and drove the other to complete abstinence, how gender conventions shape a girl's mind, and how family life sometimes contradicts the same conventions. While the subject of each story is deeply feminine, revolving around a woman narrator and woman experiences, the content of these stories creates a very human experience, one outside the confines of gender. They are about one girl turned woman, from one perspective, and about one life, but they are mostly about being human, about growing, and about the ways in which humans grow.

HULL is a manuscript driven by bodily and imagined notions of witness that marry and complicate the historical and public with the personal and private. HULL is the buoyancy of a paradox; the un-shakable hyper corporeality of a body both Black and woman, and the social and spiritual liminality of Black womanhood. This collection is centered around a contemporary Black, queer, femme voice, and moves beyond the deeply familiar, beyond any implied monolith of definitive Blackness. These poems navigate memory, both experienced and inherited to chart moments of tenderness and brutality that people within the African Diaspora have experienced. / MFA

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.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:37:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lusimar de Melo Pontes.pdf: 1179086 bytes, checksum: e7e9f15960e1e5fafc4d718b4acac64b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-10-07 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This master thesis aims to investigate the female subject and its issues concerning femininity. In this sense, it discusses the traits that could enhance or contribute to the creation of a network of obstacles or impediments to femininity. The theoretical framework of the dissertation is based on psychoanalysis, especially the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. This study aims to address questions arising from clinical practice, since it was a combination of clinical facts that raised the questions which led to the beginning of this path of study. Therefore, this research has clinical experience as a starting point, being conducted on a clinical case specifically chosen for demonstrating the drama of a young woman faced with the issues involving the loss of virginity and the non-recognition of this experience as a mark of the process of becoming a woman before society. The path taken by the young woman toward womanhood marks the psychic nature of this process and shows that on the issues surrounding femininity the logic of recognition may be in check. Psychoanalysis, through Lacan, states that "Woman does not exist," concluding that in the constitution of female sexuality there is something enigmatic and unique, beyond the Oedipal and castration complexes, making it impossible for a single and universal path to be established in the process of becoming a woman. Becoming man or woman is a matter of sexualization, a matter of choice of jouissance. The consequence of this choice is that masculine and feminine are divided according to the castration mode of jouissance in relation to the Other sex: one phallic and the other not-all. The phallus is the signifier of phallic jouissance, which inscribes the logic of phallic signification. The Other jouissance, the feminine one, has to do with a kind of paradox of recognition, unlike the male position. For there is no significant determining the woman in the unconscious and, therefore, every woman is a construction. Women, without a symbolic feature defining them, are required to construct, and create piece by piece, their own version of femininity. Obstacles to femininity can be accentuated if the woman does not accept that this trait is absent, condemning her to an eternal quest for recognition which would point to hysteria / O tema desta pesquisa de mestrado é o sujeito feminino e suas questões em torno da feminilidade. Neste sentido, ela discute os traços que poderiam acentuar ou ajudar a criar uma rede de obstáculos ou de impedimento à feminilidade. Isso é feito a partir do referencial teórico da psicanálise, utilizando prioritariamente a obra de Sigmund Freud e de Jacques Lacan. A pesquisa tem como objetivo pôr em discussão interrogações advindas da clínica, pois foi uma conjunção de fatos clínicos que suscitou os questionamentos que levaram ao início dessa jornada de estudos e de investigação. Portanto, a pesquisa tem como ponto de partida uma experiência clínica, isto é, será direcionada por um caso clínico, cuja escolha se deu, sobretudo, porque ele evidencia o drama de uma jovem frente às questões que envolvem a perda da virgindade e o não reconhecimento desta experiência como uma marca do tornar-se mulher perante o social. O caminho trilhado pela jovem rumo à feminilidade marca a natureza psíquica desse processo e evidencia que nas questões em torno do feminino pode estar em xeque uma lógica do reconhecimento. A psicanálise através de Lacan define que A Mulher não existe conclui daí que na constituição da sexualidade feminina existe algo de enigmático e singular, que se encontra mais além da problemática edípica e da castração, impossibilitando que seja instituído um caminho único e universal no processo de tornar-se mulher. Inscrever-se como homem ou mulher é uma questão de sexuação, quer dizer de escolha de gozo. A consequência desta escolha é que masculino e feminino se repartem segundo o modo de gozar da castração na relação com o Outro sexo: um modo fálico e outro não-todo. O falo é o significante do gozo fálico, que inscreve a lógica da significação fálica. O Outro gozo, o próprio do feminino, tem a ver com uma espécie de paradoxo do reconhecimento, ao contrário da posição masculina. Isso porque não há um significante que determine a mulher no inconsciente e que, portanto, toda mulher é construída. As mulheres, por não contarem com um traço simbólico que as definem, são obrigadas a construir, inventar uma a uma sua própria versão da feminilidade. Os obstáculos à feminilidade podem ser acentuados caso a mulher não aceite que tal traço inexiste, condenando-a a uma eterna busca pelo reconhecimento o que apontaria para a histeria

