This research is based on in-depth interviews with 20 women farmers and
ranchers from the state of Oregon. These women employ a variety of methods and
subscribe to a number of divergent philosophies regarding agricultural practices.
The intention of this study is to examine how women who are the primary...
Throughout society, many believe women are not succeeding professionally because of the institutional barriers created by men in the American workforce. However, women may be more competitive with other women than with men, especially when limited job positions are the goal. Competitiveness among women can be explained by a phenomenon...
This thesis examines the nature of publishing as a political endeavor through a detailed investigation of the feminist publishing movement in the U.S. since the 1970s. Feminist publishers emerged from an activist context of feminist struggle, and they evolved within changing political and social climates, facing ideological and economic challenges...
This thesis brings together gender and genre criticism to consider Virginia Woolf s memoir, "A Sketch of the Past," as a modern experiment in rewriting the traditions and conventions of Victorian autobiography. This thesis will demonstrate how Woolf specifically disrupts the conventions of linear
representations of time and the assumed...
This research examines women's magazine editors' perspectives of the relationship between editorial and advertising content in women's magazines. It specifically investigates how this relationship affects both general editorial content and more specifically, social topic stories. Mainstream women's beauty/fashion magazine editors—including editors-in-chief—were queried as to the nature of these relationships. Interviews...
In this thesis, I examine the ways in which the television series Twin Peaks represents
the feminine through a textual analysis of the character Audrey Home. Using reader-response
theory, I seek to show that while the series conforms to patriarchal media
conventions such as the male gaze and narrative stereotypes...
This qualitative study explores communication among twelve battered women's advocates. It highlights their experiences of communication at work. A disconnection existed between the agency's recommended communication style and the way participants experienced talking with coworkers and supervisors during staff meetings, specifically, and across agency sites, generally. Along with study participants,...
Located on the central Oregon coast, the Umpqua Eden site (35D083) yielded an artifact assemblage which is one of the five largest assemblages from the Oregon coast. The first aspect of the site that I looked at is the people who lived at the site, the ancestors of the Confederated...
This research explores the consequences and effects for men
enrolled in introductory Women Studies courses at Oregon State
University. Men are enrolling in the feminist classroom in larger
numbers due to institutional changes allowing Women Studies to
provide credit for baccalaureate core curriculum. The intention of
this study is to...
This paper is a compilation of micro and macro consequences of women migrating into Singapore to work as domestic workers. Singapore's governmental push for Singaporean women to have babies and a career simultaneously has required modern families to seek alternative forms of child care as a means of fulfilling household...
Passage through The Vagina Monologues: A College Anti-Violence Rite examines the ways in which the audience at Oregon State University (OSU) responds to the annual production of the play in connection with the international college campaign to raise awareness about violence against women and to raise money for community organizations...
This paper investigates certain women's problems in
contemporary Japan. Historically, Japanese believed ideal women fit
in the stereotype of "Good wife, Wise mother." Japanese women's
main roles were regarded as wife and mother. Especially,
motherhood was the main responsibility of women. However, the
advance of industry, technology, and methods of...
This research is based on in-depth interviews with 10 women directors of nonprofit organizations in New York City. Each director identified as feminist, or worked for a feminist-identifying organization that existed to meet the needs of women in New York City. The intention of this study is to examine how...
White women’s experiences with major institutions, the church included, often are generalized to other women’s experiences, much like how the experience of men in often represented as the experience of all humankind. In 2001 Elaine Howard Ecklund studied white lay women in the Catholic Church and explored two questions: What...
This research addresses the perception of leadership attributes in light of evaluator and target gender. It specifically investigates whether there is a difference in language usage when the evaluator is female versus when the evaluator is male. Two studies were conducted. A pre-test used instrumental development drawing from studies conducted...
Two companion pieces, a video documentary and written analysis, provide the
text for this exploration of how women's life stories and the mother-daughter narrative
are preserved through the transmission of inherited objects. The video documentary
reveals the lives of six diverse women who each discuss the politics of receiving and...
This research summarizes the cumulative efforts of in-depth research,
extensive participant observation, and archival analysis focused on Southern Oregon
lesbian lands. This community of womyn has persisted in rural Southern Oregon for
nearly 30 years. The intention of this study is to examine both the accumulation of
knowledge of issues...
American women’s quest for equality came into focus in the early 1900s. Amidst the cultural and societal forces pushing for suffrage, some chose the mechanism of theater. This thesis is a work of rhetorical criticism. It applies Lloyd Bitzer’s situational approach to two suffrage theater artifacts: Mary Shaw's The Woman...
This study documents the occurrence of stereotypical representations of
gender, race, and other characteristics in individuals that appear in advertisements in
the prestigious academic journal Science. It repeats and expands upon a study
conducted by Mary Barbercheck (2001) that analyzed advertisements in Science
between 1995 and 1997. In this study,...
Sororities play an important role in the process by which sorority women become gendered by influencing members' ideas about what it means to be a woman. Women and men become gendered through regular social interaction with other women and men, and sororities have a particularly strong impact on their members...
The recognition that women are not in a fixed position but are dynamic and active in any of the processes of migration and post-migration adjustment helps us to see the complexity of women's participation in migration. Using life history interviews, three Sri-Lankan womens' migration experiences are examined for the ways...
This study is based on two in-depth case study interviews with two Iranian women
trapped in violent/abusive marriages. Using a feminist methodology in combination with
a systems perspective, several themes emerge from the data gathered in the interviews.
The study provides an overview of Iranian family law, the role of...
This study examines the critical pedagogy utilized by the Center for Global
Education's study abroad program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The Center for
Global Education (Centro de Educación Mundial en America Latina-
CEMAL) facilitates two semester long study abroad programs per year as
well as a variety of short term programs,...
MySpace is a social network phenomenon with over 100 million profiles
and a strong presence in over 24 countries. As digital media become more
commonplace, social networks are becoming sites where women create and
manage relationships and identities. This thesis is a study of how women
ages 18-22 are constructing...
The extent in which the evangelical Christian perspective influenced the career decision-making self-efficacy of six female college students was qualitatively explored. Interviews and a focus group were utilized to find common themes and influences amongst the women. Literature from the areas of female college student development, career decision-making self-efficacy, and...
In this paper, my aim is to call attention to the meanings women attach to their
birthing experiences using the symbolic interaction perspective in conjunction with a
feminist lens. I argue that the obstetrical model of childbirth defines the course of the
relationship between the laboring woman and attendant, limiting...
Bildungsroman in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction is a study of Toni
Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both of these writers
implement a newer version of the genre of Bildungsroman to reveal the complexities
involved in coming of age for a young woman of color. Both...
Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the top ten best-selling children's picture books of 2006 reveals that these books contain elements of systematic privilege and oppression. Dominant group members are numerically overrepresented in the sample. Major emergent themes are the normalization of racism and white privilege, the stereotypical portrayal of the...
This study will show that polygamy is not a religious
freedom protected under the U.S. Constitution, but a power
system in which men use economic, political, social and
physical force to control the behavior of others. This
thesis will use a feminist perspective theory to provide a
theoretical outline for...
This thesis explores outcomes of women's participation in the American welfare system. The primary goal of this research was to determine the impact certain segments of the welfare system in the United States have on women's ability to obtain and retain human capital. The primary
resources were formulated around participants...
Caribbean women authors, in an attempt to reclaim their voices lost to patriarchy and colonialism, are creating a new literary tradition by expanding the boundaries of the Bildungsroman genre. Many have challenged the conservative male Bildungsroman's deeply entrenched gender bias where female transcendence was impossible due to cultural prescriptions that...