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Nursing has been identified as one of the most sex-typed occupations in the United States. Moreover, nurses typically practice in settings where there is an unequal distribution of power. These conditions make their workplace a particularly ripe environment for sexual harassment, yet some research literature suggests that sexual innuendo and even some touching is "normal" for these workers, concluding that sexual harassment does not happen to nurses. However, much of sexual harassment is embedded in gestures that are grounded and constructed both socially and culturally, implying that definitions of harassment are dependent on the context in which the behaviors occur. In this qualitative study, the term--sexual harassment--was not used at the outset of the semi-structured interviews that were conducted with thirty-seven working female nurses. Instead, respondents were asked to describe their job-related sexual advances, after which they determined how and under what circumstances they would (or would not) affix the sexual harassment label. This design allowed for analysis of the interpretive grounds under which definitions of sexual harassment are made and is predicated on the notion that harassment is not merely a list of proscribed behaviors but a range of actions subject to interpretation and constrained by factors which may be internal to the job. The respondents furnished details on 129 unwanted or unpleasant sexual acts. Yet the majority of the group equivocated when applying the label to those actions they had directly experienced. Other findings revealed that they expected that they would be sexually mistreated by male doctors and patients because they were female nurses--the treatment accorded them was "part of the job," thus their experiences were rendered invisible. Those who accept the current social definition of sexual harassment might argue that the nurses' reactions failed to appropriately label these experiences. However, the nurses' own interpretations of their situations mean that these acts and the responses available to them are constructed in light of their particular occupational situation where gender and the job are fused.

The myth of Atalanta represents the struggle for women athletes to gain legitimacy. Atalanta has strength and power that are foiled by heterosexual conventions of the sex/gender system. Thus, she functions as a metaphor of possibility and dashed hopes. This study explains the persistence of heterosexist representation of female athletes in popular press by exploring the linkages among sport, gender, and technology. Such an exploration is situated amid a body of interdisciplinary research that explores sport as a social and cultural form. As a Feminist Mass Communication study, this project explores the textual strategies employed by producers of mass-mediated content, as well as the institutional power relationships that secure them; and finally, for the exploration of the ways in which gendered ideologies are rearticulated in coverage of female athleticism. The study addresses four research questions: (a) What forms of femininity have been valorized or eclipsed in popular representations of female athleticism? (b) When and in what contexts is female muscularity addressed in the popular press? (c) What strategies does the popular press use to naturalize differences between male and female athletes? (d) Are there moments in the popular press coverage of female athleticism where the relationship between sport and gender is, or potentially could have been, transformed? To answer these questions I conduct a frame analysis on 140 articles from the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, 1921–1996. Frame analysis allows for the examination of the stability and/or change of mediated representations over time, the organizational practices of media and the representations they engender, and the politics of gender. I conclude that femininity as constituted by the popular press has limited potentially transformative moments in sport and athleticism. Furthermore, the origins of female athleticism are inaccurately represented in media, resulting in a collective amnesia about female athletic experiences. Finally, technological discourse embodies the masculinist values replicated not only in sport media, but also in the more general and popular representation of female athleticism.

Homeownership is widely considered to be of benefit both to the individual household and to society at large. Yet a number of obstacles stand in the way of successful homeownership for many women. Chief among them are familial status discrimination in mortgage lending and lack of sufficient income. This dissertation analyzes mortgage lending data from Boston and finds that women, more than men, when applying for mortgages are disadvantaged by having children. Furthermore, white working mothers are disadvantaged more than their stay-at-home counterparts, while black or Hispanic stay-at-home mothers are disadvantaged more than their working counterparts. Alternative types of tenure such as community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives are discussed as viable options for women who are underserved by conventional markets. A survey of members of eighteen such groups provides support for this conclusion.

This dissertation investigates the influence of GDR writer Gabriele (Kachold) Stötzer's visual and performance art on the texts published in her 1992 volume of experimental prose, grenzen los fremd gehen. Born in 1954, Stötzer is loosely associated with the experimental writers of the Prenzlauer Berg “Szene.” In the 1980s in Erfurt, she established the Künstlerinnengruppe, a performance group that focused on self-expression in the private spaces of apartments and self-made studios—painting, posing for photographs, creating amateur films, weaving, making pottery, and sewing clothes. I maintain that this coalition of women fashioned an indirect defiance to the GDR State by operating in arenas the Stasi did not conceive as political. As well, I argue that the techniques of bricolage—the spontaneous use of materials at hand—she devised to express that defiance that are employed in the group's visual art performances, are also central to Stötzer's textual production. Stötzer tosses together sentences built upon consonant and vowel sounds that play on meanings; she rejects the steps of revising and editing; and she uses “materials at hand”—especially the body. She uses those techniques to represent her wrenching experience of incarceration at the age of twenty-four and her ongoing discontent with the GDR. Stötzer eschews any optimistic view of the intact individual within socialism and reveals instead in her writing an exasperated figure that lacks crucial freedoms. In Chapter One I outline the prescribed tenets of socialist realism and their implementation in GDR practice and how Stötzer's texts resist them. In Chapters Two and Three I trace Stötzer's biography and her artistic production—especially with the Künstlerinnengruppe, showing how her art has always been informed by elements of bricolage. In Chapter Four I provide analyses of eight texts from grenzen los fremd gehen, particularly emphasizing their relationship to her visual and performance art. I conclude my dissertation by arguing that Stötzer's creative potential was catalyzed in very particular ways by the circumstances that reigned in the waning days of the GDR, so that her more recent post-Wende texts no longer display the experimental qualities that brought her acclaim before 1989.