This study examines the cultural and historical constructs of the patriarchal father, the dutiful daughter, and the “Cult of Southern Womanhood” that have impacted the depiction of the relationship between fathers and daughters in the works of southern writers Shirley Ann Grau, Gail Godwin, and Alice Walker. The authors illustrate fathers who influence their daughters by supplying their needs and supporting their desires, but also of fathers who have hindered the emotional growth of their daughters. The term father-force describes the characters’ understanding and revision of the power of the fathers over their lives. Evidence includes the primary works by the writers themselves, criticism of these writers from other sources, and their own words about their works. New Historicism theory supports the position that Grau, Godwin, and Walker use the historical context of the 1960s to help shape and articulate some of the more contemporary issues, anxieties, and struggles, reflected in the literature. The impact of father-daughter relationships in southern novels is an important aspect in the understanding of Grau, Godwin, and Walker’s contributions to American literature. These writers try to discover acceptable methods of dealing with their characters’ relationships with their fathers within the requirements of a society that has established clear roles for both father and daughter. The three writers emphasize good and bad examples of the cultural contexts being explored, and their writings show a historical perspective of the changes that have occurred in the South in father-daughter relationships from 1950 until the present time. The authors show their characters often becoming successful in the real world outside the home in an effort to gain their fathers’ recognition of their accomplishments, his acceptance of their individuality and differences from him, and his approval of their methods of gaining success. Strong feminists characteristics are displayed in the writings of the three authors. Grau, Godwin, and Walker share the characteristics of female characters that connect with their fathers through race, the burden of the past, gender, class and religious expectations. / Dr. Ronald R. Emerick Dr. Karen A. Dandurand Dr. Kelly L. Heider

This dissertation examines the participation and regulation of African American and Mexican women in the sex industry during the Progressive period of Texas to complicate ideas of womanhood. Between 1889 and 1925, sex workers survived, resisted, and contended with several shifts to their industry caused by the interventions of religious leaders, civil servants, community members, and reformers. Red light and related vice districts were socially- and legally-sanctioned tolerated forms of amusement and leisure throughout the state. Although black and brown madams, inmates, and prostitutes were not the most visible sex workers, they were often pivotal to that social and cultural fabric of numerous cities such as San Antonio, Fort Worth, Houston, and Laredo. The white slavery and antivice campaigns reshaped the discussions and reforms from the local to federal level. They created a social, economic, and political climate of stringent policing of vices that led to the eventual abolition of commercialized sex, where prostitutes of color embodied the worst tenets of womanhood. In contrast, the Mexican anarcho-socialist and African American progressive women’s club movements more broadly enhanced the views of women of color, demonstrating the ways that they (re)defined themselves. In this study, I argue that the intersection of prostitution and progressivism in the South/west represents a peculiar juncture in race- and sexual-making. At stake were the contested meanings of sexuality, race, and modernity under the growing vilification of vice by the national government and local groups in the Jim Crow Borderlands. While this dissertation contributes to the diverse historiographies of progressivism, the New South, and U.S. West, it also has important implications in enriching and facilitating the intersection of the histories of Mexican American and African American women in new and unconventional ways. Its significance is that it advances knowledge in topics of sexuality, race, and gender formation from a transborder and transregional framework. Moreover, it expands conceptual and methodological paradigms that presently exist in the field of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, by coupling them with the study of Jim Crow segregation of the Southwest. / text