Abstract
Native women and girls in the United States are twice as likely to be sexually assaulted compared to white women, and murder rates on certain reservations can be tenfold higher than the national average. This pervasive violence traces back to colonialism. Native women have historically been abused, exploited, and neglected by America's institutions, and lasting prejudice against Native peoples endures. The United States government has stripped tribal governments of their ability to seek justice for their women. The Major Crimes Act of 1885, Proclamation 280, and the Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978) decision place responsibility for investigating and prosecuting violent crimes in Indian Country on federal and select state governments. This excludes tribal governments from much of the justice process and often leaves violent crimes against Native women unaddressed. Stemming from a rich history of Indigenous feminist activism, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) movement has emerged within the last decade. Fifty years ago, Indigenous women fought alongside men in the American Indian Movement (AIM), demanding the fulfillment of treaties, the restoration of tribal lands, and the acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty. Indigenous women also founded Women of All Red Nations, which buttressed much of AIM's agenda and included more specific concerns, most notably the sterilization abuse of the 1970s. The following decades saw a marked increase in activism against heightened rates of domestic violence within Native communities. Analyzing articles by Indigenous newspapers revealed that Native communities adopted much of the grassroots organizing of the previous decades to address this particular type of violence. The 2010s brought another shift in Indigenous feminist activism with the MMIWG movement. Survivors, families of MMIWG, and their greater communities have raised awareness and demanded solutions to this national emergency. Federal and state governments have passed legislation to relax jurisdictional restrictions over tribal governments, centralize the data about this problem, and empower Indigenous communities to improve their law enforcement responses. But this does not address the root causes that have placed Native women in this precarious situation. By using alternative approaches to justice outside of Anglo-American carceral solutions, Indigenous communities can incorporate their traditions when healing this trauma.
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As an extension of research done for the History and Symbols Committee and President Harris' Race, Power, and Privilege initiative, this research analyzes the concept of land acknowledgement, as a whole and looks at Union College and its relations with Indigenous communities. In recent years, non-Indigenous people have begun to recognize that the land that they currently reside upon is not their own. Indigenous peoples belong to the land of North America. They once held the only claim to the North American continent and have since faced centuries of maltreatment, removal, dispossession of massive tracts of land, forced indoctrination, and many more atrocities. However, the practice of land acknowledge has quickly become convoluted by virtue signaling white people and has emphasized the comfortability of white people over sincerely acknowledging Indigenous peoples and the land. A survey of the Union College community conducted in February provides insight into the community's awareness of land acknowledgement practices, local tribes and nations, and individual opinions on whether or not Union should release a land acknowledgement statement. The Office of Intercultural Affairs is in the process of creating and releasing a land acknowledgement statement. An analysis of other higher education institutions in upstate New York provided a comparison of how Union relates to these other institutions in regard to land acknowledgement. The research culminates in suggestions for how to best conduct land acknowledgement and that the efforts should not stop with the release of the statement and a ceremony. Union should support Indigenous students and communities more than they do and should make more substantial efforts to inform its own community of the history of the land on which it sits as well as those who belong to this land.
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This project examines the ways that Puerto Rican women's fertility was discussed over time in the United States, and the ways in which these discussions influenced decisions regarding reproductive choices. Looking at articles from popular American publications reveals the way that Americans felt about Puerto Rican sterilization, which can be compared to publications from activist newsletters at the same time. Personal testimonies from Puerto Rican women who chose sterilization reveal that the way others spoke about sterilization was different from how the women themselves viewed it. Their stories also show how the circumstances women were forced to live in influenced their reproductive choices. When Puerto Rico was colonized by the United States in 1898, living conditions were already dire. Jobs became scarce, and starvation and disease ran rampant on the island. The problem afflicting the island seemed obvious: overpopulation. Puerto Rico was a small island, with a population growing at a rate faster than the island could sustain. An immediate solution was increased migration to the mainland, and a long term solution was to lower the birth rate through contraceptive programs. The most popular form of contraception on the island eventually became sterilization, which was promoted and subsidized by the U.S. government through local public health institutions. In 1965, one-third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age had been sterilized, a rate ten times higher than that of white women. In the post-WWII period, the Puerto Rican population in the United States grew exponentially due to labor migration. Puerto Rican women needed to work, which meant that they could no longer have large families. Many Puerto Rican women chose to be sterilized so that they would be better able to enter the workforce. In the 1970s, activist groups in the United States and Puerto Rico exposed the coercion Puerto Rican women faced when consenting to sterilization, and the Puerto Rican independence movement called sterilization programs a genocidal campaign. The opinions of Puerto Rican women who were most likely to choose sterilization were not put at the forefront of these arguments. Despite efforts to curb sterilization abuse in the Puerto Rican community, many women continued to seek sterilization through the twentieth century, and even today.
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Nancy Drew, America’s beloved girl sleuth, appeared on the American literary scene in 1930 with her blue roadster, fashionable clothes, and companion desires for adventure and charity – complete with Übermenschen capabilities, intelligence, feistiness, and beauty to spare. One of the last creations of literary giant Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate, Nancy Drew was first written by Iowa journalist and Syndicate author Mildred Augustine Wirt. Nancy’s creation story is explored in part through the Stratemeyer Syndicate Records, where old letters and releases detail Nancy’s origins and creation, as well as the true identities of the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, the authorial signature listed on all the Nancy Drew books. Wirt laid revolutionary foundations in Nancy Drew, establishing her as a girl who wanted to live her life, pursue her own pleasures, and never let marriage or insecurity get in her way – a stark contrast with previously-published books, where domestic sensibilities and feminine constructs inveigled girls into believing that a solely domestic life was the only acceptable option. Nancy Drew was born into the world of and epitomized the “New Woman” of the twentieth century, inspiring her readers to likewise follow their passions and become “New Women.” After the death of Edward Stratemeyer in 1930, soon after Nancy’s debut, Wirt and Nancy Drew’s second author, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, collaborated to continue Nancy’s adventures. After writing twenty-three of the first thirty stories, Wirt’s last Nancy Drew book appeared in 1948 (The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, #25). Nancy’s watershed qualities were toned down beginning in 1959, when the earlier Nancy Drew Mystery Stories underwent revisions: the stories were shortened, racist and racy aspects were edited out, and Wirt’s Nancy was “feminized” to be much more sweet and docile and less headstrong and autonomous. These revisions were ordered and carried out almost exclusively by Adams, Edward Stratemeyer’s daughter and one of the owners of the Syndicate after his death. While the differences between the original 1930 Nancy and the revised 1959 Nancy have been noted by scholars, case studies of the original and revised texts have never been done before. This thesis contains in-depth case studies of Nancy Drew’s first two adventures, The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase; the findings corroborate the claims of scholars, providing examples and analyses of these differences. The psychology of girlhood consists of (among many things) the constant negotiation of a girl’s identity between societal demands for femininity and a desire to pursue her own pleasures; later, it is also tinged by a struggle between childhood and adulthood. In Nancy Drew, these conflicts of identity are always successfully reconciled through Nancy’s absolute self-possession and constant struggle with (and forever success in) achieving life fulfillment. This is the Nancy Drew archetype; the archetype and the elements that constructed it have ensured not only the existence and success of Nancy Drew, but has also made contemporary girls’ literature of today possible. Today, the archetype appears in several characters of contemporary girls’ literature, including Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games), Samantha Parkington (The American Girls Collection), and Princess Cimorene of Linderwall (The Enchanted Forest Chronicles): these female protagonists are Nancy Drew’s daughters.
