This dissertation uses Polish women’s participation in self-defense and martial arts courses as a case study that illuminates many social processes related to postcommunism. Given the lack of popularity of a feminist movement in Poland, I ask whether individual empowerment of women such as that promoted by self-defense philosophies is a more culturally appropriate way of addressing the problems facing women in Poland than feminism per se. At the same time, my work acknowledges the fact that such individualized interpellation of a disadvantaged group ignores structural inequalities and institutionalized sexism. I form my argument in a series of chapters which focus on self-defense participation’s relationship to various aspects of Polish society. At first glance, a hybrid identity cobbled together creatively by an individual may seem more empowering than an unquestioning embrace of traditional, self-sacrificing roles, but ties of self-defense courses to consumerism are problematic. The framing of self-defense participation as a means of individualized self-improvement, and as one consumer choice among many draws attention away from the broader social problems which make self-defense necessary for women, and makes remedies for violence and misogyny seem irrelevant. I use evidence from interviews and from self-defense advertising to highlight these issues. My dissertation contributes to literatures on postcommunism, gender and European integration in Anthropology, Gender Studies, Eastern European Studies and other social sciences. In addition the insights provided by my study can inform the study of women’s empowerment by activists and by policy makers in this region.

Buddhology frequently configures monastic, androcentric practices and texts as normative and canonical. Womens Buddhism, by contrast, is often relegated to “special studies.” I will study these constructions, as well as recent discursive responses to them through the Chinese Buddhist narrative, the Legend of Princess Miaoshan. I explore the specific methodologies privileged not just in Buddhology, but in the discourses on the Princess Miaoshan Legend. Both have been dominated by Eurocentric and androcentric methodologies and theoretical biases. I reconsider how political, economic, and social forces have shaped both the Princess Miaoshan Legend and its discourses by combining Postcolonial and Feminist critiques with Historiography and Buddhology. I demonstrate that the narratives religious themes significantly resemble those of mens hagiographies, most notably that of Prince Siddhartha. In so doing I reinterpret the Princess Miaoshan Legend as a narrative neither about nor addressed to women； instead it is a chronicle that reflects the values and agendas of men like the author himself: educated and socially elite. The legend thus functions both as a cautionary tale about women that reinforces androcentric, monastic Buddhism. As such, I propose that the primary audience of the Princess Miaoshan Legend was men, not women. Moreover the audience surrogate in the narrative was King Zhuangyan, not Princess Miaoshan. I further demonstrate that using different historiographical and theoretical models reveals the androcentricity of many narratives on idealized women, and that in truth Chinese female icons like Princess Miaoshan are men “dressed” as women. Indeed, I argue that equating gender studies with womens studies limits our understanding of Chinese secular and religious texts on women. Finally, I propose that every interpretation is invested and value-laden, rather than objective and value-free. My goal is to re-configure the way Chinese womens narratives and womens Buddhist narratives are understood. Moreover, I attempt to broaden the discussion of what comprises “normative” and “special studies” in Buddhology and Chinese History.

The social sciences have four explanations for the gender wage gap: preference, crowding, power, and socialization. Neoclassical economists explain the wage gap as the result of employers and employees work-related preferences. Crowding theorists argue the wage gap is caused by women crowding into a small number of occupations. Power theorists contend men use their socioeconomic superiority to maintain a two-tier wage system that discriminates against women. Socialization theorists note womens secondary status in the labor markets is a result of lifelong socialization processes. Previous econometric research has mostly overlooked the power explanation. Crowding researchers have also not examined the crowding hypothesis over the entire post-World War II era, choosing instead to focus on one particular year or a few years； this research decision is made even though women were continually increasing their share of the labor force throughout the postwar era. The purpose of this study is to address the two mentioned shortcomings. A wage model is constructed with controls for compensating differentials, power, and female crowding. The model is fitted on male and female workers who were employed in 103 occupations； the 103 occupations were selected because their categorizations have remained consistent between 1950 and 2008. Approximately 30 percent of male workers and 40 percent of female workers are employed in the 103 selected occupations. The robustness of the wage model is tested on ten time-sensitive Census and American Community Survey PUMS. The study finds supporting evidence for the power and crowding explanations. Male workers earn wage premiums when employed in occupations with high degree of collective bargaining whereas women receive wage penalties. Women also receive no premiums in occupations with apprenticeship requirement until 1990, even though their presence in these occupations has not changed between 1950 and 2008. Also, men and women employed in female-crowded occupations receive wage penalties in every surveyed postwar year, but women are more likely to be employed in female-crowded occupations than their male counterparts.

