Womens contributions to the history of Canadian music can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. However, womens achievements then, and still somewhat now, are often overlooked and as a result, piano solo works by Canadian women composers are largely unknown. The purpose of this study is to promote the wealth of solo piano repertoire composed by Canadian women, and to report the results in an accessible and comprehensible format for students, teachers, and performers at all levels. The research focuses on the most recent piano music by female composers born in or after 1950 whose compositions are available through the Canadian Music Centre CMC) library. Brief biographies of included composers note their accomplishments, compositional output, and style characteristics. Annotations for the 103 works studied, written by twenty-six composers, include information about harmonic schemes, meters, tempos, durations, dates of the composition, CMC call number, level of difficulty, commissions, musical excerpts, premieres, and style characteristics. The style characteristics section includes composers notes, technical challenges, musical characteristics, pedagogical values, and other pertinent information about a given piece. Since the goal of this project is to stimulate the awareness of music composed by Canadian women in a truly global sense, the research paper is supplemented by a website—www.canadianwomencomposers.com—that contains all the information found in the written portion of the annotations. This website also offers short audio samples of the compositions. The writer wishes to encourage all students, performers, and teachers to explore this resource, which reveals the richness of solo piano repertoire written by Canadian women composers.

This study examines the daily life of daughters, wives, and concubines to reveal the marginalization of the traditionally valorized domestic sphere during the last five decades of the Qing dynasty. With the rise of industrial and commercial development, women in well-to-do urban households abandoned the “womanly work” of spinning, weaving, and embroidery — traditional symbols of womanly virtue — in favor of ready-made and tailored clothes, shoes, and other commodities available through the growing fashion industry. Thus adorned, they began to appear in public spaces as consumers and as leisured pleasure-seekers. This dissertation accordingly reveals the complex engagement of women in urban commercialization. Within the household, women continued their substantial role building the wealth and status of the family, using their investment skills, personal networks, and sensitivity to the new media. Yet in the context of the late Qing efforts to save the country, womens domestic contributions were ignored. Instead, reform rhetoric criticized womens confinement in the home, their lack of education, and their extravagant consumption as contributing to the ongoing political crises. This dissertation also highlights the pivotal function of merchants who made efforts to educate the younger generation of women in their families and networks, establishing girls school to respond to the reform rhetoric. The dissertation situates wives, daughters and concubines in the current historiography of talented High Qing women poets, passionate late Qing female reformers, modern “new women,” and Republican bourgeoisie housewives. It outlines a gradual cultural shift away from the “talented women” tradition of the Qing guixiu. In her place, we see womens growing involvement in the monetary world. The conclusion links the marginalization of domestic work in the inner quarters during the late Qing era with the privatization of the domestic sphere under the Communist regime, stressing the modern states silence on womens domestic burdens during campaigns to increase their labor outside the home, and the governments continuing insistence on viewing women solely in the context of marriage and family.

I look at the history of the Roma women’s activist movement in Romania and its interaction with Romanian feminists, Roma nationalists, and international organizations and institutions such as the European Union. I argue that the Roma women’s activist movement after the fall of communism was born out of the dissatisfaction of Roma women activists with Roma nationalism and mainstream Romanian feminism. Both Roma nationalism and Romanian feminism failed to incorporate issues particular to Roma women (such as arranged and early marriages, virginity tests) into their larger discourses, even while claiming to represent Roma women. My thesis aims to document both the obstacles and the collective achievements of the female Roma leaders. They had the courage to stand up in a hostile environment to fight not only for Roma women, but for the entire Roma community.

