Browsing by Subject "Women's history"
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Item American deaf women historiography : the most silent minority(2011-12) Nathanson, Deborah Anne 1974-; Jones, Jacqueline, 1948-The development and current state of the historical perspective of American Deaf women is outlined in the report. Initially this paper reviews the historical study of people with disabilities and for the American Deaf. This paper concludes with a review of the small but significant selections of historical scholarship related directly to American Deaf women along with recommendations to preserve the rich and colorful Deaf-oriented heritage; especially of the women.Item Having a baby the natural way : primitive bodies, modern women and childbirth in mid-century America(2013-05) Doughty, Deirdre Gae; Green, Laurie B. (Laurie Beth); Coffin, Judith G; Davis, Janet M; Seaholm, Megan; Peck, GuntherAs childbirth shifted from home to the hospital in earnest in the late 1930s, many women, reacting against what they saw as a dehumanizing, assembly-line approach to labor began to search for an alternative method involving conscious delivery and an emphasis on a positive experience for the mother. Natural childbirth provided one such method and by the 1950s had become the basis of a burgeoning social movement, spawning childbirth education organizations across the United States and sparking an outpouring of both opposition and support in magazines, newspapers, and medical texts. Other scholars have generally analyzed these early stirrings of interest in alternative birthing practices in relation to what would later become the more activist and more explicitly feminist challenge to medicalized childbirth in the 1970s and 1980s. My dissertation moves beyond this focus to examine the origins of natural childbirth in late-nineteenth-century thinking on “primitive” and “civilized” birth and then looks at the ways that physicians, pundits, journalists and mothers themselves reinterpreted and shaped that thinking during the post WWII years in the United States. Using photographs and articles from medical journals and the popular press, along with hundreds of letters and surveys from natural childbirth participants, I focus on three running threads. One, I examine the ways that advocates of natural childbirth relied on ideas of “primitive” versus “civilized” or “modern” birth—ideas deeply imbued with notions of bodily difference and class status. On a related point, I also look at the ways that women’s experiences of childbirth discursively marked their level of civilization or modernity. Two, I examine the fact that natural childbirth proponents paradoxically both associated the method with concepts of “nature” and “primitivity” and stressed its derivation from and basis in “modern science.” I look at how this alliance with “modern” medicine constructed natural childbirth as a distinctly “modern” method. Three, I analyze the ways that the rhetoric and theory of natural childbirth reflected contemporary understandings of femininity, as well as the ways that popular media representations of, and women’s participation in, natural childbirth helped to complicate and reshape these cultural perceptions.Item The "Texas Women : A Celebration of History" exhibit : second-wave feminism, historical memory, and the birth of a "Texas women's history industry"(2010-12) Abbott, Gretchen Voter; Ritter, Gretchen; Green, LaurieTouring the state in the early 1980s, the “Texas Women: A Celebration of History” exhibit was the first attempt to create a comprehensive, public Texas women’s history narrative. Surprisingly, the exhibit was organized not by academics or museum professionals, but rather by the Texas Foundation for Women’s Resources—a nascent second-wave feminist non-profit organization composed of up-and-coming political activists such as Ann Richards, Sarah Weddington, Jane Hickie, and Martha Smiley. Through an analysis of the exhibit, as well as archival research and oral histories with many of the participants, this thesis explores the reasons that a feminist organization with finite resources would choose to focus on the production of women’s history as a tool of feminist activism. The “Texas Women” exhibit was a uniquely effective way for the members of the Texas Foundation for Women’s Resources to express their feminist values in a culturally palatable way and to create embodied moments of feminist consciousness for their audience. Furthermore, it paved the way for the organization’s future successful feminist projects, fed the production of Texas women’s history initiatives around the state, and served as a springboard that helped launch Ann Richards’ successful political career.