Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Jewish women – Social conditions – 19th Century'

This study examined the status of women in Texas from 1860 to 1920. Age, family structure and composition, occupation, educational level, places of birth, wealth, and geographical persistence are used as the measurements of status. For purposes of analysis, women are grouped according to whether they were married, widowed, divorced, or single.

It is said that when the Sphinx was carved into the bedrock of Egypt it had the head as well as the body of Sekhmet lioness Goddess who presided over the rise and fall of the Nile, and that only much later was the head recarved to resemble a male pharaoh. Simon Schama considered the 'making over' of Mount Rushmore to resemble America's Founding Fathers constituted 'the ultimate colonisation of nature by culture … a distinctly masculine obsession (expressing) physicality, materiality and empirical externality,… a rhetoric of humanity's uncontested possession of nature. It would be comforting to think that, although Uluru has become the focus of nationalist myths in Australia, to date it has not been incised to represent Australia's 'Great Men' - comforting that is, if it were not for the recognition that if Australia had had the resources available to America in the 1920s a transmogrified Captain Cook and a flinty Governor Phillip may have been eyeballing the red heart of Australia for the greater part of a century. My dissertation traces the conscious and unconscious construction of gender in Australian society in the nineteenth century as it was constructed through the apprehension of things which were associated with 'nature' -plants, animals, landscape, 'the bush', Aborigines, women. The most important metaphor in this construction was that of women as flowers; a metaphor which, in seeking to sacralise 'beauty' in women and nature, increasingly externalised women and the female principle and divorced them from their rootedness in the earth - the 'earth' of 'nature', and the 'earth' of men's and women's deeper physical and psychological needs. This had the consequence of a return of the repressed in the form of negative constructions of women, 'femininity'" and the land which surfaced in Australia, as it did in most other parts of the Western World, late in the nineteenth century. What I attempt to show in this dissertation is that a negative construction of women and the female principle was inextricably implicated in the accelerating development of a capitalist consumer society which fetishised the surface appearance of easily reproducible images of denatured objects. In the nineteenth century society denatured women along with much else as it turned from the worship of God and ‘nature' to the specularisation of endlessly proliferating images emptied of meaning; of spirituality. An increasing fascination with the appearance of things served to camouflage patriarchal assumptions which lopsidedly associated women with a 'flowerlike' femininity of passive receptivity (or a ‘mad' lasciviousness) and men with a 'masculinity' of aggressive achievement - and awarded social power and prestige to the latter. The psychological explanation which underlies this thesis and unites its disparate elements is that of Julia Kristeva who believed that in the nineteenth century fear of loss of the Christian 'saving' mother - the Mother of God - led to an intensification of emotional investment among men and women in the pre-oedipal all-powerful 'phallic' mother who is thought to stand between the individual and 'the void of nothingness'.

This study looks at the economic, political and social history of women in the Yoruba area of south-western Nigeria in the 19th century using contemporary sources which have remained previously largely untapped for historical studies of women. The century encompassed many key historical developments which affected women; in particular, the decline of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of an export trade in locally produced palm oil and kernels. Whereas the slave trade had been dominated by men, the processing, transport and trade of palm produce was dominated by women. The extent, nature and effects of women's role in this and other industries such as pottery manufacture, dyeing and food vending, which also expanded and developed during this period, are examined. As demand for palm produce and other goods increased, the labour of both free-born and slave women became more valuable since it was vital for industry at all stages. The study looks at changing labour demands and sources and alterations in the established pattern of the sexual and generational division of labour. Important changes in gender relations are evident and the study illuminates how tensions between men and women and between women themselves were manifest and how both men and women expressed and dealt with these problems. Economic changes were accompanied by largely internal political developments which favoured a few wealthy women. overall, many men perceived and/or experienced that increasing female autonomy posed a threat to the established patriarchal order. The evidence represented in the thesis clearly shows how men attempted to subordinate women in general, tap into their income and limit their political involvement, mainly through the development of exploitative and restrictive aspects of male-dominated politico-religious cults, which were directed specifically at women.

