Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Women's rights – Australia – History'
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Brankovich, Jasmina. "Burning down the house? : feminism, politics and women's policy in Western Australia, 1972-1998." University of Western Australia. School of Humanities, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0122.
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This thesis examines the constraints and options inherent in placing feminist demands on the state, the limits of such interventions, and the subjective, intimate understandings of feminism among agents who have aimed to change the state from within. First, I describe the central element of a
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Miguda, Edith Atieno. "International catalyst and women's parliamentary recruitment : a comparative study of Kenya and Australia 1963-2002 /." Title page, table of contents and abstract only, 2004. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phm6362.pdf.
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Holledge, J. M. "Women's theatre - women's rights." Thesis, University of Bristol, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.370703.
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Tripp, Caitlin. "The American Impact on the Evolution of the Japanese Women’s Rights Movement." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2018. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/449.
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The purpose of this research is to explore the impact of America’s influence on Japanese women’s efforts to obtain equal rights. America’s role in various Japanese women’s rights groups and movements has been the subject of essays and theses in the past, yet the topic is generally centered specifically on the period during the American occupation following World War II in 1945. This paper aims to take a broader look at Japanese Women’s Rights efforts before and after the war to garner a better understanding of the ways in which the American influence aided in the development of the movement. Japanese women have fought for their rights without the aid of American influence, yet the relationship between the two has had benefits for both parties.
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Whitehead, Kay. "Women's 'life-work' : teachers in South Australia, 1836-1906 /." Title page, abstract and contents only, 1996. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phw592.pdf.
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Mast, Hallie Cierra. "Republican Motherhood and the Early Road to Women's Rights: 1765-1848." Ashland University Ashbrook Undergraduate Theses / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=auashbrook1336162089.
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Smith, Paul E. A. "Women's political and civil rights in the French Third Republic, 1918-1940." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.317758.
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Schnieder, Elizabeth F. "The Devil is in the Details: Nebraska's Rescission of the Equal Rights Amendment, 1972-1973." Bowling Green, Ohio : Bowling Green State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=bgsu1262547247.
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Tsunematsu, Naomi 1966. "Japanese women's wartime patriotic organizations and postwar memoirs: Reality and recollection." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278444.
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Japanese women have often described themselves as passive "victims" of the Pacific War, and in their wartime memoirs (senso taikenki) they have related their suffering in the hope of preventing future wars. However, when we closely examine Japanese women' s activities and beliefs during the war, we find that women were not necessarily completely detached from wartime efforts. Many women actively and even enthusiastically cooperated with the state. Even if they did not actively fight on the battlefield and kill people on foreign soil, many women were part of the total war structure, helping to stir up the patriotism that drove Japanese to fight in the war. This thesis looks at how Japanese women, through patriotic women' s organizations, were involved in the Pacific War, and what they actually believed during the war, in contrast with their recollections of the war in their senso taikenki.
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Hutchinson, Yvette. "Womanpower in the Civil Rights Movement." W&M ScholarWorks, 1991. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625696.
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Lup, John R. "A history of the nineteenth century women's issue in the Restoration Movement." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 1993. http://www.tren.com.
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Gleadle, Kathryn Jane. "The early feminists : radical unitarians and the emergence of the women's rights movement, c.1831-1851." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.386235.
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Poirrier, Lauren. "A Comparative Study of the National First Ladies' Library and the Women's Rights National Historical Park." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1277819335.
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Taylor, Shockley Megan Newbury. ""We, too, are Americans": African American women, citizenship, and civil rights activism in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-1954." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/284135.
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This dissertation explores the activities of middle- and working-class African American women during and immediately after World War II in Detroit and Richmond, Virginia, in order to examine how World War II enabled African American women to negotiate new state structures in order to articulate citizenship in a way that located them within the state as contributors to the war effort and legitimated their calls for equality. This study provides a new understanding of the groundwork that lay behind the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at African American women's wartime protest and exploring how those women created templates for activism and networks for the dissemination of new discourses about citizenship, it reveals the gendered roots of the civil rights movement. This study uses a cross-class analysis within a cross-regional analysis in order to understand how African American women of different socioeconomic levels transformed their relationship with the state in order to use state structures to gain equality in diverse regions of the country. Class and region framed African American women's possibilities for activism. In both Detroit and Richmond, women's class positions and local government structures affected how African American women constructed claims to citizenship and maintained activist strategies to promote equality. This study finds that the new discourse and programs of middle-class African American women, linked with the attempts of working-class women to gain and retain jobs and better living conditions, contributed to a new sense of militancy and urgency within the civil rights movement of the 1940s and 1950s. By attempting to claim their rights based solely on their status as citizens within the state, African American women greatly contributed to the groundwork and the ideology of the more aggressive civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. African American women's initial forays into desegregating restaurants, jobs, transportation, and housing created the momentum for the entire African American community's struggle for equality.
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Lu, Hui-tzu. "Cultivation of virtue: Women's practices and gender issuesduring the Song era (960-1279)." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280429.
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Idealized presentations of female behavior prescribed by Ban Zhao (A.D. 45-120) and later male Confucians defined women in the role of inner helpers, thus confining them to the domestic arena. Close scrutiny of data however reveals a cluster of new values for Song women evident through personal cultivation and devotional practices both "within" and "without" the inner sphere. This dissertation offers a preliminary investigation of Song women's practices such as bodily and spiritual cultivations as well as their devotional and philanthropic activities. It examines why and how these specific inner and outer practices evolved into regnant womanly practices that ultimately becarne exemplary behaviors during the Song period. Through the lens of female daily practices, this study also investigates the diverse interactions between genders in the Song era. The first part of this dissertation explores Song women's bodily and spiritual observances within the inner quarters. Song women performed bodily cultivations through various forms of ascetic behaviors, including fasting, vegetarianism, the abstinence from slaughtering living beings, and seclusion in their daily lives, which can be deemed gendered practices. Spiritual cultivation through religious practices such as sutra recitation and other related observances functioned not only as accessible avenues of female spiritual pursuits, but also served as alternative conduits for Song women's literary aspirations. Part Two first discusses the gender discourse and the tension between the norms and historical reality during the Song. The last two chapters examine Song women's practices such as their religious offerings and involvement in community public works and philanthropy outside the domestic realm. In contrast to women's inner practices, women's outer sphere endeavors put their personal cultivation and volition into practice, and also extended their influential financial autonomy beyond the domestic arena into the greater society. This study concludes that despite deviations from conventional Confucian values, these inner and outer womanly practices were perceived as paragons of female virtues. Lastly, it suggests a negotiated process in the workings of gender in the Song culture.
