Dissertation Abstracts: 1997-1998

Ash, Patricia B. “The Quest for Harmony: Religion in the Origin of the Antebellum Woman’s Rights Movement.” History, The Claremont Graduate University, May 1998.

The women in whose vision the antebellum woman’s rights movement was rooted are best understood as “religious virtuosos,” women who were obsessed with religious questions, saw the world in religious terms, and tried to mold human circumstances in accordance with the divine plan they perceived. At the center of the originators’ vision of woman and her relation to society was a new “sacred story” which figured God and human beings as androgynous, woman as meant to share equal dominion over earth, the Fall as the consequence of man’s aggression against woman, and the redemption of the world as closely linked with woman’s religious, social and political elevation. The dissertation traces the spiritual journeys of the principal “mothers” of the new sacred story, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, relating the spirituality of each to her thinking about the nature of womanhood and woman’s rights.

Alexander, Ilene. “Learning in Other Ways: A History of Feminist Pedagogy in the U.S.” American Studies, University of Iowa, May 1998.

How has the educational work of women and men, black and white, working together in the United States as teachers committed to anti-racist education played a role in developing feminist pedagogy? This dissertation attempts answering that question by drawing on the work of anti-racist educators in print when the U.S. Supreme Court announced its Brown decision in 1954/55, on the work and workers of Highlander Folk School and Mississippi Freedom Schools, and on the educational strategies and philosophies of feminist educators throughout U.S. history. Alongside the textual analysis of academic and archival resources, the dissertation features four autobiographical interviews with teachers who reflect on their development as feminist activists and educators.

Andreasen, Bryon C. “‘As Good A Right to Pray’: Copperhead Christians on the Northern Civil War Home Front.” Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 1998.

This dissertation examines a significant Democratic insurgency within the northern Protestant Churches of the Civil War west (Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio). Pious Democrats attempted to articulate an alternative religious interpretation of the war that would sustain both their standing as Christians and their political opposition to the Republican majority. To challenge the seemingly monolithic support of the Northern churches for the Republican war agenda, proscribed preachers tried to channel religious dissent into a network of “new churches.” Their story forces historians to reassess the nature and scope of Democratic opposition to the Republican war effort, and to acknowledge an important religious dimension to the Copperhead movement.

Applegate, Deborah Mari. “The Culture of the Novel and the Consolidation of Middle-Class Consciousness: Henry Ward Beecher and the Uses of Sympathy, 1830–1880.” American Studies Program, Yale University, September 1997.

This study examines the pathbreaking career of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) to argue that middle-class consciousness has been constituted less by shared economic factors than by ideological bonds. In the unstable economy of the mid-nineteenth century, Americans emphasized ideological affinity over socioeconomic circumstances as a way to assess class status. The rise of modern celebrity and a mass media based on practices associated with the novel—particularly techniques designed to foster sympathetic identification and mass-marketed intimacy—was crucial to propagating the belief that individual aspiration and personal character are more important to middle-class status than socioeconomic factors. Drawing evidence from hundreds of fan letters, and synthesizing the techniques of social history and narratology, this dissertation discusses oratory, sentimentalism, melodrama, periodicals, Protestantism, and the role of the commodity form in class formation.

Beemyn, Brett. “A Queer Capital: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Life in Washington, D.C., 1890–1955.” American Studies, University of Iowa, August 1997.

A Queer Capital focuses upon the Black and white same-sex sexual communities of Washington from the 1890s, the years in which gay life in the city seems to have first been documented, through 1954, when open discrimination began to wane following the banning of segregation in the capital. Unlike...