This dissertation project examines the rhetorical performances of women who hold or have held the highest office of a nation-state. Currently, only 20 women are in such positions of political national leadership. This project asks how these women rhetorically perform—discursively, visually, and through embodied performance—their positions of power and how they are read, time again, against and with other women who have held similar positions in different geopolitical locations. Specifically, I ask how these rhetorical performances open up and/or close down the potential to confront gendered expectations of leadership. I argue that a “woman world leader” is not just a head of state, but also a symbolic heterodoxy that interrupts and reaffirms the doxa of the nation-state as an eternal structure. I analyze three rhetorical situations—autobiographies, the Council of Women World Leaders, and the nickname of “Iron Lady,”—in order to conclude that woman world leaders, as a discourse, can limit the potential for ethical rhetorical action of embodied women as world leaders. I link the function of the discourse of women world leaders to that of the “US presidency,” as established by Campbell and Jamieson, in that it creates a transnational tradition of women as leaders. By researching women as world leaders, a subject of curiosity following the 2008 US Presidential campaigns, this project contributes to popular and academic discussions of power, identity, and transnational political participation at the foundation of which are writing, rhetoric, and education.

During the first decade of this century, Turkey witnessed the proliferation of a novel form of occult economy: fortune-telling cafes. Turning the feminized activity of reading coffee grounds for prognostication into a commodity under the shadow of a secularist law that forbids fortune-telling as an occupation, these cafes are unique business arrangements offering cup-reading as a promotional giveaway with the purchase of a cup of Turkish coffee. Conscripting poor and lower-middle class women as cup readers and providing a feminized public space for a secular, middle-class, and predominantly female clientele, fortune-telling cafes offer a densely textured ethnographic setting for the scrutiny of the intricate relationships between secularism, gender, and the public in contemporary Turkey. Drawing from two years of ethnographic research in Istanbul, this dissertation approaches fortune-telling cafes as a lens to examine how gendered fortunes are brokered through occult economies in emergent feminized publics of secular Turkey.

In recent decades historians have traced the popularization of “high” culture in the United States in the post-World War II era. In recognizing opera, classical music, and ballet as part of the “culture boom” of the 1960s, they tend, however, to treat the status of cultural forms as fixed and unchanging: pre-existing “high” arts become popular. By tracing the cultural history of ballet dancing in the United States, an art form long tied to the popular theater but elevated to the status of high art in the twentieth century, this dissertation examines the process by which cultural categories take form. The widespread dissemination of ballet in the United States via television, film, and theater, the tours of international ballet companies, and the prevalence of regional ballet schools, companies, and festivals in the 1940s and 1950s reveals that ballet reached a diverse, national audience in the United States in the post-war period, a notable achievement given the peripheral nature of ballet to American culture during most of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-centuries. Once limited to occasional appearances within popular forms of entertainment, ballet now entertained millions of Americans, many of whom eventually enjoyed ballet as a unique and independent art form – ballet for the sake of ballet. Ballet dancers, choreographers, and publicists exploited the cultural politics of the era that privileged high art, particularly Cold War era inspired international rivalries and pervasive social anxieties pertaining to American consumer culture, gender, sexuality, race, and class, and positioned ballet as a symbol of cultural accomplishment and refinement. At the same time, by drawing from the long history of ballet in popular culture, these ballet makers also created an art form with widespread public appeal. The celebration of the ballerina, an image of grace, refinement, and control, as a representation of iconic American womanhood, and the simultaneous fascination with the glamorous, highly sexual and often effeminate Russian male ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev reveals the particularly important role changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity played in the ballet revival. Drawing from contemporary popular literature and newspapers, the extensive film and television collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the records of several major ballet companies, dancers, and associations, “Elevated: Ballet and Culture in the United States, World War II to the National Endowment for the Arts” traces the invention of ballet as high art. Recognized today as one of the highest of the high arts in the United States, ballet dancing has not always occupied this place in American culture. The history of ballets elevation to this role is the history of the making of modern American culture, a culture in which the ballerina epitomizes feminine grace and is a major influence on contemporary fashions, in which ballet classes symbolize middle and upper class accomplishment, and in which appreciation of ballet indicates taste.