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Throughout the twentieth century, women in the United States have endured a constant struggle for what historian Alice Kessler-Harris calls full economic citizenship, which refers to the ability to obtain full economic independence and equal opportunities for the potential gain of increased power and influence within society. Historically, and even currently, women’s economic dependence on men, especially husbands and fathers, has prevented women from achieving full economic citizenship. One of the major steps women can take to attain this goal is participation in the paid workforce, which can potentially end women’s reliance on men for financial security. Although many women did engage in paid employment throughout the century, they were frequently stigmatized even though the choice to work was often out of financial necessity. However, each decade did experience a shift in the type of women working in paid employment, as well as in how these women were represented in the media. This study compares and contrasts the messages conveyed through issues of Ladies' Home Journals of the 1930s and 1970s regarding women's paid and unpaid work to examine the potential of women to gain greater economic citizenship during decades of financial difficulty in the United States. Ladies’ Home Journal was selected for analysis because throughout the century it strived to represent and to attract mainstream (white, middle-class) female readers, and especially in the earlier decades it was one of most widely read women’s magazines. Therefore, Ladies’ Home Journal represents a popular publication that held a wide reader base. Another feature of the magazine is its inclusion of distinct genres that lend themselves to analysis: non-fiction articles, advertisements, and works of fiction. Several similarities and differences in representing women’s paid and unpaid work existed in the three genres in magazine issues in the 1930s and 1970s. Both decades tended to publish some non-fiction articles that addressed all women as America’s consumers and placed the responsibility on them to spend money in the hope that this would help relieve the country of its financial problems. However, it was not explicitly stated whether women should be earning this money themselves, or whether they should be getting this money from their husbands. Some advertisements during these decades also addressed the troubled economy and tried to attract the female consumers by promoting long-lasting products for little money, as well as suggesting that women purchase certain products solely for the purpose of making a man happy. Fictional stories of these two decades addressed married women gaining financial independence; however, achieving led to conflicts within the family because the woman was no longer dependent on a man for financial support. Stories like these acted as a warning to women of what could happen to their families if they decided to get a job in the paid workforce or attempted to gain financial independence in any other way. Although Ladies Home Journal attempted to strike a balance in providing readers with information about housewives and wage-earning women, there was definitely more emphasis placed on the virtuous housewife in the 1930s, while the 1970s tended to focus on working women. In the 1970s, non-fiction articles not only promoted traditional values by providing details to women about the negative aspects of paid employment, but also provided working women with useful information about how to deal with workplace discrimination. Advertisements from the 1930s tended to portray housewives purchasing products for the benefit of their husbands and children, while in the 1970s, the advertisements were more ambiguous in referencing the type of woman, whether housewife or business woman, who would use a particular product. Finally, although fiction stories were often used as a means to communicate information to the reader about the cultural shifts that had occurred throughout the twentieth century, working women and the idea that women were becoming more independent was much more apparent in the 1970s stories. Many historical and political factors contributed to the reason why the roles of women, especially women in paid employment, were altered between the 1930s and the 1970s, such as: the call for women to work during World War II; the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963; and the development of the women’s rights and women’s liberation movements in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, Ladies’ Home Journal, while making some modifications to reflect these changes, still tried to maintain a balanced representation of both women who worked within the home and women who worked outside of the home in the paid workforce. The magazine did not advocate that American women should be able to be financially independent and thus achieve women’s full economic citizenship in the twentieth century.
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Historians have spent considerable time discussing American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, with good reason. American Exceptionalism is the belief that since its creation, the United States of America and its citizens possess exceptional qualities setting them apart from the rest of the world. Manifest Destiny is the belief that the nation was destined to extend its boundaries from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean for its citizens’ benefit. Though both topics have been extensively studied, the historical literature lacks a thorough discussion regarding the connection between these two concepts. This thesis links them by explaining how Jeffersonian ideology shaped notions of American Exceptionalism, which in turn would influence United States policy significantly in early America. By the 1840s, American Exceptionalism continued to flourish as a widely accepted concept and was articulated in geographic terms as Manifest Destiny. Together, American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny provided the nation and its citizens with an acceptable rationale for aggressive expansion, which culminated in the Mexican War. The evidence presented in this thesis can be categorized as either public or political sources. Small, partisan newspapers provide a sense of public opinion related to these two concepts. An understanding of the political realm comes from political and military leaders’ public statements, private correspondence, and memoirs, as well as Congressional debates. Analyzing sources from both the public and political spheres is important because political documents contain explicit statements regarding controversial policies, whereas newspaper editorials reveal the implicit motives behind those policies. Before it developed into a powerful program of expansionism, American Exceptionalism had to be characterized in such a way that it would appeal to Americans. Thomas Jefferson accomplished this by simply asserting that virtuous, autonomous citizens were required in order to maintain a successful republic. American Indian policy based on land acquisition was deemed necessary, by first trying to “civilize” American Indians and then expelling the “uncivilized” Indians to create room for the republic and its citizens to prosper. The latter was pursued vigorously under Andrew Jackson’s leadership. The support of expansion by Americans is chronicled in newspaper coverage of the intense election of 1844 that declared Democrat and expansionist James Polk the victor over Whig Henry Clay. Although not all of Polk’s supporters had exceptionalism as their motive for expansion, notably southern slave owners, a considerable amount of northerners wanted to spread republicanism and therefore voted for Polk and the Annexation of Texas, a republic eager to join the United States. In 1845, John O’Sullivan asserted that the exceptional citizens of the U. S. still needed to grow as he declared that the Manifest Destiny of the nation was to extend to the Pacific Ocean. Exceptionalism then took on an aggressive aspect with the onset of the Mexican War. Using Manifest Destiny as both justification and propaganda, the United States waged war against Mexico, certain that the land would be better managed and populated as part of its own Republic. The U.S. government settled for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny rather than overthrow a sovereign republic. Thus, American Exceptionalism prevented the U.S. from seeking the entirety of Mexico and preserved its identity as a republic inherently superior to a colonial empire.
