This study examines the ways Parisians viewed marriage contracts and marital relationships in the late fourteenth century. It focuses on the Archidiaconal court of Paris and the ways men and women used the court to modify their marriages. My argument in this project is two-fold: First, I argue that the Parisian laity had at least a basic understanding of marriage law, especially the importance of consent for the creation of marriages, and that women, in particular, used that knowledge to control their choice of marriage partner. Second, I argue that after the formation of the marriage, society had certain expectations for both husbands and wives. The evidence from narrative sources—such as conduct manuals and saints lives—presents a picture of obedient wives loving their husbands, who not only financially supported the household, but also loved their wives in return. Similarly, within Parisian separation cases, these same expectations allowed the majority of plaintiffs—usually female—to legally separate from their husband who did not live up to this ideal. The majority of this study uses documents from the Archidiaconal court of Paris from 1384-1387, but my arguments speak to a wider view of medieval marriage and the ways society viewed marriage more generally. Overall, these court cases indicate a wider cultural acceptance of affective marriages in the Middle Ages, and fit into the larger argument of female agency within the medieval legal system. Despite women’s marginalized legal status—in many cases not being allowed even to testify in court—women in the late fourteenth-century Archidiaconal court of Paris were regularly plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses before the officials. Women pled their cases sometimes with the support of legal counsel or their parents, but often alone, and they successfully negotiated the legal system to achieve their preferred outcome.

The history of the prison system in the US is inextricably linked to Christianity. Penitentiary shares its root word, penitence, with repentance. Quakers and Congregationalists started the very first prisons because they viewed the corporal punishment of that time to be cruel (Graber 20). Even today, prisons are required to hire chaplains to make sure incarcerated people have the freedom to practice religion inside of the prison. The largest volunteer group serving incarcerated people is Prison Fellowship, an arm of the Religious Right which began in the 1970s and is now the largest faith based group of its kind1 (Prison Fellowship “Benefits”). Under the umbrella of Prison Fellowship, a pre-release program called InnerChange Freedom Initiative was developed with the specific goal of transforming incarcerated men in order to lower recidivism rates. The Religious Right claims to have positive effects on incarcerated people beyond cultivating spirituality, such as better rehabilitation and lower recidivism. However, their claims have not withstood scientific scrutiny. This begs the question, what are the effects of the Religious Right’s programming inside of prisons? The US prison system, created with the intent of protecting society from criminals, was developed primarily by straight, white, Christian men who intended the system to be for men. Every aspect of a resident’s life is controlled by someone else;

This thesis analyses the scholarship of Sandra Coney from the 1970s through to the present day. I argue that Coney’s scholarship has made an important contribution to understanding New Zealand society from a feminist perspective. Coney’s scholarship provides an important representation of feminism. Through her scholarship Coney has constantly questioned dominant ideals within New Zealand society. The recovery of New Zealand women’s history has also been a focus of Coney’s scholarship. This thesis examines New Zealand’s feminist magazine Broadsheet, to which Coney contributed numerous articles from the beginning of the second wave feminist movement. It also draws upon archival sources and Coney’s extensive published books. What influenced Coney’s work and the context of time periods is discussed and analysed. Key themes suggested by Coney’s scholarship are the importance of: women’s voices and experiences, women having authority over their own representation, a second wave feminist perspective of New Zealand society, and the importance of recovering the past and recording it for the future.

As the Catholic revival that followed the Wars of Religion in France brought about the proliferation of new monasteries and religious orders, spiritual biographies of the founders and leaders of these houses were composed in unprecedented numbers. These texts, generally written by men about women, described cultural ideals about feminine piety more than the lived experience of nuns. This project seeks to examine the ways that spiritual biographies nevertheless represented literary practices in convents and actual collaboration between religious men and women. The vast array of biographical documents that were produced within convents became the source materials for the male authors of biographies, which allowed the members of convents to exert influence on the subject matter of the published work. The products of these collaborative efforts then served the interests of women as well as men, offering examples of religious communities’ virtues and valuable works to potential recruits and donors in addition to providing models of the ascetic piety and self-examination endorsed by women of the Catholic Reformation. In an era when authorship was a communal, rather than individual, endeavour, the participation of men did not necessarily erase all traces of women’s voices, but rather granted them the legitimacy and spiritual authority to be published before a wider audience. Spiritual biographies are therefore an example of how cloistered women could transcend the barriers of enclosure to influence a broader secular and religious public. / Graduate