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Morrill, Kelli N. "From Housewives to Protesters: The Story of Mormons for the Equal Rights Amendment." DigitalCommons@USU, 2018. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/7056.
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On November 17, 1980, twenty Mormon women and one man were arrested on criminal trespassing charges after chaining themselves to the Bellevue, Washington LDS Temple gate. The news media extensively covered the event due to the shocking photos of middle-aged housewives, covered in large chains, holding protest signs and being escorted to police cars. These women were part of the group Mormons for the Equal Rights Amendment (MERA) and were protesting the LDS Church’s opposition to the ERA. The LDS Church actively opposed the ERA and played an important role in influencing the vote in key states leading to its eventual failure. However, ERA literature generally ignores the LDS Church and their influence, instead attributing the ERA’s failure to lack of appeal to lower class and minority women, the ratification process, and confusing messaging about the amendment. Literature that does discuss the LDS Church and its opposition to the ERA fails to tell the story of the small, but bold and attention grabbing group of Mormon women who organized a campaign in direct opposition to the position of their church. This thesis begins with an evaluation of MERA’s use of sacred space in protest, and their portrayal in the media. It then explores how MERA re-appropriated LDS hymns, rituals and language to assert their power and express discontent with the church’s position on ERA, and concludes with an evaluation of the institutional and social consequences MERA members faced as a result of their activism.
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Gill, Amy. "In Their Finest Hour: Deciphering the Role of the Canadian Women's Movement in the Formulation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28645.
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This thesis analyzes the role of the Canadian women's movement in the formulation of sections 15 and 28 in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Grounded in the context of the decade leading up to the 1980-1982 mega-constitutional debates, the ideas and actions of the women's movement demonstrate both their intellectual and political agency in securing a new interpretation of equality rights within the Charter. Intellectually, women drew on the legal experiences of Canadian, American, and international interpretations of equality as well as feminist ideology to conceive of a more substantive equality. Built out of two principles, equality of opportunity and equality of results, Canadian women devised a new language to reinforce the interpretation of substantive equality and sought out the means to transform their idea into reality.
The success of the women's movement in this era is typically attributed to its effective mobilization, profiting from an environment in which Canadian women were able to develop a complex network of organizations at the national, provincial, local, and grass roots level. Moreover, the structure of the women's movement provided a powerful platform for key figures within the movement to articulate women's concerns and have those opinions respectfully considered. Only in tandem do the ideals championed by the women's movement and the structure of the movement allow for its eventual success. The women's movement was riddled by strong cleavages, including ideological, regional, class, and ethnic cleavages, but held together in this era by a common commitment to substantive equality.
Providing an arena for action, the critical events that mark the 1980-1982 mega-constitutional debates showcase these elements and illustrate how Canadian women transformed their ideas into action. Examining the context leading up to the debates along with the events during the fourteen-month span of negotiations, it is argued that women played both an intellectual and political role in shaping equality rights in Canada. Their contributions not only secured an effective path to substantive equality but also irrevocably altered the nature of the debate surrounding human rights and changed the way Canadians understand, interpret, and practice equality.
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Brannon-Wranosky, Jessica S. "Southern Promise and Necessity: Texas, Regional Identity, and the National Woman Suffrage Movement, 1868-1920." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2010. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc31553/.
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This study offers a concentrated view of how a national movement developed networks from the grassroots up and how regional identity can influence national campaign strategies by examining the roles Texas and Texans played in the woman suffrage movement in the United States. The interest that multiple generations of national woman suffrage leaders showed in Texas, from Reconstruction through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, provides new insights into the reciprocal nature of national movements. Increasingly, from 1868 to 1920, a bilateral flow of resources existed between national women's rights leaders and woman suffrage activists in Texas. Additionally, this study nationalizes the woman suffrage movement earlier than previously thought. Cross-regional woman suffrage activity has been marginalized by the belief that campaigning in the South did not exist or had not connected with the national associations until the 1890s. This closer examination provides a different view. Early woman's rights leaders aimed at a nationwide movement from the beginning. This national goal included the South, and woman suffrage interest soon spread to the region. One of the major factors in this relationship was that the primarily northeastern-based national leadership desperately needed southern support to aid in their larger goals. Texas' ability to conform and make the congruity politically successful eventually helped the state become one of NAWSA's few southern stars. National leaders believed the state was of strategic importance because Texas activists continuously told them so by emphasizing their promotion of women's rights. Tremendously adding credibility to these claims was the sheer number of times Texas legislators introduced woman suffrage resolutions over the course of more than fifty years. This happened during at least thirteen sessions of the Texas legislature, including two of the three post-Civil War constitutional conventions. This larger pattern of interdependency often culminated in both sides-the Texas and national organizations-believing that the other was necessary for successful campaigning at the state, regional, and national levels.
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Hodge, Pamela. "Fostering flowers: Women, landscape and the psychodynamics of gender in 19th Century Australia." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 1998. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1435.
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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'.
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Lowenthal, Kristi. "Conservative thought and the equal rights amendment in Kansas." Diss., Manhattan, Kan. : Kansas State University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/907.
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Ray, Amanda J. "The impact of statehood and Republican politics on women's legal rights in West Virginia, 1863-1872." Morgantown, W. Va. : [West Virginia University Libraries], 2001. http://etd.wvu.edu/templates/showETD.cfm?recnum=2260.
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Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2001.Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 138, 4 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-137).
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Stuntz, Jean A. "His, Hers, and Theirs: Domestic Relations and Marital Property Law in Texas to 1850." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2495/.
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Texas law regarding the legal status of women and their property rights developed from the mingling of Spanish and English laws. Spanish laws regarding the protection of women's rights developed during the centuries-long Reconquest, when the Spanish Christians slowly took back the Iberian Peninsula from the Moorish conquerors. Women were of special importance to the expansion of Spanish civilization. Later, when Spain conquered and colonized the New World, these rights for women came, too.
In the New World, women's rights under Spanish law remained the same as in Spain. Again, the Spanish were spreading their civilization across frontiers and women needed protection. When the Spanish moved into Texas, they brought their laws with them yet again. Archival evidence demonstrates that Spanish laws in early Texas remained essentially unchanged with regard to the status of women.
Events in the history of England caused its legal system to develop in a different manner from Spain's. In England, the protection of property was the law's most important goal. With the growth of English common law, husbands gained the right to control their wives's lives in that married women lost all legal identity.
