School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemParadoxical Representations of Vietnamese Women in Propaganda: The Communist Party of Vietnam and Conflicting Visions of Women During the Vietnam War (1955-1975)( 2021)This thesis examines the paradoxical representations of Vietnamese women produced by the Vietnamese Communist Party (CPV) between 1955-1975. Through analysis of the changing representations of women, it questions the Party's commitment to gender equality. Furthermore, it challenges the assumption in previous scholarship that the Vietnam War was a period of increased rights and revolutionary change, and instead suggests that Vietnamese women were circumscribed by the persistence of Confucianism in CPV propaganda.
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ItemCountryminded Conforming Femininity: A Cultural History of Rural Womanhood in Australia, 1920 – 1997( 2021)This thesis explores the cultural and political history of Australian rural women between 1920 and 1997. Using a diverse range of archival collections this research finds that for rural women cultural constructions of idealised rural womanhood had real impacts on their lived experiences and political fortunes. By tracing shifting constructions of this ideal, this thesis explores a history of Australian rural womanhood, and in turn, centres rural women in Australian political and cultural history. For rural women, an expectation that they should embody the cultural ideals of rural Australia — hardiness, diligence, conservatism and unpretentiousness — was mediated through contemporary ideas of what constituted conforming femininity. This thesis describes this dynamic as countryminded conforming femininity. In this respect, this research is taking a feminist approach to political historian Don Aitkin’s characterisation of the Country Party as driven by an ideology of countrymindedness. This thesis uses countryminded conforming femininity as a lens through which cultural constructions of rural womanhood may be critically interrogated, and changes in these constructions may be traced. This thesis represents the first consideration of Australian rural womanhood as a category across time that is both culturally constructed and central to Australian political and cultural life, drawing together histories of rural women’s experience, representations and activism. It theorises what ideals of Australian rural womanhood have meant across the twentieth century and finds that they have had an under-considered role in Australian political life, and on constructions of Australian national identity.
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Item'Qual’è utile alla Città’: pizzochere networks, social ‘usefulness’, and female precarity in early modern Venice( 2020)This thesis provides the first dedicated study of the identity, social status, and social roles of pizzochere, or lay religious women, in early modern Venice. Pizzochere professed simple religious vows, usually to a mendicant order, and as professed laywomen lived a complex duality, neither fully secular nor fully religious; vita activa and vita contemplativa. Most also lived outside of the social statuses of wife (and mother and widow) or nun, the roles viewed as conventional for women. This thesis argues that pizzochere’s social position was, nonetheless, not only accepted, but perceived as integral to the proper functioning of the city. Drawing from archival, visual, literary, and architectural evidence, the thesis approaches pizzochere primarily through the concept of utilita, or usefulness, a concept raised surprisingly frequently with regard to these women. It asks what sort of women became pizzochere in sixteenth-century Venice, and how they were perceived by, and interacted with, their contemporary community. Bringing together histories of gender and women’s experiences, histories of lay devotional structures, and the related histories of charity, poor relief and hospitals, the thesis uses pizzochere, viewed as a kind of working woman, as a lens through which to explore the social and economic opportunities available to, and the experiences of, non-elite laywomen in early modern Venice more broadly. Situating these individual women and communities within the city and its other charitable, devotional, and social structures, both informal and governmental, reveals that pizzochere networks included and assisted women of widely varied social background, and filled a significant space in Venetians' approaches to the systemic vulnerabilities faced by women. The works that pizzochere undertook within the city for vocational fulfilment and income were tasks that were necessary and valued within the community. Consequently, pizzochere contributed, and were perceived to contribute, to establishing Venice's status as an ideal Christian state. The thesis highlights how women’s work served and sustained the early modern State, and how non-elite women’s agency operated in the early modern city.
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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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ItemHomefront hostilities: the first world war and domestic violence in Victoria( 2004)This thesis examines the influence of the First World War on domestic violence in Victoria, Australia. A reading of court cases, newspaper reports, official records and oral testimonies reveals a connection between the war and individuals' violent behaviour within marriage, apparent during the war and in the decade following the cessation of hostilities. This connection explains what appears to be an increased incidence of domestic violence in the immediate aftermath of the war. A link between veterans' war trauma and domestic violence - frequently assumed in the historiography - existed, but this was just one aspect of the war's impact on domestic violence and did not account for all cases of returned-soldier wife abuse. The war contributed to both veterans' and civilian men's wife abuse by idealising male aggression and by provoking a range of experiences that personally disempowered men. Against the masculine ideal of the fearless Anzac, many men's self-esteem diminished. Failure to enlist, failure to fight, and failure to cope with horrifying memories of battle were some of the ways in which men fell short of their own and society's expectations of manliness. Male insecurity was further exacerbated by women's increased self-assertions. The war afforded many women greater social and economic autonomy, a situation which made wives' separation from violent husbands more viable. The war was influential, too, in shaping social responses to domestic violence. The new masculine hierarchy of wartime affected judicial determination of who was, and who was not, accountable for acts of violence. Official leniency towards returned-soldier perpetrators was noticeable both during and after the war, and in the post-war years such leniency also extended to civilian defendants. While the outbreak of war sparked renewed enthusiasm for male chivalry towards women, this ideal disappeared rapidly after 1918. ln a context of male antagonism towards women's apparent advancement, a new male ambivalence towards wife abuse emerged within the public realm. The notion of men as victims, rather than as brutal tyrants, informed much official reaction to actual cases of domestic violence. Greater official indifference to men's violence against their wives after the First World War was the result not only of men's fears of female encroachment on male privilege, but of a changing interpretation of the causes of domestic violence. The widespread phenomenon of shell shock in soldiers served to further the currency of psychological theories of human behaviour. In the post-war decade, the stereotype of the disturbed violent veteran both emerged from, and influenced, the proceedings of cases of domestic violence in Victorian courts. The idea that returned-soldier violence was a product of battle nerves weighed on cases of wife abuse, regardless of whether the facts of individual cases evinced such a connection. The violence of civilian men also increasingly came to be understood in a psychological framework during the 1920s. As the community's awareness of psychological factors burgeoned, the belief that domestic violence was an outcome of extraordinary stresses on ordinary men's minds began to prevail in the public sphere. Such an understanding helped to dismantle the dominant pre-war stereotype of the working-class 'wife-beater'.
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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.