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Historians often characterize first ladies in the Progressive Era as representatives of the last vestiges of Victorian womanhood in an increasingly modern society. This dissertation argues that first ladies negotiated an image of themselves that fulfilled both traditional and modern notions of womanhood. In crafting these images, first ladies constructed images of their celebrity selves that were uniquely modern. Thus, images of first ladies in the Progressive Era show them as modest and feminine but also autonomous, intelligent, and capable. Using the historian Charles Ponce de Leon's research on modern human-interest journalism, I contend that first ladies in the Progressive Era worked with the modern press in a symbiotic relationship. This relationship allowed the press exclusive access to what was, ostensibly, the first lady's private, and therefore authentic, self. By purporting to reveal parts of their private lives in the press, first ladies showed themselves as down-to-earth despite their success and fulfilled by their domestic pursuits despite their compelling public lives. By offering the press exclusive access to their lives, first ladies secured the opportunity to shape specific images of themselves to appeal, as broadly as possible, to their husbands and parties' constituents and the American public. First ladies in the Progressive Era thus acted as political figures by using both public and private, or what historian Catherine Allgor terms, "unofficial spaces" to support and reflect their husbands and parties' political agendas. In examining representations of first ladies in popular magazines and newspapers from 1901 to 1921 in tandem with letters, memoirs, and other personal papers from these women, a clear pattern emerges. Despite personal differences, first ladies in the Progressive Era represented themselves according to a specific formula in the modern press. The images, constructed by first ladies in this time period, reflect shifts in economic, social, and political life in Progressive Era America, which called for women to be independent and intelligent yet still maintain their femininity and domesticity.
ContributorsHorohoe, Jill (Author) / Gullett, Gayle (Thesis advisor) / Longley, Rodney K (Committee member) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Women have played a vital role in Nevada's lawmaking process since first lobbying the Territorial Legislature in 1861. In subsequent decades, women increased in numbers as lobbyists, staff, and reporters. By 1914, when Nevada women won the right to vote and be elected to office, male legislators were accustomed to a female presence in the Capitol. With enfranchisement, however, came a more direct role for women in the state's lawmaking process. Featuring the twenty-nine women who served in the Nevada Legislature in the first half of the twentieth century, this dissertation enhances knowledge about public women between what are commonly called the two feminist waves. In addition to a general analysis of their partisan and legislative activities, this dissertation specifically contemplates women's participation in shifting Nevada's tax base from residents to nonresidents. This dissertation argues that these women legislators were influenced primarily by their experiences in the business sector. Suffrage provided the opportunity to hold public office, but it did not define their politics. More useful for understanding women lawmakers in the first half of the twentieth century is what I call "fiscal maternalism." Women legislators mitigated their social concerns with their understanding of the state's economic limitations. Their votes on controversial issues such as legalized gambling, easy divorce, and regulated prostitution reflected a perspective of these issues as economic first and moral second. Demonstrating a motherly care for the state's economy and the tax burden on families, women invoked both their maternal authority and financial acumen to construct their legislative authority. Combining policy history and women's history, this dissertation documents that a legislator's sex did not necessarily predict her vote on legislation and advances the gendered analysis of state lawmaking beyond the dichotomy that emerges with the application of the label "women's issues." In addition, this dissertation demonstrates that the digitization of newspapers provides a fruitful new resource for historians, particularly those interested in women. The ability to search within articles removes the reliance on headlines and reveals that the previously-disregarded society pages are valuable tools for tracing women's business activities and political networks.
ContributorsBennett, Dana R. (Author) / Gray, Susan E (Thesis advisor) / Critchlow, Donald (Committee member) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In the preface to his 1852 Dictionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery, Spencer Thompson wrote: "But health will fail, either in old or young, and accidents will happen, in spite of the most careful precaution." With this concise statement, Thompson summarized the universal human desire to combat illness, injury, and hurt with action and knowledge. The more efficient ability to spread ideas and technology in nineteenth-century Britain led to increased production and use of home remedy books. Although women traditionally represented the agents of remedy and care within the domestic sphere (centuries prior to the nineteenth century), a struggle between the supposed inherent nurturing capabilities of womanhood and the professional medical realm occurred within the rhetoric of the home remedy genre during this period. Cultural mores allowed and pushed women to take up duties of nursing in the home, regardless of advice given by male physicians like Thomas John Graham, W.B. Kesteven, and Ralph Gooding. Despite remedy book physician-authors' attempts to dictate appropriate medical care in the home through the writing of home remedy books, British women read, interpreted, and used home remedy books in ways that undermined medical control.
ContributorsJacobson, Emily (Author) / Green, Monica (Thesis advisor) / Szuter, Christine (Thesis advisor) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011