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / In 1942, the U.S. Army and Navy announced the creation of their respective women’s military services: the WAAC/WAC and the WAVES. Although American women had served alongside the military in past conflicts, the creation of women’s military corps caused uproar in American society. Placing women directly into the armed services called into question cultural expectations about “masculinity” and “femininity.” Thus, the women’s corps had to be justified to the public in accordance with American cultural assumptions regarding proper gender roles. “Fashioning Femininity for War: Material Culture and Gender Performance in the WAC and WAVES during World War II” focuses on the role of material culture in communicating a feminine image of the WAC and WAVES to the American public as well as the ways in which servicewomen engaged material culture to fashion and perform a feminine identity compatible with contemporary understandings of “femininity.” Material culture served as a mechanism to resolve public concerns regarding both the femininity and the function of women in the military. WAC and WAVES material culture linked their wearers with stereotyped characteristics specifically related to contemporary meanings of “femininity” celebrated by American society, while at the same time associating them with military organizations doing vital war work. Ultimately, the WAVES were more successful in their manipulations of material culture than the WAC, communicating both femininity and function in a way that was complementary to the established gender hierarchy. Therefore, the WAVES enjoyed a prestigious position in the mind of the American public. This dissertation also contributes to the ongoing historiographical debate regarding World War II as a turning point for women’s liberation, arguing that while the seeds of women’s liberation were sown in women’s wartime activities, those same wartime women were firmly convinced that their rightful place was in the private rather than the public sphere. The war created an opportunity to reevaluate gender roles but it would take some time before those reevaluations bore fruit.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis examines the motivations of the Woman’s Council of National Defense. It will examine how women in Indiana and Illinois organized their state and local councils of defense as they embraced home-front mobilization efforts. It will also show that Hoosier women, like women across the United States, became involved in World War One home-front mobilization, in part, to prove their responsibility to the government in order to make an irrefutable claim for suffrage. As a result of extensive home-front mobilization efforts by women, the government was able to fulfill its own agenda of creating a comprehensive record of its citizens, thus guaranteeing a roster of citizens eligible for future wartime mobilization. By examining the Child Welfare Committee and the Children’s Year in a broad view, this thesis supports the assertions of historians like Robert G. Barrows, William J. Breen, and Lynn Dumenil, who have shown how Progressive-minded women advanced Progressive reforms by embracing the war effort and using it to their own advantage.

On November 17, 1980, twenty Mormon women and one man were arrested on criminal trespassing charges after chaining themselves to the Bellevue, Washington LDS Temple gate. The news media extensively covered the event due to the shocking photos of middle-aged housewives, covered in large chains, holding protest signs and being escorted to police cars. These women were part of the group Mormons for the Equal Rights Amendment (MERA) and were protesting the LDS Church’s opposition to the ERA. The LDS Church actively opposed the ERA and played an important role in influencing the vote in key states leading to its eventual failure. However, ERA literature generally ignores the LDS Church and their influence, instead attributing the ERA’s failure to lack of appeal to lower class and minority women, the ratification process, and confusing messaging about the amendment. Literature that does discuss the LDS Church and its opposition to the ERA fails to tell the story of the small, but bold and attention grabbing group of Mormon women who organized a campaign in direct opposition to the position of their church. This thesis begins with an evaluation of MERA’s use of sacred space in protest, and their portrayal in the media. It then explores how MERA re-appropriated LDS hymns, rituals and language to assert their power and express discontent with the church’s position on ERA, and concludes with an evaluation of the institutional and social consequences MERA members faced as a result of their activism.