When the English legal system crossed the Atlantic and took root in the United States, little changed, especially in the southern states, when migrants from there entered Texas. When these Anglo-American colonists came into contact with Spanish/Mexican laws, they tended to prefer the legal system they knew best. Accordingly, with the creation of the Republic of Texas, and later the state of Texas, most laws derived from English common law. From Spanish laws, legislators adopted only those that dealt with the protection of women, developed on the Spanish frontier, because they were so much more suitable to life in Texas. Later lawmakers and judges used these same laws to protect the family's property from creditors, as well as to advance the legal status of women in Texas.
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McCarthy-Rechowicz, Matthew. "Franz Grillparzer's dramatic heroines and women's emancipation in nineteenth-century Austria." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0bdefd2f-b09f-4653-9abb-236681262622.
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Recent decades have seen an increase in feminist critiques of the works of Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), and a growing awareness that these deal with contemporary issues around the social roles of women. This study builds on exsiting feminist-themed examinations of Grillparzer's works to show more fully how they fit into the context of calls for women's rights in nineteenth-century Austria. New interpretations of Grillparzer's heroines are made possible by considering the full spectrum of the author's intellectual interests and examining his dramas through the lenses suggested by his reading. Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen is seen in the context of the Enlightenment, and Sappho and Libussa are analysed with reference to social contract theory. Contemporary feminist approaches are combined with Schiller's thought on stadial history, and with Grillparzer's analysis of Shakespeare's Macbeth, to give new insight into Das goldene Vließ and Die Jüdin von Toledo respectively. Consideration of the lives and works of Grillparzer's female friends provides the context for my analysis, and helps define the original nature of this thesis. While several earlier studies have argued for the influence of Grillparzer's romantic interests on the construction of his heroines, sufficient attention has not been given to these heroines in the context of the intellectual women Grillparzer knew. While I do not argue that Grillparzer's heroines were influenced by the authors and other prominent women he knew, examination of the lives and works of Caroline Pichler, Betty Paoli, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Sophie Schröder and others shows that Grillparzer was on friendly terms with intellectual women throughout his career, and that all of these women were to some degree critical of the contemporary social situation of women.
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Jaffer, Sadaf. "Ismat Chughtai, Progressive Literature and Formations of the Indo-Muslim Secular, 1911-1991." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845441.
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This dissertation examines the life, work, and contexts of noted Urdu writer and Indian cultural critic Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991). By engaging in readings of Chughtai’s texts and contexts, this dissertation presents the first study of its kind, examining Indian secular thought through the lens of an Urdu literary figure. As such, this dissertation offers new perspectives on intersections between popular culture and political and religious thought in modern India through the lens of a celebrated literary figure whose legacy continues to be invoked.
I argue that, at its core, Chughtai’s critique of society hinged upon the equality (barābarī) of all Indians. The primacy of “humanity” (insāniyat) over other identities was the keystone of her formation of the secular, and has roots in a tradition that can be termed Islamicate humanism. In the first chapter, “Sacred Duty: Ismat Chughtai’s Cosmopolitan Justice between Islam and the Secular,” I argue that, by rejecting the inferior status of women within Muslim legal codes, Chughtai pursued what she saw as moral equality to a more radical degree than the postcolonial Indian state, which enshrined separate codes of personal law based on religious community. Ultimately, the secular ideals of equality, autonomy and human dignity were the mainstays of her thought, without regard to whether these were pursued through “Islamic” means. In the next chapter, “The Personal is Political: Economic and Sexual Progress in Modern India,” I argue that Chughtai, unlike other members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, emphasized the link between hierarchical economic injustice and limitations on autonomous sexual choice. In the third chapter, “Reform, Education, and Woman as Subject,” I argue that in her writing, particularly the novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr, Chughtai deployed narratives of education as foundational to the formation of an emancipated girl, one who liberates herself by rejecting the “old rules” (purānī qānūn). The fourth chapter, “The Many Lives of Urdu: Language, Progressive Literature and Nostalgia,” explores the fate of the Urdu language and Chughtai’s legacy in independent India. Ultimately, this project calls into question assumptions regarding what types of textual and human subjects are considered representatives of “Indo-Muslim Culture” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
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Wilms, Sabine. "The female body in medieval China. A translation and interpretation of the "Women's Recipes" in Sun Simiao's "Beiji qianjinyaofang"." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280225.
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This dissertation investigates the medical treatment of the female body in medieval China based on the women-related sections of a pivotal work in the history of Chinese medicine, the second through fourth scrolls of Sun Simiao's Beiji qianjin yaofang (completed ca. 652 C.E.). This text provides central evidence for the emergence of gynecology as a separate medical specialty in medieval China and reflects the highest level of elite medical knowledge regarding women at its time. It is the first text in the Chinese medical tradition to clearly define the parameters based on which the gender-specific treatment of the female body was conceptualized in the medical practice of the literati tradition. Its comprehensive nature shows that women's medical treatment in the seventh century was performed by and contested between large variety of practitioners, including literate male elites, professional midwives, other female members of the household or community, and religious specialists. The core of this study consists of an annotated translation of this text, covering the topics of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, postpartum recovery, supplementing and boosting, menstrual problems, vaginal discharge, and miscellaneous conditions. The translation is preceded by an introduction which discusses the author and his work, then summarizes and explains the contents of my text, and lastly indicates topics for future research and potential interpretation in the areas of women's health in general, reproduction, physiology, and issues of the gendered body. Lastly, this study includes two indeces for materia medica and for symptoms, syndromes, and diseases.
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Parker, Pauline Frances, and paulinefparker@gmail com. "Girls, Empowerment and Education: a History of the Mac. Robertson Girls' High School 1905-2005." RMIT University. Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, 2007. http://adt.lib.rmit.edu.au/adt/public/adt-VIT20080516.164340.
