Browsing by Subject "Women"

* Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15*

This dissertation investigates the ‘woman philosopher’ in the works of fourteenth-century Italian author, Giovanni Boccaccio. Across his literature, Latin and Italian alike, Boccaccio demonstrated an ongoing interest in both philosophy and women, concepts that were at the center of various intellectual debates in fourteenth-century Europe. I use variations and commentaries found in the manuscript tradition to historically ground my literary analysis, showing how scribes, translators, and early readers drew attention to the relationship between gender and knowledge in Boccaccio’s works. While women have not been absent from critical studies of Boccaccio, existing interpretations often limit their discussion to the feminism or misogyny of his works. Drawing on thinkers who problematize the relationship between women and knowledge, I shift the scholarly discourse away from feminism/misogyny. Each chapter situates one or more Boccaccian figures within textual and material networks and shows how they employ “philosophy,” exploring distinct but related definitions of the term as outlined by Boccaccio. I contend that Boccaccio, in his vernacular masterpiece the Decameron and other works, presents not just one model of a woman philosopher but several, a plurality that challenges our inherited notion of what constitutes philosophy, to whom it belongs, and how we encounter it in our lives.

"Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century" explores the socioeconomic worlds of free women of means. I find that they owned slaves, engaged in cross-caste relations, managed their estates, maintained profitable social networks with other regional elites, and attempted to secure the economic futures of their children. Through an examination of notarial, ecclesiastical, and viceregal sources, I highlight the significant role this group played in the local economy and social landscape. My work demonstrates that free women of African descent engaged in specific types of economic endeavors that spoke to their investments in particular kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that allowed them greater visibility and social legitimacy than previously documented. This dissertation, further, challenges a historiography that has over-emphasized the roles of race and gender in determining the lives of all people of African descent in colonial Latin America.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Great Britain's computing industry led the world in the development and application of computers for business and administrative work. The British government and civil service, paragons of meritocracy in a country stratified by class, committed themselves to implementing computerized data processing techniques throughout the sprawling public sector, in order to modernize their economy, maintain the competitiveness of British high-technology industries, and reconsolidate the nation's strength and reputation worldwide. To succeed in this project, the British government would need to leverage the country's existing expertise, cultivate the heterogeneous field of computing manufacturers, and significantly re-train labor.

By the 1970s, Britain's early lead in the field of computing had evaporated, government computing projects had produced disappointing results, and the nation's status as a world power had declined precipitously. This dissertation seeks to explain why British computing achieved so few of its intended results by looking at the intractable labor problems within the public sector during the heyday of the Britain's proclaimed "technological revolution." The dissertation argues that the interpretation of, and solutions for, these labor problems produced disastrous effects.

Sources used include government documents, civil service records, records of the nationalized industries (the Post Office, National Health Service, Central Electricity Generating Board, Coal Industry, Railways, and others), computing industry records, press accounts, and oral interviews. By using methodologies from the history of technology, institutional history, and labor history, as well as gender analysis, this dissertation shows that despite the government's commitment to both high technology usage and labor meritocracy, competing claims of technological expertise and management tradition led the government to misjudge the role of computing within the public sector and the nation.

Beginning with a labor situation in which women did the majority of computing work, and seeking to achieve a situation in which young men and management-level technocrats tightly controlled all digital computing, the British government over-centralized its own computing endeavors, and the nation's computing industry, leading to a dangerous winnowing of skill and expertise within the already-small field. The eventual takeover of the British computing market by IBM, and purchase of the last viable British computing company by Fujitsu, marked the end of any hope for Britain's computing dominance in either their home market or the global market.

While multiple factors contributed to the failures of government computing and the British computing industry--including, but not limited to, American competition, inability to effectively create a global market for British machines, and misjudging the public sector's computing needs--this dissertation argues that labor problems, arising largely from gendered concerns about technological change and power, constituted a critical, and unrecognized, stumbling block for Britain's government-led computing revolution.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cadre of black women merged the ideals of the "New Woman" and the "New Negro" to configure New Negro Womanhood. For these women, the combining of these two figurations encapsulated the complexity and strivings of black women attempting to achieve racial and gender equality and authorial control of their bodies and aspirations. New Negro women challenged racial and gender inequality and exclusion from participating in contemporaneous political and cultural currents. New Negro women are meaningful in understanding how ideas about black women's political, economic, social and cultural agency challenged New Negro's ideological focus on black men and New Woman's ideological focus on white women. At the core of the New Negro woman ethos was a transformation in how black women thought about the possibility of moving into the public sphere. Black women etched out the parameters of individual and collective aspirations and desires within a modern world in which they were treated as second-class citizens.