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There has been perhaps no more compelling story in American history than the struggle of African Americans to gain equality and justice. It took a horrific war to end the institution of slavery, but the victories thereafter would have to take place in the political arena, not the battlefield. In 1863-1875 and 1954-1968, two periods of civil rights reform, there were serious efforts to advance the rights of African Americans; however, legislation had a greater impact in the 1960s because reformers could fit their arguments into the context of a post-New Deal, Cold War America characterized by a stronger sense of national identity, a relatively proactive federal government, African Americans’ greater influence in the process, and new forms of media bringing these issues to life. Given how difficult the struggle for justice for African Americans has been, it is critical to understand how and why these reforms finally became law in both Civil Rights eras through a comparative analysis of political leaders views, the roles of the branches of government, and the influence of lobbying and the media. This thesis first explores individual politicians’ stated intentions and beliefs about race in these two periods. Speeches, autobiographies, letters, and recordings of conversations from men such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens from the 1860s and Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s and 1960s, reveal that there was a serious desire for reform in both periods, but that differences in ideology and political climates that developed between the two eras, and the impact of African American led lobbying and protests allowed for very different results. Unlike the Republican politicians of the 1860s, whose nationalism focused inward, wanting both to punish and re-admit the states that had seceded, nationally-minded Democratic leaders almost 100 years later fit the expanding federal government of the New Deal and America’s role as a superpower in the Cold War into their arguments about Civil Rights, and as a result made them more compelling and powerful. Beyond the roles of individual leaders, branches of the federal government served or impeded the Civil Rights cause. The aforementioned sources and also court rulings make clear that these institutions operated very differently in these two periods. During Reconstruction, the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress was really the only force for significant reform, unleashing a “revolution” that sought to provide African American equality, punish the South, and secure the party’s political dominance. Presidents Lincoln and Johnson believed the President’s role in these moments of national crisis was to unite the country, and as a result they favored reconciliation over racial justice. And the Supreme Court viewed the Reconstruction amendments and legislation in only the narrowest terms in the late nineteenth century. By the 1950s, the Congress became an obstacle to reform as a shrinking but determined Southern bloc held out in the U.S. Senate, aided by the more undemocratic characteristics of the institution. Nevertheless, a Supreme Court that suddenly found a new framework to interpret the Constitution, and an Executive Branch that had become more powerful and more identifiable as the leader of the American people, fought for Civil Rights legislation with the argument that this is “one country”. Undoubtedly, these politicians did not operate in a vacuum. In the 1960s, unlike the 1860s, a heroic and peaceful Civil Rights movement created a great deal of political space for political reformers to operate within. Also, a growing African American lobby on Capitol Hill put pressure on Congressmen to prioritize Civil Rights, serving as an important balance to the unrelenting Southern bloc. Finally, the differences between visual representations of African Americans in printed media suggest that the immediacy and “realism” of photos in Life and the New York Times in the 1960s swayed public opinion in favor of Civil Rights reform. Ultimately, twentieth-century America and its role as a superpower with a powerful federal government, growing sense of national unity, and new forms of media helped push politicians, institutions, and the American public closer to racial equality.
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In September of 1970, women first set foot onto the nearly two-centuries-old grounds of Union College as full-time undergraduate students. Although female students were brought to campus, Union did not provide them a fully coeducational experience. These “pioneer” women faced unequal opportunities as entrenched gender bias and all-male traditions permeated most facets of college life. By using gender as the central focus to examine coeducation, and approaching the topic from a historical as well as feminist perspective, the sundry trials and errors of those early years of coeducation at Union College become manifest. As Union struggled with the question, decision, and implementation of coeducation, the college followed a national trend in higher education and experienced many of the same challenges as other schools. Many scholars have studied coeducation in secondary schooling or the popularity of coeducation in higher education during the 1960s. Numerous works discuss women in the classroom, but they often neglect to acknowledge the enormous influence extra-curricular activities and interactions play in an undergraduate’s experience. Critical examination of institutional records and close analysis of personal anecdotes—gathered from surveys and interviews of female and male graduates as well as faculty members—together suggest that certain behaviors, expectations, and experiences of coeducation were pervasive at Union. This thesis concentrates on women’s experiences in different avenues of college life during the first decade of coeducation at Union. By 1968, the college’s administration became quite concerned that most of its competitors had begun to abolish single-sex matriculation policies in favor of coeducation. In addition, financial difficulties, the declining quality of male students, and a high-achieving but untapped pool of prospective applicants contributed to the institution’s decision to undertake such a change. Yet, despite the national emergence of “women’s liberation” concurrently with Union’s decision, the college clearly did not admit women because of feminism’s impact or any potential benefits for female students. As a result of this male-made and male-centered decision, early female students experienced the limitations of Union’s attempt at coeducation in academics and in their extra-curricular lives. A disparity existed within the faculty between the sexes, the curriculum was not gender-balanced, and women experienced bias from some male students and professors in the classroom. The nearly non-existent opportunities in extra-curricular life in housing, sports, sororities, and other activities negatively affected how women felt about the value Union placed on them as students deserving of equality. Many faced sexual harassment, and all suffered from unequal budgeting and fewer options for an active social life than their male counterparts. It is safe to say that drastic social progress, such as the introduction of coeducation, never comes easy. This thesis provides a focused analysis of and insight into the lives of Union’s female students while radical change was implemented close to forty years ago. When women initially arrived on campus, the college was not prepared to include them fully and equally. Blatant sexism started to subside as men accustomed themselves to women’s presence in their previously and exclusively male space, and as the effects of feminism became more accepted in American society. However, there has still been somewhat of a constant struggle for women to achieve full equality with men in various areas of college life. Indeed, Union presently grapples with society-wide problems like sexism and gender-bias. In this thesis it is demonstrated that the question of what it means to be a truly coeducational institution of higher education is still being answered today, both at Union and in America at large.
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Long before the Quaker anti-slavery societies of antebellum America worked to abolish slavery, the Religious Society of Friends was discussing the issue from the late seventeenth century onward. The voices and tactics of the different antislavery advocates were not equally effective and it took over a century for the Quakers to reach consensus. In 1657 founder George Fox reminded his co-religionists that Christ had died for people of all races, thus African slaves should be treated kindly and taught the Gospel. At first, Quakers such as Fox, William Penn, and William Edmundson suggested ways to make the institution more humane, including the education and conversion of slaves. In 1688 a group of Dutch Germantown Quakers wrote an epistle to a nearby meeting, stating that the enslavement of humans was sinful and cruel. This missive was forwarded upward through the Quaker hierarchy of meetings until it reached the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Although no final ruling was made concerning this epistle, in 1696 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting did ask its members to try not to support the importation of slaves and to treat kindly slaves that they already owned. While meetings and individual Quakers slowly began to evaluate the morality of slavery, John Hepburn printed the first Quaker antislavery pamphlet, The American Defense of the Christian Golden Rule in 1715. Perhaps influenced by his former status as an indentured servant, Hepburn was sharply critical of wealthy slave owners in general. No responses to his vehement critique of slave owners and the institution they supported exist, but he set the stage for the fiery denunciations of Quaker leadership by Ralph Sandiford and Benjamin Lay. Sandiford and Lay both turned to non-Quaker Benjamin Franklin to print their denunciations of slave-owning Friends. Sandiford, a Philadelphia merchant, published A Brief Examination of the Times… in 1729 against the dictates of the Quaker leadership in the form of the Overseers of the Press, which led to his disownment. His desperate pleas to rid the Society of Friends of the evils of slavery fell on resistant ears, as the 1720s and 1730s were the peak years of slave ownership among members of the Philadelphia meetings. Likewise, Lay’s emotional rants in All Slavekeepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage… (1738) failed to woo prominent Friends, who published a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette that stated Lay was not truly a Quaker and his words were not supported by the members of that faith. Though the 1740s was a quiet decade for antislavery, the emergence of John Woolman as a respected voice in the Quaker community brought the focus back to this cause. With the help of his influential friend Anthony Benezet, Woolman published his first pamphlet, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, in 1754. Benezet began publishing his own works that combined his Enlightenment education and his Quaker beliefs. Due to well-placed acquaintances in Philadelphia, England, and France, Benezet’s A Caution and Warning to Great Britain (1766) became the widest read and most influential antislavery publication of the eighteenth century. Unlike their predecessors, both men always gained the permission of the Overseers of the Press before publishing and both combined their texts with activities such as itinerant ministry, letter writing, and meeting testimony. By uniting their efforts with each other, with other Quakers, and with like-minded non-Quakers, and by working within the established structure, Woolman and Benezet affected by far the most change of any antislavery advocates up to their time. Moreover, their influence is seen in the written testimony of abolitionists who came after them.