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Despite the considerable significance of publicly funded education in the making of Australian society, state school histories are few in number. In comparison, most corporate and private schools have cemented their sense of community and tradition through full-length publications. This history attempts to redress this imbalance. It is an important social history because this school, Mac.Robertson Girls' High School can trace its origins back to 1905, to the very beginnings of state secondary education when the Melbourne Continuation School (MCS), later Melbourne High School (MHS) and Melbourne Girls' high School (MGHS) was established. Since it is now recognised that there are substantial state, regional and other differences between schools and their local communities, studies of individual schools are needed to underpin more general overviews of particular issues. This history, then, has wider significance: it traces strands of the development of girls' education in Victoria, thus examining the significance and dynamics of single-sex schooling, the education of girls more generally, and, importantly, girls' own experiences (and memories of experiences) of secondary schooling, as well as the meaning they made of those experiences. 'Girls, Education and Empowerment: A History of The Mac.Robertson Girls' High School 1905-2005', departs from traditional models of school history writing that tend to focus on the decision-makers and bureaucrats in education as well as documenting the most 'successful' former students who have made their mark in the world. Drawing on numerous narrative sources and documentary evidence, this history is organised thematically to contextualise and examine what is was like, and meant, to be a girl at this school (Melbourne Continuation School 1905-12; Melbourne High School 1912-27; Melbourne Girls' High School 1927-34, and Mac.Robertson Girls' High School from 1934) during a century of immense social, economic, political and educational change.
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Monthey, Tanya Trangia. ""The Most Difficult Vote": Post-Roe Abortion Politics in Oregon, 1973-2001." PDXScholar, 2019. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4822.
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The abortion debate in the United States has come to split the contemporary electorate among party lines. Since the late 1970s, the Republican Party has taken a stand against abortion and has worked through various routes of legislation to pass restrictions on access to the procedure. Oregon however, provides a different interpretation of this partisan debate. Though Oregon has seen both Republican and Democratic leadership in all houses of state government and pro-life conservative groups have lobbied to restrict the procedure, no abortion restriction has been passed in the state since the United States Supreme Court invalidated many state abortion bans in 1973.
This thesis analyzes the legislative history of Oregon beginning in the mid nineteenth century, when the Oregon Territory first passed an abortion ban. Oregon voters and lawmakers alike were continuously asked to debate the legality and morality of abortion. Though the state did participate in the national debate over access to abortion, made clear by dozens of attempts at restricting the procedure, Oregon's response to conservative political trends is distinctive.
Oregon liberalized its abortion law before Roe was decided; and years before, prominent physicians provided abortions and advocated for reproductive health. After abortion was decriminalized, Oregon legislators protected abortion access further by rejecting all attempts to pass abortion restrictions and crafting legislation to make further restrictions more difficult to pass. Even as Republicans gained majorities in the Oregon legislature in the late 1980s and 1990s and the pro-life movement gained momentum on the statewide level nationally, Republican lawmakers remained unwilling to prioritize abortion legislation. So too, in the decades following the Roe decision, Oregon voters have rejected all pro-life attempts to restrict abortion access by ballot initiative. Instead of pointing to one explanation for Oregon's protection of abortion access, this thesis examines the societal and legislative developments that worked in tandem to create a legislative landscape that is protective of abortion.
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Butterfield, Jo Ella. "Gendering 'universal' human rights: international women's activism, gender politics and the early cold war, 1928-1952." Diss., University of Iowa, 2012. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2187.
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This dissertation analyzes how transnational feminist advocacy and ideas about gender shaped modern human rights doctrines that remain central to this day. After World War II, United Nations delegates drafted and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). During this process, international feminist activists disagreed about how to incorporate women's long-standing rights claims into the emerging human rights framework. Fiery interwar debates about laws and standards that regulated female labor persisted, prompting influential U.S. feminists to oppose the inclusion of gender-specific rights. To challenge U.S. opposition, key delegates to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) forged an unofficial coalition. Despite the fact that these CSW delegates held competing ideas about gender and represented distinct national governments, they collectively crafted a significant but little-known women's human rights agenda and lobbied UDHR drafters to adopt it. Their proposals not only included political and civil rights, but also promoted particular economic and social rights for women as a group. They maintained, for instance, that child care and maternity leave should be obligations of the state. Indeed, the CSW insisted that recognition of their women's human rights agenda was essential to building a socially-just postwar order.
While Anglo-American women dominated interwar NGOs, the CSW showcased myriad international voices and won critical allies among liberal and conservative UN delegations by linking the advance of women's human rights to notions of modernity and democracy. As a result, the CSW made substantial political and civil rights gains, such as the guarantee of equal rights in marriage and divorce. Yet feminist delegates had to juggle their internationally-minded agenda with the interests they were to serve as national representatives. This task was further complicated by nascent Cold War politics and a growing anti-feminist backlash at the UN. In this context, UDHR drafters ultimately rejected the CSW's call for women's economic and social rights--a "social revolution" for women--in favor of the perceived stability of the "traditional" family. By the early 1950s, anti-communist pressures led the CSW to sever the pursuit of women's rights from the developing human rights framework at the UN. Feminists' absence from the UN human rights debates over the next several decades removed a forceful challenge to U.S.-led efforts to privilege political and civil rights over economic and social rights, and fostered a tacit hierarchy of rights that persists to this day.
This dissertation places the CSW's competing vision of universal human rights at the center of the postwar human rights project, and expands our understanding of the history of international women's activism and human rights. By analyzing official UN records, delegates' papers and memoirs, and the records of governmental and non-governmental organizations, it reveals that postwar human rights advocacy was critically shaped by women's activism of the interwar period. Furthermore, this dissertation demonstrates that the CSW's demands for women's rights shaped the context from which the universal human rights framework emerged. Indeed, feminist activism and debates about the rights of women influenced UDHR drafters' views about human rights in ways that expanded, but also significantly curtailed postwar human rights standards. As a result, feminist activists continue to fight today for full recognition of women's rights as human rights.
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Ward, Jessica D. "Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2014. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500176/.
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This study explores how four medieval poems—the Junius manuscript’s Genesis B and Christ and Satan and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls—engage with medieval conjugal rights through their depictions of agentive female protagonists. Although many laws at this time sought to suppress the rights of women, especially those of wives’, both pre- and post-conquest poets illustrate women who act as subjects, exercising legal rights. Medieval canon and common law supported a certain amount of female agency in marriage but was not consistent in its understanding of what that was. By considering the shifts in law from Anglo-Saxon and fourteenth century England in relation to wives’ rights and female consent, my project asserts that the authors of Genesis B and Christ and Satan and the late-medieval poet Chaucer position their heroines to defend legislation that supports female agency in matters of marriage. The Anglo-Saxon authors do so by conceiving of Eve’s role in the Fall and harrowing of hell as similar to the legal role of a forespeca. Through Eve’s mimesis of Satan’s rhetoric, she is able to reveal an alternate way of conceiving of the law as merciful instead of legalistic. Chaucer also engages with a woman’s position in society under the law through his representation of Criseyde’s role in her courtship with Troilus in his epic romance, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer disrupts his audiences’ expectations by placing Criseyde as the more agentive party in her courtship with Troilus and shows that women might hope to the most authority in marriage by withholding their consent. In his last dream vision, The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer engages again with the importance of female consent in marriage but takes his interrogation of conjugal rights a step further by imagining an alternate legal system through Nature, a female authority who gives equal consideration to all classes and genders.