My dissertation explores New Negro womanhood in Washington, D.C. The nation's capital functioned as a preeminent site for the realization of African American possibility. The District of Columbia also offered unique opportunities for African American political, civic, social and cultural involvement. More specifically, the city was a fruitful site for the development of African American women's leadership, entrepreneurship and creativity. I use black beauty culture, performance activism, women's suffrage activism, higher education, and black leisure spaces in Washington to examine how black women grappled with and configured ideas about black modernity. Each of these areas provided a distinct context in which African American women in Washington transgressed boundaries of both racial and gender hierarchies and aspired to greater visibility, mobility, and legibility within the modern world. African American women in Washington embraced New Negro Womanhood as a conduit to black modernity.

“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.

Background: Intimate partner violence is a global burden that disproportionately affects women and has more severe outcomes in women as well. Our objective was to explore the epidemiologic profile for intimate partner violence and preliminary patterns in the underreporting of this burden in Maringá, Brazil. Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted in Maringá. A convenience sampling method was utilized to recruit participants. 435 women at least 18 years of age who either currently had or had previously had an intimate partner were interviewed about their experiences with IPV. Sociodemographic characteristics were collected at the time of the interview to estimate associations with IPV using univariable and multivariable logistic regression models. Positive IPV cases identified from the community survey were compared with positive IPV cases identified from the Maringá city violence registry using sociodemographic variables and location variables in both datasets to explore patterns of underreporting. Results: Lifetime prevalence of IPV was 53.79%. Significant bivariate associations found between the SES indicator occupation and psychological violence (X2 = 8.688, p < 0.05) and overall IPV (X2 =12.441, p < 0.01) showed differences in distribution of IPV among the different levels of occupation. Significant bivariate associations found between the SES indicator number of children and physical violence (X2 = 6.963, p < 0.05) and sexual violence (X2 = 8.969, p < 0.05) also showed differences in distribution of IPV among the different levels of number of children. Women who had no paid work outside the home seemed to experience all 3 types of violence as well as overall IPV significantly less than women who had paid work outside the home (p < 0.05). Having 4 or more children was noted to significantly increase women's experience with physical and sexual violence (p< 0.01). Patterns of underreporting noted were associated with older age, women racially self-identifying as brown, and women being either illiterate, or completing higher education. Geospatially, IPV cases found through the community survey were ill-represented in the violence registry. Conclusion: IPV is a significant burden in Maringá and some underreporting patterns were noted through this study. These findings highlight the need for further research into conditional and precipitation risk factors of IPV and further exploring the burden and reasons for underreporting of IPV. Care settings can be potential sites for screening communities for IPV and exploring patterns in reporting of IPV.

This ethnographic study looks at women caregivers in pneumoconiosis (also known as black lung) patients’ families in rural China. Based on archival research and ten months of digital fieldwork, this thesis argues that the family is a crucial space to examine for thoroughly understanding black lung, a disease that has sickened more workers in China than any other disease and encapsulates the ugliness of China’s miraculous economic development. An analysis of China’s social reforms over the past decades reveals the state’s strategy to push sickened workers back to the family unit, and close narratives of two women’s daily lives in caregiving illustrate the complex impact caused by the incurable black lung as well as the creative responses initiated by suffering people in desperate situations.

This project explores the ways in which clergy and Christian leaders can positively affect the continued development of the self-image of Black, Christian, Gen Z women. For those who are privileged to hold a space of influence with this demographic, experience among those in collegiate ministry shows that there is an abundance of curiosity and doubt, tenderness and fragility related to their self-image. These circumstances provide the opportunity for building up the self-image of these young adults, God’s beloved.The thesis first defines “self-image” using psychology, sociology, and theology as a foundation. Next, using a methodology that is womanist in nature, this project allows Black, Christian, Gen Z women to speak for themselves. The project explores via in- depth interviews with ten Black, Christian, Gen Z women how their self-image has developed over time, specifically in regard to their encounters with Christian organizations and clergy and Christian leaders. Finally, this project asks these young women to recommend actions Christian clergy and other Christian leaders can take to positively affect the self-image of women like themselves. What results are recommendations that will benefit not only Black, Christian, Gen Z women, but also will benefit others far beyond this limited demographic. A project that was implicitly womanist yields explicitly womanist results.