Jessie Ackerman was the second world missionary for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Her fascinating life sheds light on the most important issues facing women during this time period. Most WCTU women have been dismissed by twentieth century scholars as being religiously fanatical and conservative. They have been overshadowed by suffragists and other women that we consider more radical by today’s standards. Only in recent years have some feminist historians begun to reexamine the contributions WCTU women made to the suffrage movement and to feminism. The research for this thesis relies heavily on primary sources including Ackerman’s personal papers found in Sherrod Library’s Archives of Appalachia, her three published books,Australia From a Woman’s Point of View, What Women Have Done With the Vote, and The World Through a Woman’s Eyes. Also consulted were issues of the WCTU’s official journal, The Union Signal, from 1887 through 1892.

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This thesis is about how Moravian women in the community of Salem, North Carolina, challenged the policies of the church in order to gain more autonomy in the late 18th century. Settling into the Piedmont, these women encountered excessive materialism and a widely accepted racial hierarchy, which challenged the simple life of the Moravian community. I argue that although historians of Moravians have explored the dissent in the Salem community, they have not considered the desires of Moravian women and how their environment shaped them. Moravian Elders struggled to keep their congregation in line and were greatly concerned with the conduct of women. Young women running away with outsider men reflected poorly on their patriarchal control. Married women who conducted their households in a way that contradicted the guidance of the Elders, seemed to threaten the future of their community by corrupting the youth. Despite the efforts of the Elders to contain dissent, they were sometimes pushed to adjust their policies. Using the disciplinary records of the Elders, memoirs, the Single Sisters Diary, and various documents from the congregation, I examine the experiences and actions of Moravian women prior to their arrival in Salem and shortly after, the dissent and desires of Single Sisters, and how Married Sisters navigated the rules of the Brethren to run their own households. Despite the attempts of the Elders to curb disobedient behavior, many women were successful. Moreover, the disobedience of Moravian women exemplifies how women were involved in changing the Moravian church and the development of the Piedmont culture by challenging the policies of the church and seeking opportunities for freedom. / Master of Arts / In the second half of the eighteenth century, a group of German Lutheran reformers or Pietists, called the Moravians, started a congregation and community in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Largely surrounded by small communities that were embracing materialism and benefiting from enslaved labor, Moravian Elders struggled to keep their congregation in line. This thesis examines how single and married Moravian women disobeyed the policies of the community in order to gain control over their marriages, work, and homes. These women navigated the spaces around them, southern racial hierarchy, and opportunities for dissent to garner some control over their lives and push back against the rules of the Elders. In this thesis, I argue that white Moravian women used private and public spaces to bend or break the rules of the Elders and gain new freedoms and autonomy. Furthermore, Moravian women had to consider their identities as white Moravian women in a slave owning society, which implied that they were superior to enslaved Black individuals. Due to these influences, Moravian women were inspired to dissent and challenge the Elders, which in turn inspired changes in the policies of the Moravian church.

Touring the state in the early 1980s, the “Texas Women: A Celebration of History” exhibit was the first attempt to create a comprehensive, public Texas women’s history narrative. Surprisingly, the exhibit was organized not by academics or museum professionals, but rather by the Texas Foundation for Women’s Resources—a nascent second-wave feminist non-profit organization composed of up-and-coming political activists such as Ann Richards, Sarah Weddington, Jane Hickie, and Martha Smiley. Through an analysis of the exhibit, as well as archival research and oral histories with many of the participants, this thesis explores the reasons that a feminist organization with finite resources would choose to focus on the production of women’s history as a tool of feminist activism. The “Texas Women” exhibit was a uniquely effective way for the members of the Texas Foundation for Women’s Resources to express their feminist values in a culturally palatable way and to create embodied moments of feminist consciousness for their audience. Furthermore, it paved the way for the organization’s future successful feminist projects, fed the production of Texas women’s history initiatives around the state, and served as a springboard that helped launch Ann Richards’ successful political career. / text

Utopian Dreams, National Realities: Intellectual Cooperation and the League of Nations chronicles the work of the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI). This dissertation demonstrates how the CICI’s utopian vision of international peace was actively challenged by national tensions and agendas in the interwar period. It examines the idealistic goals of the movement by focusing on the narratives and motivations of key committee members as they worked toward their own ideas of peace. The challenge of nationalism is illustrated through an analysis of major disagreements between CICI members as well as through biographical case studies of lesser-known members. The pursuit of “moral disarmament,” or the process of changing mentalities towards war, was a central component of the CICI’s work. Both education and film were envisioned as ways to influence the public and engender anti-war sentiment. This work argues that the League of Nations’ conception of internationalism was Eurocentric and moral disarmament was formulated within an Anglo-American context. Both of these limitations narrowed the influence of the CICI’s peace work to certain geographical areas of influence and effectively marginalized less powerful nations and individuals within it.

The principal purpose of this essay is to research how the development of needlework education interacts and interconnects with consumption patterns. Iceland has been used as a case for this study but any country would be applicable. The point of departure is the assumption that when a society develops more and more into being a consumer society, the needlework education also will change – in drastic forms. And that tracing a development towards consumerism can be traced in the curricula regarding this specific subject. People’s changing attitude towards spending, wasting, and an extravagant living is an important feature which explains the shift between non-consumer societies to a consumer society. Society’s outlook on these features is best reflected by that policy the institutions society uses to form its citizens’ desirable (consumer) behavior. In understanding the development from a non-consumerist society to a consumer society the study on the Icelandic syllabi for needlework and textile education plays a prominent part. A presentation on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the period of time in question has also been used in order to see the general increase of the standard of living and rise of consumerism in Iceland. Also numbers on trade and unemployment have been enclosed in order to give a more telling picture of the development and the results. The spatial imprint of the development of the Icelandic educational system and the development of syllabi for the textile handicraft subject show that an established consumer society firstly can be found in Iceland somewhere between 1960 and 1977, thus slightly ensuing the most immediate period after the World War II. A society that educates its young ones to darn, mend, and knit with the explicit motive to help deprived homes and states that this is a necessary virtue for future housewives cannot rightly be called a consumer society. It is also worth mentioning that the subject was after this breakthrough also available for boys. Furthermore, this seems to coincide with the so called “haftatímanum”, the restriction era, which lasted from 1930 to 1960. During this time the Icelandic government controlled the market having an especially harsh policy on the import of consumer goods, with product rationing as a result. Both of these two matters - the syllabi for the textile handicraft subject and the haftatímanum - had an anaesthetized impact on the development of the Icelandic consumer society.