The subject of Jews in sports is often times perceived as an oxymoronic research topic given the ethnic stereotypes that Jews are physically weak, unfit, and more focused on intellectual pursuits. However, Jews have had a long history and in-depth interaction with sports that is important to understand, not only to expand our perception of the Jewish people, but also to realize the important role sports play in social historiography. While the Jewish population of East Coast America and their involvement in athletics has been studied to some extent, the West Coast population, in particular, the Northwest, has been sorely neglected. This thesis examines the lives of immigrant Jews on the West Coast, specifically Portland, OR and their interaction with sports compared to the experiences of immigrant Jews on the East Coast from 1900 to 1940. An overall examination and comparison of the Jewish immigrant experience in the West is presented along with an evaluation of the establishment of the Portland Jewish community and their coinciding athletic community. The experiences of the Jews in Western America is compared to the immigrants of the East Coast and how these differing involvements shaped the development of Jewish sporting facilities. The thesis then expands on how the Portland Jews grew their athletic facilities and overall involvement in athletics, related to the experience of East Coast Jews. The growth of the Jewish Zionist movement is examined along with how Jewish involvement fit more seamlessly into certain sports than others. The thesis also takes a closer look at Jewish women and their specific experiences in athletics compared to their East Coast counterparts and the experience of Jewish men in Portland. The role of philanthropic organizations as a means of greater involvement in athletics is assessed, along with how the experiences of Western European versus Eastern European immigrants played into their varying involvements with sports. Finally, the conclusion discusses the importance of scholarly sports inquiry as it plays to the relevance of a greater social history and for immigrants in particular, their assimilation and acculturation into American society.

At the end of the nineteenth century, St. Lawrence Boulevard, popularly known as 'the Main', attained mythical status in Montreal. Due to its particular location in the social and cultural geography of Montreal, the Main, which symbolically divides the working-class Francophone east and the Anglophone bourgeois west, has developed as a mixed-use commercial artery, an eclectic border zone of a bilingual, multi-ethnic city. The heterogeneous character of the Main is reflected in its material landscape---with its old and now largely re-used garment sweat-shops and labour halls, theatres of the red-light district, cafes, and the shops and restaurants of the mid-twentieth century immigrant shopping corridor. Shaped by the diversity of the populations that came to live, work, protest, shop or be entertained in these sites, it is an example of the social and cultural diversity of the metropolis. Such heterogeneous sites have often been interpreted as liminal spaces, but this research demonstrates that the construction and experience of the Main as a border zone have rarely been gender neutral. While physical, social and cultural heterogeneity are components of this landscape, these sites also attest to the importance of gender relations in the experience of the Main as a place of work and social life and, ultimately, as a space of representation. Its border status has often been represented through discourses and images of 'marginal' womanhood, articulated in terms of social, occupational, political, sexual and/or ethnic identity. Many of its locales, moreover, have been sites where women entered urban public life in contentious and distinctive ways.
As a place that highlights the social and cultural heterogeneity of a supposedly 'divided' city, the Main is an ideal site from which to explore how ethnicity, language, class, occupation and sexual identity intersect with gender in the experience and representation of urban life. This thesis examines how a multiplicity of female gender identities have been defined and contested along the Main over the past century. It contributes to a broad literature on geographies of gender, difference and urban public cultures through an analysis of the relationships between feminist spatial metaphors and the material production of urban space. Through a series of events that move through time and sections of St. Lawrence, I examine how portions of the landscape of this boulevard have been marked by the enactment of specific sets of gender relations and forms of representation that became central to civic debates regarding gender. I argue that the construction and experience of the Main as a border zone has involved the production of specific relations of gender, alterity and space.
A variety of qualitative methods and archival sources are used to illustrate the importance of representations of gender to the production of this place and to illustrate how women have experienced and made use of material sites to express their specific occupational, cultural, religious, social or sexual identities. This thesis demonstrates the crucial role played by the border zones of urban public cultures in the construction of female identities that depart from dominant gender norms in the expression of social, cultural and sexual differences.