My thesis focuses on the determinants of child health outcomes. I examine both the incentives and constraints that households in developing countries face when making use of both public and private goods and services that benefit their children. The first chapter examines the effect of the World Health Organizations recommended number of prenatal care visits for developing countries on birth outcomes. It accounts for the endogenous nature of prenatal care decisions by using an instrumental variable approach based on the accessibility of prenatal services. The source of exogenous variation is the accumulated unexpected rainfall levels during pregnancy. These shocks increase commuting times and can even make roads impassable affecting the mothers time availability and capability to seek prenatal care. To address previous shortcomings in the literature I constructed a measure of prenatal care that accounts for both the timing and intensity of use. I find that prenatal care only has a positive impact on child birth weight in urban areas. These results are highly robust to alternative methods to remove the systematic effect of gestation on birth weight. In addition, I show that having the desirable number of visits reduces the probability of experiencing poor birth outcomes such as being born prematurely. Prenatal care appears to have no impact in rural areas due to the inferior quality of services received there. I conclude that policy makers and researchers should focus not only on the frequency but also on the quality of prenatal care interventions. The second chapter tries to answer the question: why is the urban-rural gap in child malnutrition increasing in Peru despite government efforts to improve the provision of public services? This paper examines the impact of regional public expenditure on the nutritional outcomes of young children. To account for policy endogeneity, I instrument for public expenditures using the level of natural resource royalties assigned to each region. The exogenous variation in this study comes from the interaction between natural resource endowments in each region and the world prices of these resources. In contrast to health input prices, typically used in the health economic literature, the instrument chosen does not directly alter individual regional migration. I consider separately supply and demand restrictions that diminish the effectiveness of public expenditure. I find that public spending has a positive impact on childrens outcomes only in urban areas. This statement is true regardless of the type of expenditure analyzed. However, worse off urban households do not benefit from public good provision. This suggests that the poor face constraints that limit their ability to make use of public goods and services. In rural areas, there is no effect for either the poor or the non-poor. This is likely due to the lower quantity and quality of public services in rural areas. Over seventy percent of the increase in malnutrition disparities between rural and urban areas can be explained by the increase in total public expenditure during the two rounds. This result is shown to be due to the lower quantity and quality of public services and the crowding out of private expenditure in rural areas. The third and final chapter analyzes the impact of indoor air pollution on child health outcomes for children younger than 6 years old. I use a panel of children which allows me to control for unobserved household/child heterogeneity. One of the main shortcomings in the indoor air pollution literature has been the inability to control for a series of confounding variables, such as socioeconomic status, that could bias the impact of this hazard on child health. This paper improves on previous work by using longitudinal micro data and exploiting a rich set of controls. Using this data I find a positive, statistically significant and important impact of indoor air pollution on the probability of suffering serious illnesses and acute respiratory infections. In addition, this paper differs from the existing literature because it provides analysis by gender and child frailty. I provide evidence that indicates indoor air pollution is a much more severe problem among young boys and less resilient children.

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. 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.

In the family policy reforms they undertook between 1990 and 2004, postsocialist European welfare states strengthened familialist policy elements by reducing state assistance to families and by increasing the burden on families – de facto on women. This dissertation documents the familialist trend in Poland and the Czech Republic. Poland moved toward a liberal-individualist family policy model, whereas the Czech Republic moved toward a conservative-statist family policy. The dissertation explains the variation in both countries family policy trajectories. It analyzes family policy reforms as necessary consequences of the changing political and socio-economic framework after 1990, with rising poverty and unemployment, and rapidly declining birthrates. Differences in national family policy discourses reflected the influence of norms, values, and cultural practices around gender roles in both countries. Once the Communist Partys rhetorical commitment to gender equality and the instrumentalization of family policy in the service of the planned economy were obsolete, “family values” and mostly conservative) social norms came to bear directly in the new democratic Poland and Czech Republic, though in different ways and to different degrees. In Poland, family policy discourses were strongly populist and rooted in Catholicism. In the Czech Republic, family policy discourses reflected Social Democratic traditions as well as neoliberal reform ideologies, leading to ambiguous reform outcomes. Most actors in both countries shared a preference for family policies which limited the states responsibility for family well-being, and a disregard for gender equality policies. Only a minority of gender equality advocates in both countries, inspired by policy trends and debates in Western Europe, demanded increased state support for families with the goal of promoting gender equality. While the reforms in both countries did not ignore the European Unions legal framework for gender equality and the Unions coordination process for social policy, a “Europeanization” of postsocialist family policy did not happen in either case.

This dissertation examines the role of motherhood in the women’s unit at Northeast Jail, a medium-security facility located in the Northeastern United States. Staff and administrators at Northeast Jail identify the facility as unique in the age of “get-tough” policies toward crime and punishment because the jail provides drug rehabilitation programming, educational opportunities, some job training, and a variety of classes and therapeutic groups. Preparation for parenting is an important part of the therapeutic agenda for women inmates at Northeast Jail. Officially, motherhood manifests in jail in the form of parenting classes and visitation, but motherhood is woven throughout other therapeutic groups, daily life and conversation. In these venues, staff promote an ideal form of motherhood that is not available to women in or out of jail. Thus, constructions of ideal motherhood punish women who cannot practice them. Motherhood is also tied to formal mechanisms of punishment that the jail uses to discipline inmates who break institutional rules. Or, motherhood is invoked to encourage women to behave in institutionally prescribed ways. Furthermore, since the purpose of Northeast Jail is to punish and confine, therapeutic endeavors are often superseded by punitive measures. In order to maintain a rhetoric of rehabilitation in the face of traditional punishment, staff and administrators construct inmates in ways that justify incarceration on therapeutic or punitive grounds. In short, motherhood is an integral part of life at Northeast Jail, even though women are practically and ideologically barred from practicing motherhood in their everyday lives. I will argue that this disconnect, and the primacy of motherhood to women’s lives makes motherhood an effective tool of gendered punishment.