This study examined moral reasoning used by nurses to resolve conflict and choice in the workplace. This study also focused on how nurses saw themselves as leaders and caregivers. Ten nurse leaders were purposively selected from a large urban acute care magnet hospital. In open-ended, semi-structured interviews, each participant discussed an actual workplace conflict that they experienced, the course of action taken, and evaluation. Nurse leaders also described themselves as leaders and as caregivers. Demographic data was gathered on age, sex, educational background and career positions. Two research questions were addressed in this study: How do nurse leaders respond to conflict and choice in the workplace? Does level of leadership influence response to conflict and choice? Interview data were analyzed using Carol Gilligan's protocol described in the Reading Guide (Brown et al. 1988). The results indicate that nurse leaders used justice and care voices to respond to conflict and choice in the workplace. Seven out of ten used both a justice and care voice. Three of the leaders responded with only one voice: two with only a care voice and one with only a justice voice. In this study, leadership level did not influence choice of moral voice in workplace conflict. Managers and executives both used justice and care in describing their dilemmas. Nurse leaders described three kinds of workplace conflict: organizational, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Four themes emerged as central to how nurse leaders view themselves: the importance of relationships in the leader role; power as a piece of the leader role; the leader as a team member; standards as guides to decision-making. Nurse leaders underscored the importance of the worksetting and its influence on nursing's ethic of care. Congruence of institutional philosophy, climate, and larger administrative presence with nursing's professional care values are the contextual influences cited by the nurse leaders.

Women have a longer life expectancy than men, yet there have been few studies exploring the multifaceted dimensions of successful aging among community-dwelling older women. In the present study, grounded theory methods were used to discover their subjective meaning of successful aging and the strategies older women use to age successfully. Participants included seventeen women between the ages of 73 and 104 residing independently in New England who described themselves as aging successfully. Data sources included tape-recorded interviews, telephone follow up calls, participant journals, and field notes. Using constant comparative data analysis, the basic social process of Transcendence in Successful Aging was discovered. The participants described experiencing individual causal conditions and characteristics that informed their selection of one of three paths of Transcendence in Successful Aging; sedulous transcendence, spiritual transcendence or sanguine transcendence. The general strategies used by these women to manage age and health related change and age successfully included accepting by being positive, surveying the options and following the path; adjusting, by charting the options, and acting by preserving interest and continuing involvement. The participants described successful aging strategies specific to each type of transcendence. The outcome of Transcendence in Successful Aging was identified as personal satisfaction with life course. Knowledge of the meaning and process of successful aging among community-dwelling older women is essential for understanding the strategies they use to manage age and health related change and age successfully. The results of this study have implications for education, practice and research. Insight into older women's personal meanings of successful aging and the strategies they use to age successfully will assist nurses and health care providers to support community-dwelling older women in the self-management of age and health related change while promoting their successful aging.

In the last decade, labor migration of women from the former Soviet Union has grown exponentially. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Moldova, where 1/3 of the population works abroad, most illegally, and where about 1/2 of these migrants are women transnationally "commuting" to work for 6 to 12 months at a time. This dissertation examines the effects of the neoliberal global economy in this region on women's migration and questions how notions of gender inform this new economy. Bridging ethnographies of postsocialism with those on migration and gender, and drawing upon poststructural feminist works, I show how shifting ideas about gender play a key role in the moral economies of supply and demand for these labor migrants, in the experience of this migration on the ground, and in state and organizational responses to it. I offer a comprehensive view of one particular migration pattern—(Gagauz) Moldovan women who work as domestics in Turkey—drawing on multi-sited and transnational ethnographic dissertation research and interviews conducted in 2004–5 with these migrant women at home and abroad, their village compatriots at home, their employers and employment agents in Istanbul, and employees of the foremost institution dealing with migrants in the region, the International Organization for Migration. I deploy Bourdieu's concept of social fields of values—here conceptualized as gendered moral economies—to show how notions about women, wealth, migration, and work play out in discursive practices at these sites, conditioning the experiences of this migration from these various perspectives and helping this illegal labor market to function. This dissertation also problemmatizes claims about 'postsocialist women' by specifying their experiences in terms of overlapping and various subjectivities. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on 'postsocialism' in this region and 'postsocialist women' as a special case of migrant women to identify problems and processes of neoliberal globalization that hold wider significance. In this, I am concerned with relating the common dilemmas of migrant women, the ambiguities of all female labors, and the complexity of women's agency.

Women make up a significant minority of the homeless population in the United States. This dissertation examines the social and health characteristics of homeless women, the data having been obtained from the National Health Care for the Homeless Program (HCH), sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Pew Memorial Trust. This program is designed to provide health care and social services to homeless people in 19 U.S. cities. The data are gleaned from medical and social service records on the entire HCH client population (over 20,000 individuals), and from a supplemental questionnaire completed on a sample of the HCH client's. The findings indicate that there are at least five types of homeless women in the HCH population. The first, and largest group includes the single, significantly mentally impaired women, most closely fitting the stereotype of the "bag lady." Two-thirds of this group are receiving government entitlements, but only one-half are receiving mental health counseling. Release from a mental institution is a reason for homelessness for nearly one-third of these women. The second group of women are the women with dependent children in their care. Only half of these women receive AFDC benefits, but they are in better physical health and are rated as having better chances at employment and finding housing than any other type of women. The very young, single women make up the third, and smallest, group of HCH women. Findings suggest that this group may be the most difficult to reach and to maintain contact with, given their low average number of contacts with the HCH program and the lack of information available in their files. The fourth type includes the women with adult family members but no dependent children. The adult support they were presumed to have appears to be of little benefit in their homeless state. The fifth type of women, single, with no significant mental impairment, no children, and no adult support, are by far the most deviant and addicted of any group. The implications of the findings are significant for both service providers and policy makers. Interventions for homeless women must be tailored to their specific problems, and can be guided by the health and social characteristics found here to be associated with each type of homeless woman.