Although there is an increasing interest in the economic, educational and developmental roles of small-scale enterprises for women in the Third World, there is relatively little in the literature that provides detailed case descriptions and analysis of how and why some efforts "succeed." This exploratory study was designed to address this need. Based on a review of the literature and three intensive case studies in India, it attempts to discover the kinds of factors that contribute most significantly to the success of such small-scale enterprises from the perspective of the participants as well as to examine the different ways that "success" is or can be defined. Certain factors that supposedly help promote success are identified in the literature. For instance, education and business skills of participants appear to play a critical role in their ability to raise capital for establishing an enterprise. Other factors cited include community control of the enterprise, role of participants in decision making and problem solving, and the acquisition of new skills. The case studies are used here to reassess such assumed factors and to identify new types of factors related to economic success of small-scale enterprises for poor Third World women. In addition to "success" as an increase in income, the most commonly used indicator, the literature seems to suggest that there are important non-economic benefits which participants of small-scale enterprises also include in their definitions of success. Again, the field inquiry into the three cases in India explores the range of non-economic benefits perceived by participants as related to their small-scale enterprise. This provides a basis for an argument for a broader definition of "success" in planning, implementing, or evaluating such efforts. The literature reviewed includes that on small-scale enterprises with particular reference to women, as well as literature on women and economic development in India, to provide a context for the case studies. For the three case studies, ethnographic and qualitative interviewing methods were used. An inductive analysis of the data revealed factors in the following groupings: Factors Deriving from Organizational Design and Structure; Factors Deriving from Management and Administration; and Factors Deriving from Participant Characteristics. The non-economic benefits with implications for definitions of success are grouped under Skill Related Benefits, Benefits Related to Changes in Lifestyle, and Benefits Related to Personal Growth. Since this was an exploratory field study, one of the concluding chapters provides some important hypotheses for further investigation, and the other provides some recommendations for development agencies, educators, and researchers concerned with the topic. A sample questionnaire used in the field study is available in the Appendix, followed by an extensive bibliography.

The purpose of this study is two fold. First, it provides rich descriptive information on how seven women in the position of college president define and construct their work and secondly, it gathers information regarding their perceptions of the power of the presidency. This study incorporates a feminist paradigm throughout the research process. The research study is a collection of indepth interviews with seven female college presidents in New England. The sample was purposeful rather than random and the women were invited to participate based on diverse background, experience, and a willingness to engage in self-reflective dialogue. Participants are from public and independent two and four year institutions. The interview guide was utilized to collect the data and broad generalizations should not be construed from these data. Data analysis was approached with the feminist assumption that women are more likely to integrate the self with work and work with self. The approach that I have taken embraces the idea that it is important to understand not only the restrictive and narrow definitions that have prescribed roles for both men and women, but also women's subordinate position and marginal status in society. The data are organized into two areas, the first being "The Self in the Workplace". This section is designed to give insight into who the women are, what brought them to the position, their aspirations and their dreams for the future. The second section concentrates on "The Work of the President" and includes leadership and vision, management styles, decision making, and managing the job. Within both sections of the study a series of common threads emerge. The women in the study approach the presidency in a relational manner grounded in the context of the environment. The women grant great value to their relationships with the various constituencies in their respective institutions. Thus being relational rather than hierarchical in their interactions in the workplace is paramount. They view the presidency as expansive and inclusionary, and bring a collaborative, integrated approach to the position of president.

This dissertation examines the role of Afro-Americans in the U.S. birth control movement in the years between 1918-1942. It argues that Afro-Americans of all classes not only supported the idea of birth control but were also a significant force in shaping the national birth control debate, educating their communities and delivering contraceptives to women. During a period when white advocacy of birth control became increasingly conservative, black birth control advocates advanced a broad, often radical, rationale for contraception. While the black and white communities often worked together to provide services to black women in many locations throughout the country, Afro-Americans worked independently of the national, white dominated birth control organizations. Additionally, the organizational strategies of Afro-American birth control advocates were found to be different from those of their white counterparts. The differences were due, in part, to Afro-Americans' strong community orientation, their belief in each person's right to good health and that the state should provide health care, and their nonhierarchial approach to the "professional's" relationship with other health providers and birth control users.