<p>This dissertation takes the paradoxical role of Colette in the canon of French and women's writing, from her earliest works to present, as an entry into a radically new interpretation of her life and literary oeuvre. This work is distinguished from previous works on Colette both in its approach and in the scope of its research, relying on extensive archival research revealing unpublished and unstudied aspects of Colette's biography and reception, and using a variety of modes of analysis to interpret this research. </p><p>This dissertation shows, in its first two chapters, how the myth of Colette as the incarnation of a particularly French brand of femininity, a spontaneous, natural writer, in no way literarily self-conscious, neither contributing to nor influenced by literary innovations, whose writing expresses her instinctive femininity, was constituted, from the earliest reviews of Colette's first novel, Claudine à l'école (1900), through feminist interpretations of Colette from the 1970s to present. Because Colette was understood to be a feminine writer of women by both misogynist conservatives of 1900 and radical feminists of the 1970's, their understanding of this writer remained remarkably homogenous and durable. The third chapter relies on contemporary celebrity theory in order to investigate Colette's own agency in the creation and policing of this durable public image, tracing both ways that Colette maintained her image, and ways that she profited from it, focusing in particular on her eponymous literary collection, the Collection Colette, and her "produits de beauté" cosmetics line and a beauty salon. This understanding of Colette's agential role in her public image inspires a new reading of the 1910 novel La Vagabonde and the relationship Colette depicts between the protagonist, Renée Néré's stage persona and her life when she is not in front of an audience.</p><p>The next two chapters suggest new ways of approaching Colette, beyond the durable myth of the spontaneous feminine writer that she worked so hard to maintain: as a consummate professional and as a literary innovator. The fourth chapter focuses on Colette's professionalism: using a Bourdieusian-inspired analysis of Colette's correspondence to uncover her role in the literary field, tracing the full extent of her social, artistic, and professional networks with other writers, journalists, and artists. This chapter then explores concrete examples of her manipulation of these networks, studying in particular her collaboration with Maurice Ravel in L'Enfant et les sortilèges and her management of the literary department at the newspaper Le Matin. The final chapter of this dissertation reads Colette in terms of discourses of modernism, from which she has long been excluded due to her imagined marginality to the literary field, focusing in particular on French conceptions of the harmonious reconciliation of classicism and literary innovation which reached their height in the 1920's, and which I have termed the "classique moderne." This dissertation makes a contribution to trends in French literature, literary history, the sociology of literature, women's studies, women's history, feminist literary criticism, and celebrity theory.</p> / Dissertation

The purpose of this thesis is to look at the motivations behind the life and work of Caroline Chisholm, nee Jones, 1808-1877, and to ascertain why British historians have chosen to ignore her contribution to the nineteenth century emigration movement, while attending closely to such women as Nightingale for example. The Introduction to the thesis discusses the difficulties of writing a biography of a nineteenth century woman, who lived at the threshold of modernity, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, in the period identified as late modernity or postmodernity. The critical issues of writing a historical biography are explored. Chapter Two continues the debate in relation to the Sources, Methods and Problems that have been met with in writing the thesis. Chapters Three to Seven consider Chisholm's life and work in the more conventional narrative format, detailing where new evidence has been found. By showing where misinformation and errors have arisen in earlier biographies that have been perpetuated by subsequent biographies, they give specificity to the debate discussed in the Introduction. Chapters Eight to Ten discuss, in far greater depth than a conventional narrative format allows, the relevant political, religious and social influences which shaped and influenced Chisholm's life, and which facilitate an understanding of her motivation and character.

My thesis examines the role that Ladies Home Journal played in challenging the ideals of domesticity that emerged in the postwar period in the United States. Originally founded in 1883, Ladies Home Journal emerged from World War II as the most popular and highly circulated women’s magazine. Husband and wife duo Bruce and Beatrice Gould served as co-editors-in-chief from 1935 to 1962, and populated the magazine with numerous ambitious and talented female writers and editors. Many of these female staff members also married and had children, while maintaining their careers. During an era where employees discriminated against women in the workplace, Ladies Home Journal employed women and published numerous articles supporting women in the workplace. In 1963, Betty Friedan claimed that women’s magazines only perpetuated the idealized, feminine housewife, but I argue that her argument oversimplifies the complexities women’s magazines represented during the 1950s. Divided intro three chapters, I analyze the shifting working conditions for women between the 1940s and 1950s, then unearth the working culture of Ladies Home Journal during the postwar period through an analysis of the editors, writers, and articles. Lastly, I examine three female journalists, Dorothy Thompson, Betty Hannah Hoffman, and Maureen Daly who all regularly contributed to the Journal.

This thesis investigates the dynamics between devadasi women and judges in the Anglo-Indian court in the Madras Presidency of 19th-century colonial India. The thesis focuses on how the devadasis navigated the colonial legal system and the strategies they utilized as well as the role of the judges' preconceived notions and prejudice in determining the decisions they made.