School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Paradoxical Representations of Vietnamese Women in Propaganda: The Communist Party of Vietnam and Conflicting Visions of Women During the Vietnam War (1955-1975)
    Ardley, Georgia ( 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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    The women are most laborious: the role of female slaves on the Gold Coast in the age of abolition, 1833 – 1874
    Gorman, Julia ( 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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    Innocent ingénues, virtuous mothers, and ‘semi-respectable girls’: complicating Australian attitudes toward female sexual desire during the Great War
    Smith, Madeline ( 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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    Eyes on Albania: sex and empire in the British imagination
    Dempsey, Carolyn Teresa ( 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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    Mobilising the Third Reich: the final phase: an analysis of Joseph Goebbels' role as Reich Plenipotentiary for the total war effort, July 1944 - March 1945
    Fitzmaurice, Camielle Jean ( 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.
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