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Narain, Vrinda. "Anxiety and amnesia : Muslim women's equality in postcolonial India." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102240.
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In this thesis, I focus on the relationship between gender and nation in post-colonial India, through the lens of Muslim women, who are located on the margins of both religious community and nation. The contradictory embrace of a composite national identity with an ascriptive religious identity, has had critical consequences for Muslim women, to whom the state has simultaneously granted and denied equal citizenship. The impact is felt primarily in the continuing disadvantage of women through the denial of gender equality within the family. The state's regulation of gender roles and family relationships in the 'private sphere', inevitably has determined women's status as citizens in the public sphere.In this context, the notion of citizenship becomes a focus of any exploration of the legal status of Muslim women. I explore the idea of citizenship as a space of subaltern secularism that opens up the possibility for Indian women of all faiths, to reclaim a selfhood, free from essentialist definitions of gender interests and prescripted identities. I evaluate the realm of constitutional law as a counter-hegemonic discourse that can challenge existing power structures. Finally, I argue for the need to acknowledge the hybridity of culture and the modernity of tradition, to emphasise the integration of the colonial past with the postcolonial present. Such an understanding is critical to the feminist emancipatory project as it reveals the manner in which oppositional categories of public/private, true Muslim woman/feminist, Muslim/Other, Western/Indian, and modern/traditional, have been used to deny women equal rights.
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Wambali, Michael Kajela Beatus. "Democracy and human rights in Tanzania Mainland : the Bill of Rights in the context of constitutional developments and the history of institutions of governance." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1997. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4207/.
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This thesis is an examination of human rights and constitutional development in Tanzania Mainland. The colonial and post-colonial history is used to analyse the development of human rights struggles, as well as institutions such as the Bill of Rights in the recent development of multi-party democracy. The thesis intends to establish that in spite of global factors such as pressure for democratisation from international institutions, the achievement of the Bill of Rights in Tanzania Mainland is part of a wider rights struggle of the people of Tanzania. The effective legal and political implementation of specific rights such as the right to vote, freedom of association and assembly reflect the state of that struggle. The thesis further seeks to establish that while the government sponsored the enactment of the Bill of Rights in 1984 and the re-introduction of multi-partism in 1992, it has always preferred to exercise extreme control over the enjoyment of political rights. This has often involved curtailing the establishment and free operation of institutions of popular democracy. The thesis goes on to suggest that unless a democratic culture and civil society are restored in the country, the success of the rights struggles of the people will be far-fetched. Together with the above it is argued that the struggle for rights could be enhanced by working from what is provided as legal rights, all interested parties pushing for the expansion of the human rights field. This can only be attained if the majority of Tanzanians are made aware of the existence of such rights through legal literacy programs.
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Smith, Helen. "The Fire and the Ash." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2002. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1644.
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This thesis comprises two parts. Part One is a novel (The Fire and the Ash), set in the latter half of the nineteenth century. lt chronicles, for the most part, the marriage of a young Irish couple. Part Two is an essay entitled Victorian Women and the Law. This area of research was selected because the life span of the woman in my novel coincides almost precisely with the reign of Queen Victoria. The life of women in Victorian Britain is commonly known to have been difficult. The social dictates of the time required that they be groomed from early childhood for a life of servitude to father and, hopefully, later a husband. There was little room, apart for a small minority of exceptional women, for self-expression, other than through the domestic arts within the home.
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Chediak, Lynsey. "Holes in the Historical Record: The Politics of Torture in Great Britain, the United States, and Argentina, 1869-1977." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/875.
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While many politicians gain national or international acclaim, domestic political activists are rarely remembered for their dedication and, similarly, their sufferings. More specifically, the acts of female political activists, and the harsh punishments they endure following government pushback, are not appreciated or acknowledged by popular histories.
Across Great Britain, the United States, and Argentina, three women played crucial roles in advancing reform against unjust government policies. Josephine Butler (1828-1906) was a pivotal character in repealing laws allowing for the government regulation of prostitution, the Contagious Diseases Acts, in Great Britain. Similarly, Alice Paul (1885-1997) was essential in achieving the ratification of the Nineteenth Constitutional Amendment in the United States—granting universal suffrage. Lastly, Azucena Villaflor (1924-1977) was one of the first people, man or woman, to openly oppose the Junta dictatorship in Argentina and openly advocate for the release of information on desaparecidos.
Despite advancing such important policy reform, all three women increasingly faced physical suffering, torture or death at the hands of their respective state governments. Amid a lack of media coverage or biased, partial media coverage paired with the direct confrontation of male government leaders, noncombatant activists were unjustly treated in violation of their fundamental human rights.
Progressive, forceful voices for positive change are consistently dismissed as crazy, extreme or irrational, rather than praised for their efforts. In exploring the cycle of violence surrounding the treatment of political activists, it appears nationalist histories are often void of past government faults.
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Davis, Laurel F. "Voyage to Terra Australis." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2004. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1648.
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This thesis in Writing is composed of two parts, a creative work for stage, and an essay that both informs the writing of the drama and reflects upon it. The creative work, entitled Ann Flinders Remembers, a musical drama based on the life and journals of Matthew Flinders, navigator and cartographer, and his wife, Ann Flinders. The drama consists of lyrics, letters, extracts, dialogue, monologue, and stage directions, the story told from the point of view of Ann Flinders remembering, and by the all-knowing Chorus, of early Greek theatre. The essay, entitled 'Reflections on and of the Pastoral', traces the genre from the early Greek plays through to more recent theatre, and precedes the creative work to show how I came to the point of writing a musical drama based on the Pastoral genre, and what literature and theory might have been an influence. In the essay, I challenge some widely held conceptions of the Pastoral, at the same time re-acquainting myself with the techniques used by dramatists throughout history. Such a course enables me to reveal the habit of mind that lies at the source of the ancient genre.
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Bezbatchenko, Mary. "Virginia and the Equal Rights Amendment." VCU Scholars Compass, 2007. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/748.