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This project examines the ways that Puerto Rican women's fertility was discussed over time in the United States, and the ways in which these discussions influenced decisions regarding reproductive choices. Looking at articles from popular American publications reveals the way that Americans felt about Puerto Rican sterilization, which can be compared to publications from activist newsletters at the same time. Personal testimonies from Puerto Rican women who chose sterilization reveal that the way others spoke about sterilization was different from how the women themselves viewed it. Their stories also show how the circumstances women were forced to live in influenced their reproductive choices. When Puerto Rico was colonized by the United States in 1898, living conditions were already dire. Jobs became scarce, and starvation and disease ran rampant on the island. The problem afflicting the island seemed obvious: overpopulation. Puerto Rico was a small island, with a population growing at a rate faster than the island could sustain. An immediate solution was increased migration to the mainland, and a long term solution was to lower the birth rate through contraceptive programs. The most popular form of contraception on the island eventually became sterilization, which was promoted and subsidized by the U.S. government through local public health institutions. In 1965, one-third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age had been sterilized, a rate ten times higher than that of white women. In the post-WWII period, the Puerto Rican population in the United States grew exponentially due to labor migration. Puerto Rican women needed to work, which meant that they could no longer have large families. Many Puerto Rican women chose to be sterilized so that they would be better able to enter the workforce. In the 1970s, activist groups in the United States and Puerto Rico exposed the coercion Puerto Rican women faced when consenting to sterilization, and the Puerto Rican independence movement called sterilization programs a genocidal campaign. The opinions of Puerto Rican women who were most likely to choose sterilization were not put at the forefront of these arguments. Despite efforts to curb sterilization abuse in the Puerto Rican community, many women continued to seek sterilization through the twentieth century, and even today.
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In this study, heroines and villainesses in nineteen Disney animated films from 1950- 2013 are characterized as traditional, complex, or non-traditional. A total of twenty-four female characters are classified based on their representation, actions, personality traits, appearance, and relationship status. Traditional female figures are beautiful dependent on male figures and engage in a heterosexual relationship as part of their "happily ever after." The traditional female figures in this study are Cinderella from Cinderella (1950) Lady from Lady and the Tramp (1955) Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) from Sleeping Beauty (1959) and Duchess from The AristoCats (1970). Complex female figures are, in the beginning of a film, independent from male figures and outspoken, but by the end of a film they are dependent on male figures and they always end their tale with a man beside them. The complex female characters are Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989), Belle from Beauty and the Beast (1991), Jasmine from Aladdin (1992), Meg from Hercules (1997), Mulan from Mulan (1998), Jane from Tarzan (1999), Tiana from The Princess and the Frog (2009), Rapunzel from Tangled (2010), and Anna from Frozen (2013). Non-traditional women are all independent outspoken and determined. Non-traditional female characters are separated into two sub-categories: negative and positive. The negative women are evil and masculine in appearance, while the positive women are inherently good and feminine in appearance. The evil villainesses are Lady Tremaine from Cinderella (1950), Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty (1959), Cruella DeVil from 101 Dalmatians (1961), Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989), Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove (2000), and Mother Gothel from Tangled (2010). The positive non-traditional women are Pocahontas from Pocahontas (1995), Nani from Lilo & Stitch (2002), Helen Parr from The Incredibles (2004), a Disney and Pixar film, Merida from Brave (2012), a Disney-Pixar film, and Elsa from Frozen (2013). There are two phases of changing representation: traditional to complex and negative to positive non-traditional. When Ariel appeared in 1989, it marked the shift from traditional to complex female figures. Likewise, in 1995, Pocahontas signified the transition from negative to positive non-traditional female characters. Disney's animated female characters in the 1950s to early 1970s reinforce Cold War values of modest femininity and devotion to family. Walt Disney's influence is crucial to the traditional female figure image. Most of the "princesses" of the 1990s-2010s reflect changes brought about by feminist activist efforts of the 1960s-1970s, attempting to incorporate multicultural and feminist ideals in their representations of heroines. With recent positive portrayals of independent female characters, Disney has experimented with representing non-traditional families which are increasingly prevalent in 21st century America. The recent rise of positive portrayals of independent female characters in Disney animated cinema is in part due to the phenomena of consumer feminism. Based on current Disney films and media such as Moana (2016), Elena of Avalor (2016), and Beauty and the Beast (2017), it is evident that Disney continues to feature positive non-traditional female figures in their animated productions to capitalize on feminism.
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Sex trafficking is a vicious crime and has been denoted as a form of modern-day slavery, accumulating nearly 21 million victims worldwide. Women and girls make up 95% of victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation, which reflects the dominance of patriarchy operating in the U.S. and across the globe. When it comes to the sex trafficking of women, it is often seen as a problem that happens elsewhere, never close to us. This hegemonic narrative that exoticizes sex trafficking contributes to keeping the problem in the dark. Yet an estimated 200,000 people are forced into the sex trade in the United States every year; the majority of these are American citizens, many of them trafficked within the borders of the United States—from one municipality to another, and across state lines. The pervasiveness of patriarchal social norms often makes human trafficking and sexual exploitation a normalized and yet sometimes invisible crime. Drawing on both feminist theory and political science's focus on governance, this thesis analyzes the sex trafficking of women with a three-pronged approach, reconstructing the main legal, conceptual, and institutional frameworks available to prevent and respond to sex trafficking, and assessing their contributions and limitations within the United States. Attention paid to defining sex trafficking as distinct from labor trafficking and prostitution. Offering a brief historical overview, the introductory chapter reconstructs the process through which the sex trafficking of women gained visibility both as a problem of public concern and as a subject of scholarly research. Two main questions at the center of the introductory chapter are, first, the vagueness of definitions, which contributes to leaving victims overlooked, and second, the assumptions that sex trafficking happens elsewhere. In turn, Chapter 2 looks at the international dimensions of the sex trafficking of women, characterizing and assessing the effectiveness of the main institutional, legal and conceptual frameworks and instruments in place. With a focus on the United States, Chapter 3 explores both national and state laws and institutional mechanisms as they apply to the sex trafficking of women. In doing so, the chapter will also examine the relations between the United States' and the international institutional and legal frameworks. When, how, and why do U.S. institutions opt in and out of international law in addressing cases of sex trafficking of women? When are international, federal, and state laws privileged by courts? Chapter 4 then digs deep into legal cases that have occurred in New York State. It explores specific legislation and acts that have been passed at a state-level.