This thesis focuses on the transformation of domestic ideology in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. It traces the emergence and development of the doctrine of separate spheres in the Revolutionary and early national periods and then examines the rise of the home economics movement in the post-Civil War period as an agent and expression of the demise of the separate spheres ideology of domesticity. The doctrine of separate spheres developed from a longstanding sense of separateness from the public world of men experienced by colonial women. The emergence of this doctrine was facilitated and shaped by the events of the Revolutionary War, the development and spread of commercial and industrial economic activities, changes in religious practises and new notions about the nature and nurture of children. The complex interplay of these factors strengthened women's sense of disjunction from the male-dominated sector of society, but bolstered women's sense of moral authority and autonomy within their sphere, the home. Women saw their domestic role as essential to the preservation of traditional values and morality and therefore critical for the preservation of social harmony. Supported by the doctrine of separate spheres, women organized to protect and project home values, hoping to reform society by their influence. Noted domestic theoreticians such as Sarah Hale and Catharine Beecher helped articulate this doctrine for women, but their work should be viewed as expressions of widely felt notions about women's place in the family and society. The emergence of home economics is viewed as a challenge to the basic precepts of the doctrine of separate spheres, thereby calling into question the universality of the acceptance of this doctrine by middle class women in the nineteenth century. As urban reformers, scientists and college educated women, home economists found the doctrine of separate spheres inadequate and outmoded as a guide for modern living. These women sought to replace traditional homemaking practises and ideals with a new domestic ideology, home economics, which they thought would more effectively meet the needs of the family in the twentieth century. Home economics developed as a social reform movement in two phases, each one dominated by a different generation of women. The pioneer generation of home economists were traditionally educated women who sought to inculcate working class and immigrant women and children with middle class domestic values and ideas. They initiated programs of education in various institutions, ranging from the public schools to church-sponsored mission classes, to teach girls and women homemaking skills such as cooking, sewing and budgeting. Although traditional in their goals, these women created new forms which quickly led to developments which went beyond a re-assertion of domesticity expressed in the doctrine of separate spheres. Home economists began to see themselves as scientifically-trained experts, not as ordinary homemakers. This development both coincided and was furthered by the rise of the second generation of home economists, who were largely college graduates and subsequently professors and administrators in institutions of higher learning. This group of women shaped home economics to meet some of their own needs, both personal and professional, and in the process changed the focus of the movement. Home economists became more concerned with reforming the middle class home and homemaker in this period. Home economics became embedded in colleges as a new inter-disciplinary course of study for women and as a new profession. Home economists promoted a new ideology of domesticity which had as its foundation the emulation of certain aspects of men's sphere: business values of efficiency and rational organization, the use of technology and a reliance on expertise. A belief in the reforming power of science replaced traditional notions of piety in the home economics ideology. Home economists created elaborate hierarchies of expertise based on achieved levels of education, thereby undermining the sense of sisterhood supported by the doctrine of separate spheres. Insofar as women adopted the home economics ideology of domesticity, the homemaker role lost its authority and autonomy and women's sphere lost its boundaries and sense of mission which had informed nineteenth century women's notions of their role in society.
Arts, Faculty of
History, Department of
Graduate

This study offers an overdue exploration of the early years of the deaconess community in Neuendettelsau from a gender perspective. Drawing on rich archival material, it focuses on the process of the formation of a distinctive collective identity. Central to this study is the assumption, drawn from the social sciences, that collective identity is a social construction which requires the participation of the whole group through identification and which is consolidated by developing specific rituals, symbols, codes and normative texts, which facilitate integration, and by constructing external boundaries, which separate from the world and wider church. The centrifugal forces which came into play when deaconesses were sent out in isolation were counterbalanced by a communal life which offered forms of participation and identification for the individual members and which consolidated their sense of belonging. The first chapter introduces the methodology. Chapter Two explores the social, cultural and theological context of the foundation of the Deaconess Institute, and offers a brief outline of the institution's historical development. The third chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the initiation ceremony as a rite which both admitted into the community and conferred an ecclesiastical office. Chapter Four analyses formative and normative texts that shed light on the community's norms, values, and expectations. In the fifth chapter, non-literary means of consolidating and affirming the deaconesses' collective identity are explored. This study concludes that the process of the emergence of a specific deaconess culture was pervaded by bourgeois norms, values, patterns of behaviour and notions about gender roles which measured out the women's radius of action and were at times difficult to reconcile with the deaconess profession.

