This thesis explores the impact of Twilight Sleep on women and physicians and their perceptions of childbirth. Twilight Sleep empowered women to take on a more active role in shaping the medical care they received rather than accepting childbirth as a natural event associated with physical and mental trauma and high risk of mortality. For doctors, the debate regarding Twilight Sleep’s safety and efficacy affirmed a ubiquitous notion that childbirth ought to be seen as a pathological rather than natural event. By considering childbirth a medical condition that necessitated treatment, physicians had to evaluate their duties to their patients. In empowering women to be involved in making medical decisions and forcing physicians to balance their medical training with their patients’ needs, Twilight Sleep helped to establish more reciprocal doctor-patient relationships.

This thesis examines hiring and retention challenges in the retail sector. Using a case study format, I interviewed 2 retail firms to determine in what ways they are experiencing these issues and what strategies they use to combat them. I use Lazear & Shaw (2007) and their personnel economic theories about compensation structure, nonmonetary benefits, and sorting to discuss the data I obtained.

In 1907, researchers Bernhardt Kronig and Carl Gauss combined the drugs morphine and scopolamine to induce twilight sleep in women during childbirth. Physicians in the early twentieth century in Germany used twilight sleep, Dammerschlaf, to cause women to enter a state of consciousness in which they felt no pain and did not remember giving birth. Twilight sleep was associated with increased use of forceps during delivery, prolonged labor, and increased risk of infant suffocation. Because of those disadvantages, physicians stopped using morphine and scopolamine to prevent pain during childbirth. Morphine and scopolamine were among the first anesthetics to be used during childbirth, and after physicians stopped using them, researchers searched for safer alternatives.

The Starbucks Workers United Movement emerged in late 2021 and quickly spread to 290 stores in at least 40 states. SBWU cuts against the decades-long trend of decline in the US labor movement, and many hope that it signals its revitalization. I conducted interviews in Arizona's first SBWU location to investigate why workers organized, why they chose to act now, and what obstacles lie ahead of the movement. I found that the movement is driven primarily by young workers (Gen Y and Z) motivated by factors other than pay like toxic management, scheduling concerns, and dignity at work. Findings indicate that the conditions which brought about SBWU will increase in a future of climate change and economic instability.

Mary Ware Dennett, an activist in the US for birth control and sex education in the early twentieth century, wrote an educational pamphlet in 1915 called “The Sex Side of Life, and it was published in 1919. The pamphlet defined the functions of the sex organs, emphasized the role of love and pleasure in sex, and described other sexual processes of the body not usually discussed openly. In the early twentieth century in the US, individuals did not have wide access to sex education due to the limitations enforced by the Comstock Act, which prohibited the distribution and discussion of topics that were considered obscene. In 1929, the US tried Dennett for mailing her pamphlet as a violation of the Comstock Act, sending obscene material through the United States Postal Service. Dennett’s pamphlet, Tthe “Sex Side of Life,” and her subsequent trial, United States v. Dennett, contributed to a national discussion about sex education and human reproduction and led to the revision of reproduction- related obscenity laws.