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/Abstract
Since its creation, print advertising has affected how women perceive beauty and has shaped the trend of consumer purchasing, as well as the social status of women. This thesis analyzes three women's magazines—Life, Ladies' Home Journal and Ebony and evaluates how the advertising of fashion and cosmetics portrayed ideals of beauty in the 1950s and how the advertisements may have shaped or reflected class differences and racial perceptions in mid 19th century America. In order to accomplish this analysis and to evaluate how fashion and cosmetic advertising may have differed based on targeted demographic, advertisements from the months April and October in the years 1947, 1950, 1953, 1956, 1959 and 1962 were studied and compared. The roles of fashion and cosmetic advertising on societal expectations of beauty is a fairly recent topic of study and consequently, there are few secondary sources in this area. Most authors address either the individual topics of advertising in the 1950s or of fashion and/or cosmetics and few combine these subjects to assess the impact of fashion and cosmetic advertising. Those sources that do address this topic unanimously present the importance on French fashions as inspiration for the US market, the creation of a distinctly "American look," the emphasis on a slender figure, and the differences in types of cosmetics being advertised to white and black women. This thesis contains two main chapters, the first addresses cosmetic advertising, and the second addresses fashion advertising. In general, the types of cosmetics being advertised and the styles of the ads in Life and Ladies' Home Journal are quite similar.
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Hysterical women's stories from the 19th and 20th centuries have all too often been ignored and furthermore, invalidated through the capitalization and spectacularization of hysterical women's experiences. "Acting Hysterical: Analyzing the Construction, Diagnosis and Portrayal of Historical and Modern 'Hysterical' Women" aims to acknowledge hysterical women's narratives by studying the visual documentation of hysterical women. Visual documentation of hysteria began with the photographing of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot's "hysterical" female patients and extends to modern cinematic representations from the last two decades of historical and modern hysterical women. Medical Muses, a book based in years of research by Asti Hustvedt served as the muse for this project. The historical account narrates the lives of three specific women (Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve) who were treated in the 19th century for hysteria by Dr. Charcot, the "father of hysteria," at the Ho?pital universitaire Pitie?-Salpe?trie?re in Paris, France. After reading the book, a hunger for an answer to the following questions lingered: do modern representations of hysteria validate or invalidate hysterical women's experiences? Moreover, how does modern day society portray hysterical women, if at all? To begin, Chapter 2: Defining Identity, Truth and Authenticity in Personal Narrative outlines the evidence of this thesis' hypothesis that the narratives of hysterical women have, in fact, been invalidated. The evidence lies in the examination of Dr. Charcot's aforementioned photographs of his hysterical patients and also in the presentations where he displayed his hysterics for physicians' and audiences' viewing pleasure in 19th century Paris. "Acting Hysterical" investigates cinematic portrayals from the last 20 years of hysterical women in historical contexts and in modern contexts. Moreover, it considers how the perceptions of the films validate and/or invalidate their experiences by engaging with written and video evaluations made by the general population and by feminist and medical scholarship about the films . The primary piece of feminist scholarship used in film interpretation is Laura Mulvey's piece, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Finally, this chapter discusses the subjectivity of "truth" and how this should be taken into account when looking at the primary and secondary sources used in this thesis. The next chapter, Modern Cinematic Accounts of Historical Hysteria, discusses modern representations of historical hysteria in film, specifically in Hysteria (2011), A Dangerous Method (2011), and Augustine (2012). Also in this chapter is an analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and its corresponding 2011 short film. The Yellow Wallpaper is the only film/story included in this thesis that is based on a woman's own expression of living "hysteria," making it a vital component to the holistic analysis of representation. Then, the correlation between hysteria and these four films is drawn by narrating the relevant history of sexually repressive social norms and Victorianism. Concluding this chapter is the systematic application of this thesis' conjecture that all cases of historical and modern hysteria stem from repression and/or trauma. The fourth chapter, Hysteria in Modernity, is dedicated to defining modern hysteria as well as modern mass hysteria, followed by the study of the portrayals of the modern hysterical women in Black Swan (2010), The Falling (2015), and The Virgin Suicides (1999). These topic are first introduced by defining and characterizing 21st century hysteria. Then, the chapter cites Black Swan (2010) as the primary and most significant example of modern-day hysteria in film. Then, after defining modern mass hysteria, the chapter ends with the dissection of The Falling (2015) and The Virgin Suicides (1999), the two most notable examples of modern mass hysteria in cinema. This thesis communicates the universality of "being hysterical" by emphasizing the similarity between female experiences of hysteria in entirely different centuries and geographical locations. Not only are their experiences universal, but so is the exploitation of their narratives. The nature of being hysterical, in every sense of the word, serves as entertainment for the public. Just as sex sells, so do hysterical women. This concept of portraying hysteria and hysterical women in film is riddled with contradictions: the portrayals of their stories validate their experiences (to an extent), but the over-sexualization of their characterizations invalidates their experience and reduces them to a commodity for sexual objectification and consumption. The seven identified films in this thesis spread consciousness on the historical phenomena of hysteria, yet dramatize the stories and by doing so, skewing the "truth" of what really happened (even when "truth" is subjective). The films critique the oppression of female sexuality, yet turn female sexuality into a spectacle that serves the heterosexual, male gaze.