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In 1972, the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) began in the states. Many states quickly ratified the amendment but the ERA stalled fifteen states short of the necessary three-fourths to become part of the United States Constitution. Virginia was one of the states who did not ratify the amendment and this study examines the reasons why. Much like other southern states, conservative Virginia legislators wanted to maintain traditional gender roles. STOP ERA and other anti-ERA organizations mobilized before the proponents developed a unified campaign. Legislators were able to use the rules of the General Assembly to block serious consideration and ratification of the ERA. Proponents of the amendment started with an educational campaign but faced the problem of not being in a position to challenge the powerful conservative leaders in the General Assembly. They then shifted to a campaign based on electoral politics. However, the transition occurred too late to effect the outcome of ERA ratification in Virginia.
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Walker, Pamela N. ""Pray for Me and My Kids": Correspondence between Rural Black Women and White Northern Women During the Civil Rights Movement." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2015. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1999.
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This paper examines the experiences of rural black women in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement by examining correspondence of the grassroots anti-poverty organization the Box Project. The Box Project, founded in 1962 by white Vermont resident and radical activist Virginia Naeve, provided direct relief to black families living in Mississippi but also opened positive and clandestine lines of communication between southern black women and outsiders, most often white women. The efforts of the Box Project have been largely left out of the dialogue surrounding Civil Rights, which has often been dominated by leading figures, major events and national organizations. This paper seeks to understand the discreet but effective ways in which some black women, though constrained by motherhood, abject poverty, and rural isolation participated in the Civil Rights Movement, and how black and white women worked together to chip away at the foundations of inequality that Jim Crow produced.
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Rousseau, Stéphanie. "Women and the public sphere in Peru : citizenship under Fujimori's neopopulist rule." Thesis, McGill University, 2004. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=84544.
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This thesis analyses the process of social construction of women's citizenship rights in Peru under the regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990--2000). It builds on an existing body of literature on democratization and women's movements in Latin America, to develop an understanding of the forms of women's mobilization under new democratic regimes and the impact of the pattern of state-society relations on the advancements and losses in women's citizenship rights. More specifically, it shows that the 1990s witnessed a significant range of advances in women's civil and political rights, while social and economic rights suffered serious reversals. It is argued that the strategies and opportunities of different sectors of the women's movement in Peru, as well as the objectives pursued by the state under Fujimori's rule, combined to generate this evolution of women's citizenship. The forms of mobilization of these different sectors followed the course of their own constraints and choices, while they were also importantly shaped by the broader political framework: a neopopulist model of political rule together with the implementation of a neoliberal program of structural adjustment and liberalization. The influence of a set of international factors also contributed to structuring the political incentives and resources of the different actors involved in the social construction of women's citizenship in Peru. The thesis concludes that the democratic or authoritarian nature of the political regime as such cannot explain the pattern of construction of women's citizenship rights, as witnessed by an increased space of women in the public sphere and advances in civil and political rights under the restricted version of political democracy which characterized most of Fujimori's rule. Contrary to the literature on other Latin American women's movements, which detected a marginalization of women's movements in the political sphere following the transitions to d
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Cantzler, Julia Miller. "Culture, History and Contention: Political Struggle and Claims-Making over Indigenous Fishing Rights in Australia, New Zealand and the United States." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1306269394.
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Key, Leslee. "From Desegregation to Desexigration in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-1973." VCU Scholars Compass, 2011. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/2603.
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This investigation explores the relationships and experiences in the urban community that connected black and white women to understand the complexities of Jim Crow, its breakdown, and the subsequent expansion of female activism in Richmond, Virginia. By examining the South’s famous department stores, Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoads, this research attempts to focus on female-created and female-oriented spaces within downtown Richmond, from 1954 until 1973, and draws a line from the Thalhimer boycott staged by African-American women in 1961 to the sit-in performed by white women in the Thalhimers male-only soup bar in 1970. Historical context is developed to show changing patterns surrounding racism and gender roles during the 1950s and 1960s within urban space, particularly department stores. The changes made within white and black women’s organizations, such as the YWCA, alongside these downtown stores, supplied important social and employment opportunities for women in the community and throughout the state, and influenced women of different cultures and races. The formation of multi-racial female coalitions within areas of employment set the stage for the formation of the women’s Movement in Richmond as women displayed subtle forms of feminist activism within the conservative environment of the Commonwealth.
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Tognini, Melinda. "A struggle for recognition: the War Widows' Guild in Western Australia 1946-1975 ; and, Exegesis: Researching and writing an organisational history." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2012. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/486.
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This thesis comprises an organisational history of the War Widow' Guild Australia WA Inc., and an essay about the research and writing process I undertook to construct such a history. The history outlines the development, struggles and achievements of the War Widows’ Guild in Western Australia from 1946 to 1975. While many were celebrating the end of the war in 1945, thousands of war widows faced an uncertain future without their husbands. Although Prime Minister John Curtin addressed the issue of war widows' pensions as part of his Post War Reconstruction initiatives, the pension was well below the basic wage. Many war widows, especially those with small children to support, now lived in near poverty. It was under these circumstances, that Mrs Jessie Mary Vasey, the widow of Major-General George Alan Vasey, established the War Widows' Craft Guild, first in Victoria in November 1945, and then in other states. In Western Australia, the Guild held its first meeting on 29 November 1946. During the early years, members undertook training in weaving and various crafts to supplement their meagre pensions. The Guild also opened tearooms on the Esplanade in Perth, as a form of income and as a central meeting place. For many war widows it was in meeting together that they found support from others who understood their own experiences of grief and loss. At a state and national level, the Guild became a powerful lobby group on behalf of all war widows influencing the government on issues such as accrued recreation leave, pensions, educational benefits and health care. Many of the pensions and benefits war widows receive today are largely due to the work of the early members of this organisation. These women fought for public recognition and expression of their loss. They fought to have war widows' pensions seen as compensation for their husband's lives rather a government handout. They persevered when the organisation faced hurdles, and fought for their rights at a time when men had the louder voices and determined the rules. The essay outlines the research and writing journey that has produced the history. It outlines the wide-ranging research I undertook for each narrative thread. This includes the writing of organisational histories; experiential research in the form of a trip to Gallipoli; archival sources such as newsletters, minutes, correspondence and photographs; contextual history such as war literature, Western Australian history and post-war history; and oral history. I describe some of the difficulties I encountered when searching for particular kinds of information. I also discuss some of the decisions underpinning the selection and shaping of information, particularly in relation to the war widows' stories and embedding an historical context, and some of the tensions at play in that process.
