This dissertation is an ethnography of communication, situated in the context of a feminist utopian community, that examines members’ use of communication and communicative embodiment to counter what they consider to be oppressive United States gender practices. By integrating speech codes theory and cultural discourse analysis with theories of the body and gender, I develop analyses of spoken and written language, normative language- and body-based communicative practices, and sensual experiences of the body. I argue that there are three key ways communication and communicative practices are used to counter gender oppression: the use of gender-neutral words, the “desensationalization” of the body, and egalitarian nudity practices. Additionally, I argue that “calm” communication, as a normative style of communicating on the farm, underprivileges both male and female members of color and of the working class. From the perspective of members, gender was understood to be a category distinct from sex and analyses demonstrated that sex as an identity was a factor in interpretations of gender performances. Sex identities were also necessary for community feminist practice. Communication practices in the community articulated with feminist, health, environmental, and egalitarian discourses to normalize forms of embodiment such as female shirtlessness and public urination to counter dominant U.S. forms. It was found that making sense of normative communication practices required a cultural understanding of how both spaces and bodies were constituted as public and private. Community spaces were understood by members to be either relatively public or private with the public spaces being the more regulated spaces. Members contested the meanings of bodies as public (and therefore able to be regulated) or private (and therefore not able to be regulated). Normative communication practices in the community indicated that members work to preserve boundaries between private bodies in public spaces by developing rules for privacy, confidentiality, and non-communication. Community feminist communicative practices were understood to be liberatory because (1) the small size of the community allowed members to co-create feminist discourses that resignified body parts and gendered identites and (2) the community provided a space in which women could embody feminist discourses as everyday, sensual performances. This study has implications for the theorizing of embodied verbal and nonverbal gender-based cultural communication practices and for understanding community-based counter discourses as well as sex and gender as cultural identities.

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This study was undertaken in order to explore the writing experiences of poor and working-class, non-professional women writers and the issues of power, self-esteem, and social class. The study was focused on this population because their writing experiences had not been investigated. The study was qualitative, having a naturalistic inquiry perspective and employing in-depth, phenomenological interviewing as a method of data collection. The population for the study were five white and five Black working-class and poor women, ages twenty to seventy-five. The data were collected in a series of three audio-taped interviews. Profiles of each woman were made from the transcripts of their interviews, and these were analyzed for emerging patterns. Issues of trustworthiness were addressed in order to avoid bias. The women exhibited powerful personal voices when writing journals and letters where they were able to express their emotions as well as get things done for family members or other people in like circumstances. They experienced self-esteem when writing personal letters, fiction, and poetry. When they first tried to share their public voice in school it was an overwhelming experience of powerlessness. However, they did report success with writing on the job, and their self-esteem was generally good when they talked about their advocacy writing. One group, members of an advocacy group for the elderly, was able to make significant changes in health care for the elderly. However, all of the women still had conflicting feelings about their experiences with public voice. One function of social class was that most of the women did not finish school. The wishes and dreams they had for their lives were not realized. The writing of poor and working-class women centered around the events in their daily lives, such as: letters to teachers, politicians, those in the health care system; journaling about events in their daily lives and writing poetry. Poor and working class women should write on topics connected with their life experiences. In order to overcome problems with writing, they need the support of each other collectively, both privately and publicly.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not there is any significant shift in mothers' stage levels, according to Gilligan's (1982) model of women's development, as a result of taking the course, "Developing Capable People". The research was developed from the narratives resulting from interviews that were examined by raters for stage assignment and empowerment statements. The results of the research are organized according to the five research questions. A demographic survey contributed other pertinent data. The sample was composed of 30 mothers in two communities in CT and MA who had taken the course from facilitators trained by the author of the course H. Stephen Glenn. The results of the research confirm that the majority of mothers reported that the course had changed their self-concept and impacted on the manner in which they related to others. Language changes were evident and the numbers of empowerment statements made confirmed the stage assigned to each mother. Statistical findings involved a chi-square analysis with a Cramer correlation coefficient to determine the extent of association between the stage assignment and the number of empowerment statements made. The association was significant. The results of the study indicate that when the mother is motivated, an in depth involvement examining interpersonal and intrapersonal skills can initiate a change in developmental level. Implications for future research are indicated with suggestions for expanding the content and context of parenting programs.