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In 1943 the image of Rosie the Riveter personified what the ideal American woman was supposed to be. Rosie supported the war effort and did her patriotic duty for her country, earned a high wage, enjoyed her newfound independence, and showed America that she could do a man's job, and do it well. However, Rosie and the many American women that she represented never dreamt that when the American servicemen came home two short years later, they would be forced out of their jobs and back into their homes to devote themselves to household chores and their families. In 1957 the image of June Cleaver embodied the time and represented the perfect American woman. A contented housewife, June spent every day at home cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry, all with the help of her new state-of-the-art "All-American" household appliances that made these chores easier than ever. The images of Rosie and June are almost polar opposites even though they symbolized consecutive eras in American history. This thesis identifies and interprets messages conveyed about women's roles at home and in the labor force during World War II and the subsequent Cold War period prior to the beginning of Second Wave Feminism. Rather than focusing exclusively on women's magazines of the time, as many other historians have done, this study examines a general audience magazine and newspaper to explore how white women were represented. Analysis of consumer product advertisements marketed towards and feature articles pertaining to women in Life and "Help-Wanted - Female" advertisements in the classified section of the New York Times demonstrates changes and continuities in how American women were represented and expected to behave, and identifies the paid employment positions that were available to them at the time. On the one hand, both publications convey the ideal of what an American woman during World War II and the Cold War should be and do, and yet they also suggest that fulfilling that ideal was not entirely rewarding or realistic by the mid-1950s. When American men enlisted in the armed forces to fight overseas in 1942, women aided the war effort from the home front. Advertisements and articles in Life urged women to do their part for the war effort by purchasing specific products and war bonds. Within months after Life depicted strong but still feminine "Rosies" to encourage women to take a wartime defense jobs, employment ads for these wartime positions appeared in the New York Times' "Help-Wanted - Female" columns. Once the war ended and the servicemen came home, life changed dramatically for American women. The American government believed that the strongest defense against Communism was a tight-knit nuclear family; as a result, Cold War ideology encouraged women to remain at home and take care of their families full-time. Advertisements in Life featured women using various new household appliances and grocery items, which further emphasized the importance of women as housewives. Furthermore, when women did seek employment outside the home, the only positions available were in stereotypically feminine fields such as clerical, retail, and domestic service work that reinforced feminine traits or tasks associated with women. Between 1946 and 1962, attention to physical appearance became increasingly prominent in both consumer and employment ads, which restricted women to traditional, feminine, gender roles and expectations within the home and workplace until Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963 signaled the dissatisfaction that women across the country felt with these ideals and Title VII in 1967 ended sex-segregated employment ads. By examining these publications, this thesis reveals how American women were expected to look and behave if they wanted to embody the ideal woman, and how there were both dramatic changes and significant continuities within these expectations between 1942 and 1962.
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Those who first stumbled across the steaming, bubbling land of Northwestern Wyoming in 1860s and early 1870s described it as "Hell on Earth." Over the course of a few decades, the land underwent a vast transformation, which replaced "Hell" with "Wonderland" in visitors' minds. The year 1872 represents a turning point in environmental legislation and marks the conception of Yellowstone, America's first national park. While creating a national park preserved, for the first time, the country's natural wonders, the 1872 act included no direction for management, no allocation of funds for upkeep, and no system set in place to manage tourists. This thesis examines the darker past of America's Wonderland, demonstrating that the vagueness of the original act affected the first four decades of Yellowstone's history for the worse, which led to a multitude of problems that plagued the park from 1872 to 1916, when the National Park Service was established. Through the examination of park superintendent reports, legislative acts, newspapers, and personal accounts, this thesis reveals the way political and commercial interests shaped Yellowstone's first forty years. These documents tell of the difficulties of protecting a vast area with no laws and minimal funding. Poor management led to poaching, widespread vandalism and a lack of respect for park administration. Until the passage of the Lacy Act twenty-two years after the park's creation Yellowstone lacked legal consequences for wrongdoers. Administration represents one of many areas in which the Department of the Interior failed in its understanding of a national park.
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The Age of the Common Man was a period of American political history lasting from 1820 to 1850 characterized by the implementation of universal white manhood suffrage by every state through removing property and tax qualifications from state constitutional suffrage laws, as well as the "common man" entering the center of much political discourse. These conventions were demanded by the political, social, economic, and in some cases physical climates and conditions of each state. To look at these factors, this thesis divides the nation into three regions, two of which are examined: the Northeast, the Northwest, and the South (the South is not examined). In the Northeast, the conditions driving suffrage expansion were largely a result of changes to urban economies. These changes, caused by the Industrial, Transportation, and Communications Revolutions, created a class of landless urban laborers that were denied suffrage. At the same time, a new generation of Americans was replacing that of the Founding Fathers and rejected many of their predecessors' aristocratic and elitist ideals and sought to implement the democracy seemingly promised to them by the American Revolution. Urban laborers began to organize into unions which were supported and strengthened by Workingmen's Parties, local and state-level parties that advocated for the rights of laborers. These organizations created a political presence of urban laborers that politicians could not longer ignore. In the Northwest, the egalitarian "frontier ethos" that existed from the beginning of Western settlement demanded a democratic system of leadership by persuasion and example. The creation of settlements in a vacuum of social, economic, and political hierarchies like those that existed in the East made it so that frontiersmen had to work together in a democracy to address the issues facing their society. As all of this was happening, politics were changing at a national level. America's Second Party system was forming, creating increasingly contentious elections. Beginning in 1824, a shift from election by legislative caucus to election by popular vote caused these parties to look to the people for support and address their concerns to garner as much support as possible. In the East this meant absorbing the efforts of Workingmen's Parties and in the West this meant nominating candidates reflective of frontiersmen and the egalitarian nature of the frontier itself including Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison. The Transportation and Communications Revolutions centralized information, spreading the ideas of each region to the other. This shift in politics at state, regional, and national levels caused state legislators to reevaluate their constitutional suffrage laws and extend the right to vote to the common man. Within a few years of the beginning and end of the Age of the Common Man, every state held a convention that resulted in the guaranteeing of suffrage for all white men. This thesis aims to provide a comprehensive look at all of the listed regional and national factors creating a national trend of democratization via suffrage reform. To do so, the works of historians and political scientists were reviewed, but more importantly documents from the time were researched in depth. These documents are newspapers from all over the country, materials surrounding state constitutions and constitutional conventions, and documents relating to the American Revolution, all of which gave unique insights into the mindsets of both common citizens and politicians. Out of this period came the first concrete step in suffrage reform that allowed for the democratic progress since then to take place. It is in this regard that understanding the developments made between 1820 and 1850 is important, for without doing so, understanding American political development since 1850 would be impossible.
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This thesis explores the marginalization of American Indian women, specifically in mainstream media and social movements. From 1970 to 1980 it is estimated that at least 25% of indigenous women between the ages of 15 to 44 were sterilized, with some speculating the number to be as high as 50%. American Indian women were not the only targets of sterilization abuse; African American women and Latina women also had similar experiences. The public was more aware of these women's experiences than those of American Indian women because the mainstream media was more likely to cover the involuntary procedures of women of color who initiated lawsuits, a strategy which very few American Indian chose to pursue. The American Indian Movement (AIM) discovered the involuntary sterilization of American Indian women in records they removed after occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1972. It would take nearly two years for information on the sterilization of American Indian women to be made public in 1974 by the <em>Akwesasne Notes</em>, a newspaper published by the Mohawk Nation. Mainstream media, such as the <em>New York Times</em> and the <em>Washington Post</em>, would take another two years to publish an article on the matter in 1976. Their articles appeared after the General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report investigating allegations against the IHS. The report revealed that 3,406 sterilization procedures were performed on American Indian females between the ages of 15 to 44 in the Aberdeen, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix areas alone from 1973 to 1976. American Indian women's issues were clearly present but insufficiently recognized not only in news coverage, but also in the American Indian and feminist social movements' agendas. American Indian women played an active role in AIM, but it was ultimately dominated by men, and thus didn't focus on female concerns. Mainstream media diminished women's roles in major AIM events, such as the Trail of Broken Treaties and siege at Wounded Knee. Hence the creation of Women of all Red Nations (WARN), which was intended to focus exclusively on American Indian women's issues. American Indian women attended the 1975 World Congress for Women in Mexico City and the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, but the conflicting views of white feminists and women of color on the matter of sterilization and abortion made it difficult for their voices to be heard. This thesis ends with The Longest Walk in 1978, which included WARN members marching to Washington D.C. to shed light on issues such as sterilization abuse and environmental justice. The examination of news coverage on sterilization abuse of minority women, and American Indian activism in mainstream media and the limited attention given by regional newspapers illuminates the invisibility of American Indian women during this period. The analysis of American Indian activists and feminist activists' agendas through personal accounts, AIM manifestos, and National Women's Conference proceedings show the lack of focus on American Indian women's concerns from 1968 to 1978.
