This study examines Jane Austen’s realistic interpretations of eighteenth-century English society with a particular focus on representing women’s oppressions in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. Austen, in these three novels, criticizes several issues related to women’s status in English society and focuses on how men and women should be treated equally. In the novels, she argues that English society creates social order, women’s oppressiveness, and gender inequality through arbitrary social norms and traditions. This paper mainly focuses on two areas that restrict women’s roles in their society: the marriage plot and the educational system. Austen’s purpose of presenting these issues is to voice women’s rights and improve their conditions. She also offers her readers unusual descriptions of female characters in order to correct the stereotypical images of women during the period. Finally, this paper aims to show Austen’s success in redefining women’s status and change the misconceptions of women in British society.

This thesis explores how writers mobilise what I call the “social-scientific imagination” to think through the welfare state during its “golden age.” Given the ongoing rollback of welfare programmes in Britain and elsewhere, the study offers timely insight into the history of the welfare state and its possible future. To that end, the chapters concentrate on postwar writers’ indirect and mediated representations of the welfare state in the form of a “social-scientific imagination” manifested in both cultural ideology and literary style. The term “social-scientific imagination” describes these writers’ engagements with the language and technique of social scientific disciplines like sociology, psychiatry, criminology, sexology and the science of city planning in their fiction, and how they imagine these disciplines as shaping the construction and maintenance of the British “welfare state” and its institutions. The texts I explore here capture the tension between care and control, between freedom and security, that is fundamental to the operation of social welfare programmes and that complicates women’s orientation to the welfare state; it is a relationship characterised by ambivalence, even though, as Jane Lewis has argued, women during the war and since perceived they would be – and have been – the welfare state’s primary beneficiaries. This, then, is the central problem examined in this thesis: that the novels represent welfare policies as integral to women’s security at the same time as they point up their coercive tendencies.

Dolores Dyer played from 1952-1953 for the Texas Cowgirls, a barnstorming women's basketball team that provided a form of entertainment popular throughout the United States in that era. The story of Dyer's life demonstrates how a woman could attempt to achieve the American dream—a major theme in American history—through success in athletic competition. Dyer's participation with the Texas Cowgirls also provides a look into the circumstances that limited women's participation in professional sport during the mid-twentieth century. Women's sports studies, although some are very thorough, have gaps in the research, and women's barnstorming basketball is one of the areas often overlooked. In light of this gap, this thesis relies on a variety of sources, including primary documents from unpublished collections, archived materials, and original oral histories from several members of the Texas Cowgirls team. This thesis contains analysis of the socioeconomic factors that influenced Dolores Dyer's maturation into a professional basketball player, examines what the American dream meant to her, and evaluates the extent to which she achieved it. Overall, it constructs a social history that can serve as a foundational source for further study of women in sports during the twentieth century.

This essay is an analysis of mythologies in the Swedish women´s magazine VeckoRevyn. The magazine’s own explicit purpose is to break down the unhealthy opinion of what beauty is in their industry today. By content and linguistic analysis the results of this study are interconnected to the beauty myth as it was established by Naomi Wolf in 1991. The goal is to pinpoint how VeckoRevyn’s question and answer columns construct relationships to their readers, and the mythologies that they maintain. The columns mostly focus on the readers’ physical appearance, and the beauty myth is clearly an inevitable influence. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the beauty myth is hard-wired into our society’s subconscious. VeckoRevyn is working to prevent this, and even though they have not fully succeeded, they are a part of bringing the phenomenon to the surface of society.

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on women with endometriosis, a gynecological condition in which tissue similar to the endometrium, or lining of the uterus which is shed during menses, grows elsewhere in the body. Despite a growing understanding of the disease in medical literature, it is still not well known by the general population or fully understood by the medical community. The paper incorporates a biomedical understanding with Emma Whelan’s idea of these women as an epistemological community, autoethnography, and narratives of sufferers in order to understand how women discuss, experience, and form communities around it. It draws upon individual interviews, a focus group, and readings of medical and social science literature and found that women of dissimilar socioeconomic backgrounds approached and discussed the disease distinctively from one another with three phases of coping with the illness: the discovery, quest, and revelation.