The literature on gender and psychotherapy, sex-roles, and the psychology of women reveals that the influence of gender on client and therapist behavior has important implications for the process and outcome of psychotherapy practice, especially as it pertains to angry feelings. The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationship between gender and anger in psychotherapy process. This was accomplished though in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight (four female and four male) mental health professionals. They were asked to discuss their general views regarding the role anger plays in one's emotional functioning and their perceptions of the relationship between gender and anger in their treatment of female clients. Qualitative data analysis indicated that there was considerable variation among therapists in how they conceptualized anger and viewed it as an issue in individuals' psychological functioning. General themes of therapists' perceptions of "female" and "male" patterns of the expression of anger emerged. The "female" pattern was frequently identified as involving the avoidance and suppression of anger and linked to feminine sex-role norms prescribing that anger is inappropriate for females to express. Conversely, the "male" pattern was frequently identified as involving the direct, open expression of anger and linked to masculine sex-role norms prescribing that anger is appropriate for males to express. Gender differences in how therapists' experienced and responded to clients' anger were revealed. These gender differences tended to parallel those found in clients' expression of anger. This study illustrates that gender is an important variable in psychotherapy and supports the view that anger is a central psychotherapy dimension. In considering the broader implications of this study, it is apparent that more systematic data needs to be collected from clients and/or third party observers in addition to therapists.

Detective fiction, thematically and structurally, contains the potentially rich ability to stand at multiple places simultaneously. Consequently, it provides an appropriate mediating structure for the discussion of potentially disruptive ideas, particularly ideas on identity. Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century literary and cultural contexts, I consider the geography of gender and the literary strands that provided fertile ground for the emergence of detective fiction. Through close readings of detective narratives by the three earliest women writers of the genre, Seeley Regester (1831-1865), Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935), and Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), I examine how these writers thematize the need for informed choice for their female characters, who either as detectives or suspects learn to achieve expansive readings of the confusing signs surrounding them, and seem to request expansive readings by their readers. Paralleling the discourse that moves toward answering the question "who did it?" is the double text of many of the novels that suggests a series of seemingly contradictory realities: women's entrapment by socially sanctioned roles and the clever ways they achieve freedom; women's victimization by male texts and their creation of a new story; women's invisibility to those unable to hear, see, or understand them and their vivid presence obvious in the emancipatory strategies employed for their survival. The ands suggest the wholeness of the vision of these novels and the possibility of their being read both ways--that is, read for their reinforcement of traditional ideologies and read for the future discourse they evoke. Central to my exploration are the disruptive pauses that begin a renegotiation of gender boundaries in Regester's texts, the significance given to gendered language in Green's novels, and the discourse of humor that demarcates a newly created space for women in Rinehart's narratives. Drawing connections between these early women writers and the presently emerging feminist detective novel, I argue that Regester, Green and Rinehart provide multiple mysteries in their narratives--mysteries that emphasize the desire of these women to understand the boundaries that define them and the ways in which they can change these contours.