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Brien, Donna L. "The case of Mary Dean: Sex, poisoning and gender relations in Australia." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2003. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/117977/1/T%20%28CI%29%2094%20-%20THE%20CASE%20OF%20MARY%20DEAN.pdf.
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The genre of biography is, by nature, imprecise and limited. Real lives are lived synchronously and diversely; they do not divide spontaneously into chapters, subjects or themes. All biographers construct stories, in the process forcing the disordered complexity of an actual life into a neat literary form. This doctoral submission comprises a book length creative work, Poisoned: The Trials of Mary Dean, and a reflective written component on that creative work, Writing Fictionalised Biography.
Poisoned is a biography of Mary Dean, who, although repeatedly poisoned by her husband at the end of the nineteenth century, did not die. This biography, presented in the form of a first-person memoir, is based closely on historical evidence and is supported with discursive notes and a select bibliography.
The reflective written component, Writing Fictionalised Biography, outlines the process and challenges of writing a biography when the source material available is inadequate and unreliable. In writing Poisoned my genre solution has been fictionalised biography biography which is historically diligent while utilising fictional writing strategies and incorporating fictional passages. This written component reflectively discusses how I arrived at that solution. It includes discussion of the sources I utilised in writing Poisoned, including the limitations of trial transcripts and other court records as biographical evidence; useful precursors to the form; the process wherein I located both a form for my fictionalised biography and a voice for my biographical subject; possible models I considered; how I distinguished established fact from speculative supposition in the text; as well as some of the ambivalences and ethical concerns such a narrative process implies.
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Walker, Carole A. "Caroline Chisholm, 1808-1877: ordinary woman - extraordinary life, impossible category." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2001. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/8035.
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The purpose of this thesis is to look at the motivations behind the life and work of Caroline Chisholm, nee Jones, 1808-1877, and to ascertain why British historians have chosen to ignore her contribution to the nineteenth century emigration movement, while attending closely to such women as Nightingale for example. The Introduction to the thesis discusses the difficulties of writing a biography of a nineteenth century woman, who lived at the threshold of modernity, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, in the period identified as late modernity or postmodernity. The critical issues of writing a historical biography are explored. Chapter Two continues the debate in relation to the Sources, Methods and Problems that have been met with in writing the thesis. Chapters Three to Seven consider Chisholm's life and work in the more conventional narrative format, detailing where new evidence has been found. By showing where misinformation and errors have arisen in earlier biographies that have been perpetuated by subsequent biographies, they give specificity to the debate discussed in the Introduction. Chapters Eight to Ten discuss, in far greater depth than a conventional narrative format allows, the relevant political, religious and social influences which shaped and influenced Chisholm's life, and which facilitate an understanding of her motivation and character.
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Taffe, Sue (Sue Elizabeth) 1945. "The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders : the politics of inter-racial coalition in Australia, 1958-1973." Monash University, School of Historical Studies, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8964.
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Deas, Megan Elizabeth. "Imagining Australia: Community, participation and the 'Australian Way of Life' in the photography of the Australian Women's Weekly, 1945-1956." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/148424.
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While the cultural history and practices of press photography in Australia have gained scholarly attention in recent years, the contribution of other forms of photography published in magazines—including editorial, advertising and readers’ photographs—to burgeoning concepts of nationhood has been largely overlooked. This thesis examines the role of photography in visualising a post-war ‘imagined community’ in a study of The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, the highest-circulating weekly publication in the country, between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the introduction of television in 1956. In its examination of these photographs, the thesis asks: What narratives of national identity were evident in the photographs? What subject matter and framing techniques were frequently employed to construct a national photographic language? And what does this reveal about the values the Weekly’s publisher and editors attached to being Australian? I argue that the Weekly was not passively depicting or reflecting a national community and its ‘Way of Life’, but that it actively constructed an Australian identity through the thousands of photographs it published, while simultaneously instructing its readers what good citizenship looked like—and how to perform their belonging to the nation. Visual analysis of over 200 photographs highlights the predominant narratives during the period, including an emphasis on the practice of family photography to reinforce ideals of urban, family life as centred within the modern home. Representations of immigration and Aboriginal Australians, the repetition of photographs of families participating in community events, and a valorisation of the rural worker’s relationship with the land were intertwined with the concepts of ordinariness and of the ‘Australian Way of Life’. These core ideals were deployed to enable multiple and potentially oppositional narratives to coexist on the pages of the magazine. Analysis of a series of readers’ colour travel photographs published in the later years of the study foregrounds the Weekly’s encouragement of its readers as collaborators by providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate their performance of national identity. The magazine thus became a platform through which readers contributed to the visual narrative of Australianness, via the medium of photography as a form of participatory citizenship. The thesis foregrounds the implementation of a high-speed printing press in 1950 as a turning point at which readers saw a significant increase in the publication of colour photographs of native flora and fauna, and specifically photographs of ordinary Australians within the landscape. I argue that Alice Jackson and Esme Fenston, the Weekly’s editors during the period of study, positioned it as the mediator of knowledge about Australia, and constructed a relationship with readers based on notions of intimacy and authority. Situated within the multidisciplinary field of visual culture, and drawing from photography studies, visual anthropology, cultural history and media studies, the thesis highlights the cultural work of photography in the process of imaging, and imagining, post-war Australia.
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Dunn, Kimberlee Harper. "Germanic Women: Mundium and Property, 400-1000." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2006. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5378/.
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Abstract Many historians would like to discover a time of relative freedom, security and independence for women of the past. The Germanic era, from 400-1000 AD, was a time of stability, and security due to limitations the law placed upon the mundwald and the legal ability of women to possess property. The system of compensations that the Germans initiated in an effort to stop the blood feuds between Germanic families, served as a deterrent to men that might physically or sexually abuse women. The majority of the sources used in this work were the Germanic Codes generally dated from 498-1024 AD. Ancient Roman and Germanic sources provide background information about the individual tribes. Secondary sources provide a contrast to the ideas of this thesis, and information.
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Ertle, Lynne 1963. "Antique Ladies : Women and Newspapers on the Oregon Frontier, 1846-1859." Thesis, University of Oregon, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12275.
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viii, 234 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: KNIGHT PN4897.O74 E78 1995Studies have shown that women's ideas, especially those that challenge the status quo, have historically received little attention from the press. This thesis discusses how women were described in three of Oregon's frontier newspapers from 1846 to 1859, and also explores their contributions to the newspapers as writers, poets, editors, and businesswomen. Information from established American media clipped for the frontier papers described popular, mainstream ideas of womanhood, as well as provided news on the emerging women's rights struggle. Information generated locally on women encompassed a variety of themes, including marriage, education, and temperance. This study shows that even though content about women and women's roles as contributors were constrained by contemporary ideas of propriety and women's place in society, women were valued as readers and contributors to the three Oregon newspapers.