Traditional retouching, where you make the body of a female model in a magazine thinner, has been common for a long time and is well known. Several studies indicates that showing ultra-thin images of female bodies in media can lower the body satisfaction of “ordinary” women which in some cases can lead to dangerous eating disorders. But in 2010 Swedish female magazine VeckoRevyn introduced a new type of retouching: Making some catwalk models bodies bigger instead, which we decided to call opposite retouching. This kind of retouching is aiming to widen the ideal picture that is sent out of how the female body should look like, and therefore having the readers reach a higher body satisfaction and becoming more at peace with the own body. This according to the magazine’s editor in chief, Linda Öhrn Lernstrom. In this attitude study we are looking to widen the knowledge about opposite retouching as a phenomenon by doing qualitative interviews with a number of young women in age 15 – 25 about their outlook on this new retouching. We later present as extensively as we can all these different outlooks, as well as by using Festinger’s social comparison theory, the social responsibility theory presented by Peterson and finally Hall’s representation theory, analyse these outlooks at a deeper level. Opposite retouching showed to be a controversial phenomenon among our respondents: Some of the women meant that the magazine takes their social responsibility and that this initiative is admirable, while some thought that it just makes some women’s body dissatisfaction even worse since even the thin catwalk models bodies weren’t “good enough”. The women in this study belong to the same age group and live in the same culture, which accordning to Hall is crucial for how one perceives media content, and had still such great differences of opinion when it came to the subject of opposite retouching. This indicates that this new retouching needs further investigation, and this attitude study strives to be a contribution to the research field.

Beginning with eight women’s experiences in accessing emergency contraception from a pharmacist, this research brings into view the undocumented “sexual health work” of obtaining the drug in northern Ontario. Between 2005 and 2008, emergency contraception was deregulated to behind-the-counter, forcing women to submit to mandatory counselling and screening about sex, menstruation and contraception at the pharmacy. Situating unwanted pregnancy as harmful in this context, an institutional ethnographic analysis explores the activities of health service delivery and identifies the different ideological practices that shaped women’s access like the steady creep of neoliberalism, professional specialization and clinical power. Ideological discourses construct an ideal contraceptive user, who is patient, compliant and appears “responsible”, contributing to the stigmatization of women. Findings suggest that an inaccurate government definition of emergency contraception contributes to ignorance and misperceptions about function; this, along with an empty federal policy vacuum for women’s health contributes to its problematic status in women’s contraceptive options.

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The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the way in which feminist-based organizations - specifically women's centres - have sought to fulfill the unmet social needs of women and children living throughout British Columbia. This thesis achieves this end through a number of different means. A literature review provides background on feminist planning and an overview of the history of the women's movement in Canada. An examination of B.C. women's centres, which includes a close look at the similar and unique services offered, demonstrates the positive contributions made by centres. A case study, which thoroughly reviews the history of one specific centre (the North Shore Women's Centre), shows how women's centres evolve over time in order to meet the changing needs of the women in their communities. An analysis explores the opportunities and constraints that the members of women's centres have faced in trying to carry out their various activities. This thesis has been based on, and has utilized, the goals and methodologies created by feminist planners. In doing so, it takes women's needs, interests, and experiences into account, and aims to make a contribution to knowledge that women can use to improve their lives

Ring is a composition for orchestra (piccolo [doubling flute], two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets in B-flat, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contra-bassoon, four horns, four trumpets, two tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, three percussion parts [including glockenspiel, vibraphone, tubular bells, snare drum, toms, bass drum, suspended cymbal, drum kit, triangle, and gong], timpani, harp, piano, and standard strings) and spatially separated women's choir (SA right, SA left). This arrangement of media is intended to "ring" the audience with performers. At the notated tempo of two quarter-notes per second, the duration of the piece is exactly 17'40". The title of Ring comes from a poem of the same name written by the composer which is the principal text sung by the choir in the piece. The text of the poem is as follows: Wendy is a ring / A beginning and an end / Connected / The finest gold / Melted by touch / Cooled by breath / She fits my every finger / Without constraint / But permanent / Priceless, Precious, Beautiful / Alone / She clothes me. The poem and composition were written for, and dedicated to, the composer's wife. The ring metaphor ("ring" meaning cyclical, unending, complete) underlies many of the compositional choices in the work. Much of the surface of the music and its deeper structural elements are palindromes, which, because they end as they begin, have a circular nature. Also, the pitch structure of the piece involves the climactic completion of the "cycle" of the twelve available equal-tempered pitch classes. A further organizational element is the Fibonacci series, a mathematical construct which is used to determine small-scale rhythms and the duration of the larger sections of the work. These components, taken together, have resulted in a composition filled with variety and contrasts, which, nonetheless, is quite organically cohesive.