This study was designed to synthesize the literature on women who reenter higher education, and to examine through a questionnaire their unique attitudes, personal characteristics and preferences for modes of learning. This study examined the responses to a questionnaire of 139 re-entry women in a small Catholic women's college (Emmanuel College) located in Boston, Massachusetts. The following questions were addressed in this study: (1) Who are the re-entry women? (2) What is the motivation for these women to enter into a undergraduate degree program? (3) What are these women's unique needs? (4) What are the support services needed to help meet their needs? (5) What are their instructional and program preferences? (6) What are the barriers that may interfere with their academic continuance? Methods used in the data collection process included: administration of a 50-item questionnaire to 139 re-entry Emmanuel College undergraduate women students. The participants responded by mail to the questionnaire, so the conditions were not standardized. All data were gathered according to self-reporting of the respondents. An analysis of participating re-entry women's responses revealed the following findings: (1) she was in her upper 30's, married, mother of two children and a part-time student; (2) she returned to school because she was dissatisfied with her job and received encouragement from family and friends; (3) she may find the following services useful: faculty advisement, weekly communication system and peer advisement; (4) she preferred a continuing education program that offered day and evening classes with undergraduate students and with the same full-time faculty; (5) she preferred a college that offered credit for life/work experience; (6) she preferred instructors who can relate theory to everyday experiences and ones who have a realistic view of student's outside duties; (7) she perceived work responsibilities and time commitment to family as a possible barrier interfering with her academic continuance.

In this dissertation I argue that reason is nothing more than the term we give to thinking taken to be legitimate. It has no a priori content. Because of this, there is no objective thing called reason which could be accepted or rejected. I argue that Nietzsche's most important contribution to the critique of the Enlightenment is his exposing of reason as a socially constructed discourse of desire. This puts him above the fray of the debates over the acceptance or rejection of reason, and onto what I claim is the more productive terrain of looking at reason as problematic but unavoidable. Irigaray develops this Nietzschian approach to reason in a way that exposes the tendencies of philosophical notions of reason to prevent women from being able to articulate their interests in discourses taken to be legitimate. Through this example of the marginalization of the interests of women, she is also able to help us see just how it is that reason can operate hegemonically. This epistemological perspective lends a certain plausability to Habermas' claim that in the absence of a transcendental ground for a notion of rationality, what we should call rational is a judgment that all participants in a discussion agree is correct. Where Habermas' position becomes problematic is in his insistence that a rational consensus can be distinguished philosophically from a non rational one. It is here that Habermas' position operates to reinforce dominant exclusionary mechanisms. I draw out the implications of this position for looking at feminist in an international context, and argue that we do not need universal notions of what counts as women's liberation to be able to make cross-cultural critical judgments. Rather, what we need to be able to do this is an open ear to the self articulation of the concerns of real women. I argue that critique can be rational if we do not suppose that we can ever have a fixed notion of what counts as rational, but rather if we accept that rationality is a place holder concept for the discourses which we take to be legitimate. From this it follows that the rational is the site of inevitable struggles over legitimation.

On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson asked Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly to confirm her impression that her verse was alive. Both her letter, which turned on the figure of a breathing body, and her enclosed poems, which served as samples of her living artifacts, presented Dickinson as a maker of verse and a remaker of human sentience. The context out of which her sense of language arose was local networks of exchange among kin, neighbors, and friends who had some connection to Amherst. This social economy of white, middle-class women involved exchanges of living artifacts from one household to another: food, stitched items, texts, flowers. The practice of trading handmade, material things that engaged Dickinson throughout her lifetime alters the perception of her as a recluse who isolated herself from others in order to develop her genius alone. Her linguistic choices and her indirect style are derived in part, from her social practice. So are several values espoused in her poetry: goods, not cash; unique artistry, not mass production; personal interaction, not the literary marketplace. The exchange of floral gifts reflected wider cultural practices of white, middle-class women: identifying flowers and sending messages through them. These "feminine" conventions offered Dickinson more than a temporary blurring of science and sentiment which was "corrected" by Charles Darwin in 1859: they freed her from some of the sexist constructions of nature dominant in her time. Her floral imagery resists the teeth and claws of Darwinian survival and the classifications of botanists. Science and religion emerge in her poetry as authorities proferring "instructive utterances" that require misreading. Her grounds for misreading include her experience with the Amherst landscape and her own body. Her various strands of earth, garden, and body imagery demonstrate how central the speaking body was to her art. By ignoring literature about diseased women's bodies and constructing gardens as primarily positive space, Dickinson found the means to let her body speak. Although speaking physical, sexual, and poetic fulness was difficult for Dickinson, she made verses that expressed the body's potential and touched others with their breath.