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While most Civil War history deals with a glorified and romanticized version of a soldier's experience of war, the time a soldier spent combating the idleness of camp proved to be a more consuming battle. Though lacking in grandeur, how a soldier 'killed time' provides an important yet often overlooked insight into the camaraderie and culture of Civil War soldiers. Historians that have looked into camp amusements and vices tend not to go beyond the soldiers psychological need to mentally manage the war. This thesis takes their theory a step further. Examining soldiers' records of their experiences in camp activities in date order and by season reveals distinct patterns of criticism, disassociation, indifference, and participation. Furthermore, analyzing their observations based on rank shows the antagonistic relationship between officers and soldiers based on discipline and behavior.
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In this thesis, I seek to complicate traditional readings of embodiment in the work of Simone de Beauvoir by positing an alternative reading that stresses somaticism. Positioning myself within the tradition of historical political thought I track Beauvoir's intellectual development to demonstrate that reading Beauvoirian bodies within the framework of phenomenological embodiment only discloses part of Beauvoir's theoretical interests. Whereas the traditional conception of Beauvoirian bodies largely derives from a phenomenological vernacular, primarily concentrated on the notion of embodied consciousness, I advance a complimentary but alternative reading located within contemporary somatic discourses. By reading Beauvoir's early interests as somatic I hope to disclose a Beauvoir concerned with the body experienced as de-systematized, sensorial, visceral, and corporeal. My first chapter examines some of the traditional readings of Beauvoir emanating from her own corpus and both applied and critical readings of her political theory. This analysis suggests that readings of the Beauvoirian body have been traditionally read as 'embodied situation.' Seeking to remove Beauvoir from this reading, I make a claim about an active and animate somatic body to be found in Beauvoir's aesthetic, namely literary theory and criticism.
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The social environment on many college campuses in the United States contains both positive and negative aspects that influence students. Among the various lifestyle changes experienced in college are shared residential living spaces, more frequent social events with peers, a dining meal plan replacing home cooked meals, and an increased sense of independence. These new factors may lead to bingeing behaviors. Determining the connection between binge drinking, binge eating, and binge exercising—a common cycle of behavior that may emerge at the traditional four-?year institution—to gender expectations, social group relationships, and self-esteem helps explain the possible catalysts of these behaviors. Binge drinking, binge eating, and binge exercising are three, independent behaviors that may affect a woman at any time in her life. The scholarly research on each of these three behaviors independent of one another is plentiful. However, this thesis presents these behaviors as a cycle with binge drinking leading to binge eating, which, in turn, leads to binge exercising, with the pattern of engaging in these three bingeing behaviors continuing. The hypothesis predicts that female college students are affected by these behaviors most frequently. Specifically, sorority members are more likely to engage in this cycle of bingeing compared to those women who are not members of a Greek organization. Due to a combination of societal expectations, group behavior patterns, physical environments, and engrained perceptions of femininity in society influencing body image and self- esteem, these three bingeing behaviors are likely to affect women after college as well, manifesting into a large?scale gender issue. For this study, all 1,009 female students at Union College were given the opportunity to provide an anonymous opinion regarding their binge drinking, binge eating, and binge exercise tendencies in an original research survey. Samples within this population were women who belong to a PanHellenic Greek organization at Union College and those women who do not, either by choice or due to the academic policy that a first-year student may not join a Greek organization. A total of 416 responses were collected and analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences data platform in order to identify correlations between variables. By combining the results from this survey with background literature on similar topics, conclusions imply that college?aged, sorority members may be the most at risk population to engage in this damaging behavior pattern.
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Native women and girls in the United States are twice as likely to be sexually assaulted compared to white women, and murder rates on certain reservations can be tenfold higher than the national average. This pervasive violence traces back to colonialism. Native women have historically been abused, exploited, and neglected by America's institutions, and lasting prejudice against Native peoples endures. The United States government has stripped tribal governments of their ability to seek justice for their women. The Major Crimes Act of 1885, Proclamation 280, and the <em>Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe</em> (1978) decision place responsibility for investigating and prosecuting violent crimes in Indian Country on federal and select state governments. This excludes tribal governments from much of the justice process and often leaves violent crimes against Native women unaddressed. Stemming from a rich history of Indigenous feminist activism, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) movement has emerged within the last decade. Fifty years ago, Indigenous women fought alongside men in the American Indian Movement (AIM), demanding the fulfillment of treaties, the restoration of tribal lands, and the acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty. Indigenous women also founded Women of All Red Nations, which buttressed much of AIM's agenda and included more specific concerns, most notably the sterilization abuse of the 1970s. The following decades saw a marked increase in activism against heightened rates of domestic violence within Native communities. Analyzing articles by Indigenous newspapers revealed that Native communities adopted much of the grassroots organizing of the previous decades to address this particular type of violence. The 2010s brought another shift in Indigenous feminist activism with the MMIWG movement. Survivors, families of MMIWG, and their greater communities have raised awareness and demanded solutions to this national emergency. Federal and state governments have passed legislation to relax jurisdictional restrictions over tribal governments, centralize the data about this problem, and empower Indigenous communities to improve their law enforcement responses. But this does not address the root causes that have placed Native women in this precarious situation. By using alternative approaches to justice outside of Anglo-American carceral solutions, Indigenous communities can incorporate their traditions when healing this trauma.