At her death in 1954, Frida Kahlo was known as little more than the wife of muralist Diego Rivera. Since then her art and personae have taken on a cult-like following and she has become an icon of popular culture. Thus far Frida's repute has stretched across three decades, from the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s. Frida's popularity is viewed as primarily emerging from the Women's Movement of the 1970s. However, interest from many other groups have carried her image into the 1980s and 1990s. Aside from the Women’s Movement, Frida’s popularity reflects a growing interest in Mexico, specifically the “romanticized” image of Mexico, in the wake of rising international relations between Mexico and the United States. Each subsequent exhibit of Frida’s work brought with it a plethora of articles and exhibition catalogues. By the late 1980s books on Frida’s biography and her paintings began flooding the market along with articles from various periodicals, from fashion, to medical, to women's studies journals. Numerous other publications on Frida have included calendars, postcards, and a cookbook. A book of Frida's letters and her diary were published in 1995. The associations around Frida’s name have created the legend of her personality. She is viewed as a genius painter, one who expressed her emotions and life on canvas, who spoke from her heart and who has become remembered as a martyred saint. Scholars and the general public alike have latched onto Frida’s image, making her into more than a mere artist, rather into a remarkably insightful and brave individual. This popular myth has been supported by Frida's own lifestyle, by her flamboyant attire, scandalous relationships, and internationally recognized friendships. Frida was, however, an individual who suffered from the same insecurities that much of the population does: insecure in love and acceptance. Frida had the ability to mask her emotions of insecurity with her physical pain, which she then exercised on the canvas. It is this ability to deal with her emotional pain that has brought her life and work to the cult-like status that her memory now enjoys.

The primary objective of this study is to find, statistically, how the women of Portland lived out their lives. By exploring the role of ethnicity, work and family, and the inter-relationships of these variables, upon their life choices, it is hoped a picture of women will result that can be used as a base for further interpretations on the community of women and the role they play in society. The study is based on data gathered from the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Federal Manuscript Census Schedules for the city of Portland and East Portland and utilizes a sample of 8,012 women, aged fifteen years or older, comprising the entire adult female population of the city during the census years of 1860, 1870 and 1880. The information coded for each woman includes age, marital status, ethnicity, occupation, whether or not she was head of a household, the number of children present in the home, her husband's ethnicity and a rough categorization of his occupation, the type of family residence. The data was then interpreted using a simple cross-variable program. The introduction sets the theoretical framework for the study and places it in the historiography of women and the family. Chapter I is a brief survey of the community of Portland and the development of its various institutions to use as a backdrop for the general statistical picture of women developed in Chapter II. The differences apparent in the various ethnic groups and changes over the three census periods for marital status, and intermarriage tendencies are investigated in Chapter III, and Chapter IV deals with family structure. Chapter V covers general work trends for women, cites several of the larger occupational cohorts and compares Portland's female labor force to several other urban areas for 1880. Appendix A is an explanation of the methodology employed and some of the problems encountered in the study. Appendix B is the entire collection of charts extrapolated from the data by the program used. It should be noted that all of the data was not utilized in this study, and even more information can be gotten from the data by the use of a more sophisticated program. The author hopes to rework the data at a later date for a more in-depth study.

During the period 1945 - 1960, the United States developed an intense fervor of anticommunism and strove to prevent the spread of communism to other nations, particularly the Indochina region. As a result, the government ignored or responded inadequately to key social events at home affecting both women and African Americans. This thesis will explore the extent of the active involvement in Indochina to prevent the spread of communism and the effects of that involvement on major social issues at home concerning African Americans and women. The United States had numerous opportunities to discontinue its involvement in Indochina, but it repeatedly chose to remain an important participant in the events that took place in that country from 1945-1960. As our involvement intensified, less attention was given to discrimination, educational, workforce, and civil rights issues that concerned African Americans and women. A slight period of peace allowed these groups to petition the government for help, but the response was often inadequate. As a result, these two groups formed social and political committees that would later become a major factor in the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s. The research for this thesis included both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources include documents from the Eisenhower Public Library (accessed online), the Truman Public Library (accessed online), and personal accounts from those involved in the government and social actions at this time. The majority of the material was available from the Sherrod Library at East Tennessee State University. The conclusions drawn from this research are: a) the United States government demonstrated the precedence of fighting communism over domestic issues both by the choice to remain an active participant in Indochina and by the extent of involvement; b) African American issues were often ignored unless some type of public demonstration forced the government to take notice and act; c) the anticommunist movement caused the government to overlook issues facing women to the point that the outrage generated by the ambivalence led women to revolt from traditional stereotypes to gain equal rights.