During the antebellum period of U.S. slavery (1830-1861), many people claimed ownership of the enslaved woman's body, both legally and figuratively. The assumption that they were merely property, however, belies the unstable, shifting truths about bodily ownership. This thesis inquires into the gendered specifics and ambiguities of the law, the body, and women under slavery. By examining the particular bodily regulation and exploitation of enslaved women, especially around their reproductive labor, I suggest that new operations of oppression and also of resistance come into focus. The legal structure recognized enslaved women in the interest of owners, and this limitation was defining, meaning that justice flowed in one direction. If married white women were "civilly dead," as famously evoked by the Declaration of Sentiments (1848) then enslaved women were civilly non-existent. The law controlled, but did not protect slaves, and a number of opponents to slavery denounced this contradictory scenario during the antebellum era (and before). Literally, enslaved women were claimed by their masters, purchased and sold as chattel. Physically, they were claimed by those men (both white and black) who sought to have power over them. Symbolically, they were claimed by anti-slavers and pro-slavers alike when it suited their purposes, often in the domains of news and literature, for the sake of advancing their ideas, a rich record of which fills court cases, newsprint, and propaganda touching the slavery issue before the civil war. Due to the numerous ways that enslaved women's bodies have been claimed, owned, or circulated in markets, it may have been considered implicit to many that others owned their bodies. I believe that this is an oversimplified historical supposition that needs to be re-theorized. Indeed, enslaved women lived in a time when they were often led to believe that their bodies were not truly their own, and yet, many of them resisted their particular forms of oppression by claiming ownership of their bodies and those of their children; sometimes using rather extreme methods to keep from contributing to their oppression. In other words, slave owners' monopoly of the legal, economic, and logistical meanings of ownership of slaves had to be constantly reaffirmed and negotiated. This thesis asks: who owned the enslaved woman's body? I seek to emphasize that enslaved women were valid claimants of themselves as can seen in primary sources that today have only been given limited expression in the historiography.

This study focuses on the Moore-Youse family in Muncie, Indiana, a medium size city in Delaware County, Indiana, as a microcosm of Victorian ideology and material culture using the methods of historical archaeology and social history. The following thesis examines material conditions among this middle-class, female-centered, lineal family during the Victorian period using gender theory. In this study, archaeological materials and historical documents are used to explore the priorities and choices that influenced Muncie's middle class in making material decisions during the Victorian period.The Victorian Period in America was marked by rapid social change, growing industrialization and the transformation of gender roles. These changes created an expanded middle-class in communities across America. For the middle class the home was a sanctuary and Victorian women were expected to devote themselves to the home and family. Thus began the "cult of domesticity". This thesis explores the influence of gender roles in 19th century Indiana.
Department of Anthropology

Entre 1880 et 1940, la Belgique francophone voit un accroissement significatif du nombre de femmes de lettres. À la croisée de l’histoire des femmes et de l’histoire des lettres belges, ce phénomène enregistre les nouvelles modalités d’inscription des femmes dans l’espace public, et en particulier leur accès progressif aux professions intellectuelles. Partant des acquis des études de genre (gender studies) et de la sociologie de la littérature, la thèse se propose d’étudier le rapport collectif et individuel que les femmes de lettres entretiennent vis-à-vis du littéraire.
Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Defence date: 26 February 1993
Examining board: Gisela Bock (supervisor) ; Francesco Margiotta Broglio ; Simonetta Soldani ; Mario Toscano ; Stuart Woolf
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
From 1851 to 1954, under various names, the Indiana Cotton Mills was the dominant industry in the small town of Cannelton, Indiana, mostly employing women and children. The female industrial laborers who worked in this mill during the middle and end of the nineteenth century represent an important and overlooked component of midwestern workers. Women in Cannelton played an essential role in Indiana’s transition from small scale manufacturing in the 1850s to large scale industrialization at the turn of the century. In particular, this work will provide an in-depth exploration of female operatives’ primary place in Cannelton society, their essential economic contributions to their families, and the unique tactics they used in attempts to achieve better working conditions in the mill. It will also explain the small changes in women’s work experiences from 1854 to 1884, and how ultimately marriage, not industrial work, determined the course of their later lives.

The purpose of my dissertation is to conduct an intertextual study of two fantasy texts — Alice in Wonderland by Victorian author Lewis Carroll, and Stardust by postmodern fantasy author Neil Gaiman — and their filmic re-visionings by Tim Burton and Matthew Vaughn respectively. In scrutinising these texts, drawing on insights from feminist, children’s literature and intertextual theorists, the actions of ‘growing up’ and ‘falling down’ are shown to be indicative of a paradoxical becoming of the text’s central female protagonists, Alice and Yvaine. The social mechanisms of the Victorian age that educate the girl-child into becoming accepting of their domestic roles ultimately alienate her from her true state of being. While she may garner some sense of importance within the imaginary realms of fantasy narratives, as these female protagonists demonstrate, she is reduced to the position of submissive in reality – in ‘growing up’, she must assume a ‘fallen down’ state in relation to the male.
English Studies
M.A. (English)