School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemFrom knowledge to resistance: emerging themes, developments, strategies and agendas for religious Jewish women in Israel today( 2016)This study examines three areas in which religious Jewish women are challenging and changing gender-based inequality in Israel. Israeli women effectively live in two realities. The first is a liberal democracy that has championed legislative policies to advance the status of women and has pushed for gender-based equality from its formation. The second is a nation in which religious law and culturally evolving traditions of Orthodox Jewish practice are not restricted to the private sphere. Instead, such laws and behaviors hold significant power and sway in public space and everyday life. Within this reality, some view the exclusion and subordination of women as a basic tenet of religious Jewish norms. Women are removed, segregated and discriminated again. In the past thirty years, religious Jewish women in Israel have been engaged in an education revolution, gaining access to sacred knowledge and texts previously barred to women and integrating themselves into positions of religious leadership. Their demand for equality, however, has also prompted groups of these women to confront instances of gender-based discrimination on a national level; using legal appeals, public demonstrations, civil disobedience and pluralistic alliances to generate change. Such groups are working to expand ritual, social and civil rights for women in Israel. This study acts to illuminate groups of these women; their engagement with feminism and faith, their confrontation of spaces of inequality and their demand for respect as both Jewish women and Israeli citizens. Little time has been spent examining religious Jewish feminist groups in Israel. There has also been limited academic engagement with the challenges faced by these women as they relate to the Israeli landscape. To this effect, there have been significant gaps in the critical literature regarding women in Israel. Such gaps diminish academic understandings of both the place and position held by women in this country and the strains that evolving religious cultural norms have placed on Israel’s national identity. Situated from a constructionist framework and informed by the academic discipline of Jewish studies, this study utilizes a variety of resources. Previous scholarship, Israeli-based English language newspapers, group-generated publications, United Nations’ reports, NGO reports, legal petitions and rulings, interviews and presentations at a prominent transnational Orthodox feminist conference were all used to illuminate emerging themes, strategies and developments for groups of religious Jewish women in Israel. This is a new methodological approach in a small field and thus offers new perspectives on an underrepresented area of study. Doing so adds to our critical understandings of women’s rights in Israel, Jewish feminism, Orthodoxy in Israel and Israeli national identity.
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ItemThe women are most laborious: the role of female slaves on the Gold Coast in the age of abolition, 1833 – 1874( 2016-05-17)The British idea of slavery, and by extension emancipation, was irrelevant to the realities of slaves on the Gold Coast of West Africa between 1833 - 1874. Slavery was the foundation of social structure and women made up a large proportion of these. A study of female slaves sheds light on the fundamental role slaves played in the structures of Gold Coast society and parallels can be drawn between slavery and issues women still face today.
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ItemHow to be a good wife in the Renaissance: a man's perspective( 2015)Women’s role in Renaissance Florence was defined by their marital status, and most women were married by their twentieth birthday. Finding a virtuous wife was a priority for those of elite status, and a number of texts written for an educated audience discuss the “ideal” or “good” wife. This thesis analyses this good wife in elite Renaissance Florentine families, in the period of 1361 to 1527, the timeframe from which the selected primary texts are from. This thesis also illuminates and evaluates the qualities that a good wife must possess, as prescribed by prominent Renaissance humanists, clerics and literary writers. This thesis draws from a number of Florentine sources that make reference to the good wife, overtly and didactically, or through implication. The sources range from the overtly circumscribable humanist and clerical tracts such as De Re Uxoria by Francesco Barbaro and Regola del Governo di Cura Familiare by Giovanni Dominici, essays written for instruction and circulation. This thesis also uses literary sources, such as Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris and the Decamerone, Leon Battista Alberti’s I Libri della famiglia and Machiavelli’s Clizia and La Mandragola, and his short novella, Belfagor arcidiavolo. It also analyses less formal sources, such as San Bernardino’s 1427 Lenten sermons in order to gain an understanding of the advice given at all levels. These sources provide an insight into the behaviour, demeanour, and especially virtues that were encouraged by leading writers and social norms. There are a number of virtues considered to be ‘feminine’ virtues, all of which are marked by control and passivity. The aim of this thesis is to understand the importance placed on being a good wife, and the prescribed behaviour for married women in the Renaissance, especially in regards to the feminine virtues being encouraged and idealised. There are three virtues which are consistent across the nine sources studied, which this thesis focuses on in detail; obedience, chastity and love.
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ItemInnocent ingénues, virtuous mothers, and ‘semi-respectable girls’: complicating Australian attitudes toward female sexual desire during the Great War( 2015)The Great War was a period in which competing ideations of female sexuality, modest and immodest, came into contact and overlapped. Middle-class girls and married women, though seemingly immune to this new sexualised articulation of womanhood, were nevertheless guarded more intently, lest they too succumb to a now presupposed base instinct. What had been mere shadows of suspicions around the working-class girl were now projected onto a national framework, and supported the supposition that honest young women could, and did, pursue sex outside of marriage. The resulting confusion paved the way for more complex articulations of female desire that rejected a dualistic organisation. Despite the arguments of scholars who suggest that the influence of the war was negligible in the twentieth-century reimagining of female desire, this thesis demonstrates that a close study reveals a clamorous discussion around the nature of sexual womanhood. While the Madonna/whore duality may still have held sway after the war, a contemporary observer could no longer say that women were categorically dispassionate.
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ItemEyes on Albania: sex and empire in the British imagination( 2014)In the 19th and 20th centuries, British travellers began to explore Albania and publish their impressions of the country. While this 'textual universe' has often been used as an objective window into an exotic past, these impressions were indelibly coloured by the conditions of their construction.This thesis examines Albania as the British imagined it, and Britain as it is revealed through Albania, with an emphasis on this as a gendered exchange.
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ItemMobilising the Third Reich: the final phase: an analysis of Joseph Goebbels' role as Reich Plenipotentiary for the total war effort, July 1944 - March 1945( 2014)The final ten months of the Second World War have been characterised as a time of bureaucratic and military chaos. However, this thesis demonstrates than in his role as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, from July 1944 until March 1945 Joseph Goebbels was able to implement a program for the total mobilisation of all human and material resources towards the war effort to some success. Combining his continuing role as Propaganda Minister with his new role as Plenipotentiary his approach to the program for total war can be characterised as one that maintained a primary emphasis on ‘propaganda and the ‘spoken word as the most powerful weapons’. However, not without an element of realism in the acknowledgement that ‘soldiers, weapons and raw materials’ now determined the outcome of warfare in the twentieth century.