Committee in charge: Dr. Lauren Kessler, Chair; Dr. Timothy Gleason, Dr. Leslie Steeves
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Kenny, Christina Mary. "'They would rather have the women who are humbled': Gendered citizenship and embodied rights in post-colonial Kenya." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/148124.
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For all the effort and attention Kenyan women receive from the international rights community and at times, from their own government, human rights frameworks are not significantly improving the lives of Kenyan women. Attempting to address this, a great deal of work has been done on monitoring and evaluating human rights based interventions, including tightening funding structures, making recipient organisations more accountable to donors, and assessing the progress of governments and non-government organisations in promoting human rights based reform. I take a different approach. Rather than assess individual projects or goals of aid, my approach questions the assumptions which underpin these interventions from their conception. Following Sally Engle Merry’s work on the vernacularisation of transnational gender rights projects, and taking Kenya as a case study, I argue that the local histories, understandings and hierarchies of gendered power must be understood in much more nuanced and critical manner that we are doing presently. Further, I contend that internationalist human rights discourses create certain kinds of subjects and requires these subjects to behave in particular ways. The current failure to recognize and make space for individual and cultural complexity means that human rights based interventions are only superficially affecting relationships and power dynamics in women’s lives, making substantive, long term change very difficult. My thesis is an interdisciplinary project, and combines an engagement with scholarly literature on gender, post-colonial feminism, human rights theory and practice, as well as Kenyan history and historiography, with research gathered during 13 months of field work. My field work is based on focus groups and interviews with women in Nairobi and rural areas around Lake Victoria and engages with the lived experience of African women. These discussions illustrate the ways in which the discourses of international human rights in fact reproduce the very patterns, structures, and hierarchies which are at the core of women’s disenfranchisement and marginalization. This project historicises women’s current experiences of human rights through Kenya’s late colonial and post-colonial history, and follows these colonial legacies into the modern period through four thematic cases: women as victims and objects of cultural violence; myths of the sorority of African women; women as victims of political and state violence; and women as actors in national political processes. These four cases carry two overarching concerns, firstly, that we need to challenge ourselves to locate women’s agency within their own politics and goals, rather than through what Saba Mahmood describes as the diagnostic and prescriptive lens of feminist analysis. And secondly, we need to be vigilant that our continued attention to the bodies of women does not re-inscribe the embodied-ness of women, and the disembodied-ness of men. In centring the lived experiences and views of Kenyan women, and historicising the production of gender, I critically evaluate the efficacy of modern human rights discourses and projects in local contexts, contributing to the post-colonial feminist project which explores the complex and intersecting dimensions of gender, race, and culture.
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Ring, Jonathan Jacob. "The diffusion of norms in the international system." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1386.
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Why do states express support for norms that go against their underlying beliefs? Scholars of policy diffusion have identified four social mechanisms -- coercion, competition, emulation, and learning -- that can lead to the spread of a common practice, a norm, in the international system. I build a formal model of the four mechanisms and apply them to actual cases of norm diffusion. The formal models are anchored by three variables that capture fundamental aspects of international society: hierarchy, neighborhood, and identity. The four different diffusion mechanisms operate on these variables, creating distinct over-time trajectories. Three important dynamic patterns are compared across different model specifications: the shape of the adoption S-curve, the power distribution among expressers and non-expressers, and the degree of regional clustering. I find that the four mechanisms produce unique signatures under many conditions, but that changes to some parameters such as initial number of expressers can obscure the identification of the diffusion mechanism.
In the first empirical chapter, I apply the framework to the diffusion of quotas for women's representation. I find that quotas are adopted by weak states, and that the likely source of inspiration for quota adoption are other weak states in the same neighborhood. The empirical pattern in terms of hierarchy, neighborhood, and identity point to competition as the mechanism that drove quota diffusion. Because competition is associated with norm internalization, this finding suggests that the world is really becoming more gender equal. In the second empirical chapter, I change substantive focus to the diffusion of human rights norms. Adoption of human rights treaties seems to be associated with worse human rights behavior, but why do states that ratify human rights treaties so often fail to uphold their obligations?. I find that the Convention Against Torture (CAT) treaty is adopted first by strong states in Europe, then to weaker states in a regionally-contingent pattern. This empirical pattern is most consistent with the emulation mechanism. This implies that the anti-torture norm is not associated with internalization, and solves the previously puzzling ratification-compliance paradox.
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Neunsinger, Silke. "Die Arbeit der Frauen – die Krise der Männer : Die Erwerbstätigkeit verheirateter Frauen in Deutschland und Schweden 1919–1939." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, Department of History, 2001. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-1301.
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In 1939 a law was passed in Sweden which forbade employers to dismiss female employees because of marriage or pregnancy. In Germany a law had been introduced already in 1932, which gave employers the right to dismiss a woman when she married. It also gave women right to end their employment for the same reason. The political decisions behind these legal changes were in both cases the result of an extended debate on the right of employment of married women. This debate occurred in most industrialised European countries in the interwar period.
The increasing participation of women on the labour market was by some groups interpreted as a cause of mass unemployment. Economic crisis contributed to a crisis of masculinity, which then led to attacks on the rights of married women to paid employment. In Sweden there was a state commission set up in 1936 with the task of investigating women’s employment. This commission, kvinnoarbetskommittén, managed to demonstrate that dismissing women would not lead to a lowering of the unemployment figures for men, a task they accomplished through detailed studies of several labour market areas. The report of the commission guided the decision of parliament, a decision taken when the economic depression had already turned to a boom period. The composition of the commission as well as its work was a consequence of the strong influence of the Swedish women’s movement.
In Germany the rights of women to paid employment was limited already in 1923 as the result of the financial crisis of the state. During the depression the attacks on married women’s right to employment became a political tool, which could be used both in foreign and domestic policy. Dismissing married women employed as civil servants was aimed to quash the demands of unemployed men. A prime target in the foreign policy was to convince the victors of World War I that reparations exceeded the ability of the German nation, a nation which had been badly stricken by economic crisis and unemployment. With this argument a solution of the unemployment issue was given second priority.
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Clark-Wiltz, Meredith. "Revising Constitutions: Race and Sex Discrimination in Jury Service, 1868-1979." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1305652946.
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