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This interdisciplinary thesis examines rare poetic, didactic, fictional, and musical texts written by women in latter eighteenth-century Britain for instances of and resistance to contemporary perceptions of music as a form of social control. The opening chapter defines and historicizes the term "social harmony," by discussing neoclassical views of musical affect as productive of beneficial social behaviours and gender definition. By delineating canonical aesthetic theorists' influence upon women writers and musicians and assessing music's place in women's moral education, this chapter complicates the idea of separate public and private spheres of cultural achievement and introduces expanded views of women's agency as composers and performers. Next, the thesis appraises women's engagement with charity, musically enacted, through formal musical and textual analysis of hymns, songs, and benefit performances and publications. It marks the productive intersection of patronage and charity for women, who could articulate divergent responses to such idealized or stereotyped objects of pity as prostitutes and madwomen and benefit materially from so doing. The third chapter considers women composers and writers' employment of imitative and associative aesthetic practices in nature's musical representation, including neoclassical and realist pastorals, the picturesque, and the sublime. It traces development of a hybrid aesthetic of natural representation that enables performative and compositional separation of femininity from nature in forms including the novel, song, and pastoral drama. The final chapter identifies contemporary anxieties concerning the depiction of political, moral and gender-role stability within an increasingly international musical discourse. It analyzes women's musical conceptions of cultural difference and national identity in ballad operas and pastiches in light of these conflicts. By crafting works consonant with societal ideals of charitable, natural, and national order-or by re-imagining their participation in these musical aids to social harmony-women composers, lyricists and performers contributed significantly to the formation of British cultural identity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The purpose of this thesis is to present various themes concerning women's mourning in the Striparvan of the Mahabharata. This paper is intended as a preliminary study upon which further work on death, grief and mourning in the Mahabharata may be built. Owing to this focus, it attempts to connect those themes found in the Sfripa1Van with similar themes found elsewhere in the Mahabharata. In this thesis, the mourning behaviour of the women is divided into three separate categories: the appearance of the women, the actions of the women, and the laments that the women utter. Each category is presented as it is found in the text, and analyzed accordingly. There is a strong emphasis on the symbolic and metaphorical connections between these women and other liminal beings, such as ascetics, menstruating women, gods, and animals. The meaning of these connections is subsequently explored. There are three significant findings within this thesis that stem from the analysis of the categories of mourning behaviour. Firstly, the symbolic and metaphorical links that mourning women have with the beings mentioned above lend the women an aura of power that is primarily used to hurt curses that destroy entire lineages. It is argued here that these curses are part of a background of women's curses that cause most of the suffering in the main plot of the Mahabharata. Mourning women also possess many erotic characteristics that are found both in their laments as well as through their metaphorical connections with other liminal beings. The main element of this eroticism is the expression of frustrated fertility. This frustrated fertility becomes destructive through symbolic connections with the doomsday mare. The longer the duration of the frustration, the more destructive the women become. Finally, the women's laments indicate that they firmly support the code of duty (ksatradharma) that warriors (ksatriyas) are supposed to adhere to. Just as the main villian Duryodhana does, the women place a priority on k~atradharma as a system of moral judgement. Owing to this priority, the women emphasize the responsibilty of humans for their own moral actions, which is directly opposed to the theological solution of Vaisniava bhakti (devotion) as it is presented in the text by the divine Krsna. The thesis concludes with some speculations as to the direction that further research on the same topic may take. An emphasis on men's grief and mourning is indicated. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The purpose of this study is to determine the perception of women revealed in the writing of Philo of Alexandria. Although Richard Baer approached the subject in Philo's Use of the Categories Male and Female, no comprehensive examination has been made of the role Philo accorded women. I set Philo's writing on the subject of women within the context of two intellectual traditions, the Jewish and the Greek, in order to determine whether he accepts, rejects or alters inherited attitudes. I study it also in the context of the multifarious ways Philo uses "male" and "female" to express comparisons. There emerges a coherent pattern, which indicates that Philo's statements about women are not isolated from his overall understanding of the meaning of "female." After establishing these two larger contexts, I narrow the scope of the study, by demonstrating that Philo's perception of women cannot be determined from his statements about "man." I do this by studying the context in which he uses both Greek terms translated by the English term "man," anthropos and aner, as well as looking into the use of the two terms in the Septuagint and in some earlier Greek writing. In the body of the work I study Philo's material on Biblical women and contemporary women, subdividing the first group according to Philo's terms, "women" and "virgins." The conclusion of the work is that Philo intensifies the subordination of women which he draws from both traditions. He views woman as a danger to man unless she is under his strict control. Since his first concern is the survival of the community through the religious strength of its men, he believes that woman ought to play an auxiliary role, and to be prevented from any behaviour which would deter men from their religious quest. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dispensation explores Rose Auslander's poetics through her revision of traditional myths. In many of her short poems, the 20th-century Austrian-Jewish poet is concerned with the creative process. Turning to female predecessors, she revises the role of Eve in the Biblical creation myth and uses images of an archetypal cosmic mother figure and of the Shekhina, a feminine emanation of the divine in the Kabbalah. Out of these revisions of mythology arises a new role for the woman poet, and the maternal imagery leads to an understanding of poetics which I call relational poetics. In close readings, I trace the development from the revision of Eve to the cosmic mother and to a maternal language. Eve is seen as a co-creative female power next to the divine forces of creation. Her transgression makes her a role model for the woman poet, rather than marking her as the archetypal seductive woman. She turns the knowledge acquired from the forbidden tree into the source of poetry which she shares with the world. Thus, she becomes a point of departure for Auslander and provides a bridge to the mother figure. In the mother poems, verbal creation is replaced by water and milk as the medium of creation, and Auslander shifts from the creative competition between God and Eve to the struggle between the cosmic mother and her human daughter. Finally, language takes on the mother role. Maternal voices become part of Auslander's search for a new language as images of the symbiotic relationship between the mother and the child in her womb provide access to these voices. Through the image of giving birth, female reproduction becomes a metaphor for poetic productivity. Auslander's relational poetics thus derives from the close relationship between mother and daughter. The boundaries between self and other are fluid, and in a constant process of exchange, poet and poem create each other anew with every word.

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