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As a real yet imagined place, the "American West" has a mythical aura surrounding it that hides a deeper reality of extreme violence and chaos. It is a place where great feats have been achieved and profound defeats have been suffered. The wars fought over control of the Great Plains lasted longer than any other armed conflict in United States history. From 1865 through 1890, the chaotic nature of seemingly unorganized warfare and the ensuing violence plagued the lives of those who, either willingly or not, took art. The two most recognizable and seemingly homogenous groups in this conflict were the U.S. Army and the Plains Indian nations; however, upon further examination specific and distinct identity groups within these two generalized entities emerge. African American soldiers, popularly known as the "Buffalo Soldiers" played an important but insufficiently recognized role on the frontier. Their experiences differ from those of white US soldiers in some important ways, including limited advancement in the ranks. Many Indian nations lived in the "West." By looking at the experiences of the Northern Plains Indians, specifically the Sioux and Cheyenne nations, one gains insight into some of the most controversial armed conflicts. Although there is no denying that their clashes shaped their individual experiences and made them distinct from one another, the U.S. Army, Buffalo Soldiers, the Sioux and the Cheyenne all had to cope with violence, loss of life and property, and unfulfilled promises. Therefore it is important to consider these groups together. In some respects each group reacted differently to the events that brought them together, however, their shared experiences caused similar mutual feelings of suffering and endurance. This thesis attempts to make sense of these three groups' clashing and chaotic stories by breaking down the era of the Indian resistance on the plains into three distinct phases. The Civil War threw the country into a time of disarray when the hierarchical socio-economic structure, primarily based on race, no longer seemed as immovable and now had changing implications. A pale skin-tone paired with time in the army no longer guaranteed men an honored place in society. By looking at how the end of the Civil War changed the lives of generals, officers, and soldiers in the army, as well as recently emancipated black men, their interactions with the Sioux and Cheyenne, on the Plains can be put into context and better explained. A comprehensive look at the actual events of the wars fought, the strategies behind military engagements and battles, and the effects of resulting triumphs and defeats, is necessary to understand the establishment of a social hierarchy in the West once the frontier had been conquered and its consequences. By looking at the obligations the federal government had to each group, where they succeeded and where they failed to fulfill their duties, a better understanding of the relationships and the groups' differing and shared experiences emerge. Lastly, the resulting situations of the Army, Buffalo soldiers, Sioux and Cheyenne in the years after armed conflict subsided in the 1880's and then all resistance after the massacre at Wounded Knee in late December of 1890, highlights the lasting impacts of this time twenty-five years of chaos and violence. This thesis works to illuminate both the unique and shared experiences of the buffalo soldiers, the army they served, and the Sioux and Cheyenne by examining the reminisces of individuals, personal accounts, newspapers and military reports. The effects of conflicts on the Plains between 1865 and 1890 last into today and are important to study to understand the history of America and all of its people, including those who do not fit the mold of "whiteness."
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While Catholicism in America has had a turbulent history of mixed rejection and acceptance, the American Catholic Church prior to World War One was not considered a monolithic institution by the American clergy or in certain contexts by the American press. Women religious, such as nuns, were considered unnatural and malevolent at the worst, although this characterization in popular opinion declined after the Civil War, to unusual but benevolent at the best. Moreover, ethnicity was a determining factor among male authors for where on the sliding-scale of social alienation a nun or her convent might fall, although the degree of differentiation relaxed over the fifty years this study investigates. The nuns themselves and women authors did not place much emphasis on ethnicity, choosing to make distinctions between religious orders based on the services they provided to their communities. To examine reactions to nuns' and convents' ethnicity, newspapers from around the United States were consulted. Some news articles come from Catholic newspapers, women-focused periodicals, and newspapers both large and small from around the country, including women's pages devoted to female readers and writers, and female-oriented topics. One problem posed by the COVID-19 pandemic on this study was the unavailability of primary source material written by female women religious themselves, which would have been an invaluable addition to this project. Beginning in 1865 with the close of the Civil War, nuns received their highest praises in newspapers for their contribution as nurses, with relatively little emphasis on ethnicity, although distinctions were made. These distinctions were usually in recognition of the 'Irish' religious orders - a loose classification based on either a religious order's origin in Ireland or the predominance of its Irish members. Decreasing in frequency over time, the Irish were still those most likely to be signaled as outsiders in the press with comments on women's names prior to taking their vows or references to their birth in Ireland. This period saw rising numbers of immigrants from many countries in addition to Ireland, although Irish immigrants were viewed as more socially permissible than other groups because of the duration of immigration from Ireland and the visible service done by Irish nuns in the war. Over the course of fifty years, the Irish immigrants, and by extension Irish nuns, came to be viewed with special honor as "our" immigrants; if there was a group considered simultaneously ethnically separate and yet distinctly American, it was the Irish/Irish-Americans. Part of this privileged position also came about because of the Irish's prior knowledge of English. Women with ethnicities such as German, French, Polish, and Italian were also the subject of news articles, although to a lesser extent than the Irish. These articles were not as focused on the origins of specific women, and instead generalized about the order's chosen work and skills because of the foundresses' nationality or the religious order's country of origin. French nuns were viewed as teaching in exclusive schools, while the German nuns taught in less prestigious institutions. Nuns of both ethnicities were expected, if not required, to learn the mother-tongue of the order and were considered elitists by newspapers, with few exceptions. Italian and Polish nuns received less press than the other orders, and it tended to be even more narrowly focused on a single stereotype than the others. All ethnicities tended to have at least one religious order which worked with nursing and child-care such as orphan asylums or day cares. These institutions received an inordinate share of press coverage compared to other good works nuns engaged in.
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The main subjects of this study, Pieter Vanderlyn, the attributed artist of "A Portrait of Annetje Kool" (c.1740), and Annetje Kool, the sitter, both had subversive identities relative to the sociocultural expectations of New Netherland, a Hudson River Valley based settlement. The oil portrait on canvas depicts a young woman in an elaborate dress with lace and gilt embellishments. To understand this portrait's historical context, this thesis examines how male and female voices functioned on the margins of the moral boundaries that shaped expectations of gender appropriate thought and action during the colonial, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary eras in New York and Massachusetts. Originally established as a trade outpost for the Dutch West India Company, New Netherland adopted "Dutchness," an identity that encompassed the religious, cultural, social, political, and economic practices characteristic of the Netherlands and its colonists. With an emphasis on communal worship, the Dutch Reformed Church was indispensable to the cultural unity of New Netherland. However, with a growing multinational community, seizure by the British in 1664, and the rapidly changing sociocultural and religious ideologies of the eighteenth century, Dutchness faded and the church had to modify its dogma over time to compensate for a more multicultural public, and thus, compromised their Dutchness and became Anglicized. To understand the evolving socio-political ideologies of eighteenth-century Dutch settlement is to evaluate personal accounts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which reveal tensions between conservatives, those who embraced the traditional European Dutch way, and the progressives, those who chose to develop a civilization independent of immediate Dutch influence. My examination of male voices, such as Peter Stuyvesant (1612-1672), Adrien van der Donck (1612-1672), Pieter Vanderlyn (1687- 1778), Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), and William Linn (1752-1808), reveals that the male public presence was fundamental in articulating both the needs of the society and of the individual. Moreover, the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century were critical in developing a new sense of personal development in relation to the community. While the men may have achieved perceived control over their families and the settlement through a public voice in books and sermons, women used their voices to privately articulate their struggles with God, with the public, and with themselves. My analysis of several female authors within their respective historical and cultural contexts seeks to highlight female voices relative to each other and to male discourse. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Abigail Adams (1744-1818), and Hannah Webster Foster (1758- 1840) developed their female voices into a powerful and articulate dialogue of desire and need through their journals, poetry, and prose, creating niches of feminine discourse. Although two used pseudonyms, the majority of these women were published postmortem, which furthers the assertion that female voices were simultaneously saved and suppressed by men. My examination of sociocultural expectations, transgressive voices, and voices unheard is significant in offering and understanding the identities of Pieter Vanderlyn and Annetje Kool (1713-1789). Vanderlyn's portrayal of Annetje Kool highlights the complexity of both artist and muse as transitional figures within a burgeoning nation-to-be, as he offers her a voice through his paintbrush.
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