In the post-Civil War North Carolina Piedmont, hardship visited all Southerners, and cast unprecedented numbers of women from every socioeconomic level, not merely the lowest ranks, into roles as providers. Increasing numbers of women sustained alternatives to the traditional patriarchal household and challenged conventional notions regarding a womans nature and place by serving as breadwinners and courtroom advocates for themselves and their families. During Reconstruction, women gained legal recourse for protecting their assets as well as their individual freedoms, and the courtroom became an important site of their economic agency. Despite the public discourse that built up an ideal of economic and legal dependency for women, North Carolinas married womens property legislation and other safeguards available to women, including divorce, were avenues through which women sought control of their assets and income. The imperative among white Southerners to distinguish white women from black women influenced an almost thoroughly racially divided female labor force in Piedmont cities. Increasing numbers of white urban women entered the labor force as small businesswomen, operating boarding houses and working as dressmakers and milliners, while black women worked most often as servants for white families. The race and gender hierarchy that kept black women in a degraded position simultaneously ignored the economic contributions of most white women, who were traditionally portrayed as non-laborers in opposition to the laboring identity assigned to black women, and even when their economic contributions to their families were quite significant. Their concentration in white and “female” occupations ensured that white womens labor reinscribed race and gender hierarchies even as they simultaneously gained greater economic independence and challenged conventional notions of their roles. White women did not generally seek to overturn the ideal of white womanhood that ignored their roles as providers for fear that they might slip from the pedestal constructed for them. Nonetheless, their daily lives were marked by demands on their labor and they engaged in a wide range of economic activities that frequently played crucial roles in supporting their families. Although all women were constrained by the race and gender hierarchy, the economic agency of white women reveals how they also benefited from and contributed to that system in the late-nineteenth century Piedmont.

My dissertation is an attempt to explore the ways in which the global-local network impacted diverse women’s lives and experiences at the turn of the twentieth century Tianjin, a coastal city in north China. I will especially emphasize two aspects of their experiences in cities: the ways in which women emerged as a public presence in the urban landscape, and the ways in which women’s issues became a social phenomenon under the public observation and discussion. To be specific, I focus on three most-debated issues in Tianjin: women’s physical body (footbinding), women’s education, and women’s performance. The three themes had for a long time been rooted in Chinese society and culture and symbolized the normative womanhood or its opposite side. When it came to the modern era, the themes of publicizing women’s deformed feet, the transition from private inner chambers to public women’s schools, and the extreme publicity of actresses on and off the stage became social issues in Tianjin, with which the city had never dealt before, or at least not to this extent. All the discussions, debates, arguments, and reforms of these issues affected groups of women such as missionary women, educated women, and actresses and dramatically changed their life styles and their identities in the city. New definitions of social and gender norms were forming to discipline women’s behaviors and spheres. It is the negotiation between women and the forming norms that a space was created between layers for these women to actually lived with flexibility and agency. Meanwhile, it was also through the discussion, translation, and adaptation of these issues in Tianjin that people were able to articulate and consolidate their own identity as Tianjin natives.

The goal of this dissertation is to examine the importance of translation in the history of women’s writings in nineteenth-century France and the ways in which it not only contributed to the development of women’s intellectual activities, but also afforded access to literary production. I therefore explore how translation, when conceptualized as a women’s literary activity, both reinforced existing roles for women in literature and at the same time allowed them access to other forms of creativity. For, contrary to the opinion of many scholars of literary genre and gender who do not discuss translation in this context, translation was intimately related to varied forms of textual production. In order to demonstrate this relationship and the enormous impact of translation on women’s conceptions of their creative capacities, I examine translations, as well as the prefatory discourse that often accompanies them, autobiographical statements by women translators, and fiction by women translators with texts from Therese Bentzon, Victorine de Chastenay, and Mme Lesbazeilles-Souvestre. I first address how literary creativity was a gendered activity in the nineteenth century, with women limited to certain secondary modes of literary production. I then examine the relationship between translation and the modes of textual creation named above in order to demonstrate the fundamental related-ness of these writings and, finally, I demonstrate the creative aspects of translation through a close reading of several translations in comparison to their source texts to show how translation was not only a creative activity, but a gendered one as well. Despite the widespread dismissal of translation in consideration with issues of gender and genre in nineteenth-century France, its inclusion opens important new areas of research and allows for a fuller understanding of what it meant to write as a woman in the nineteenth century.

In recent years, sentimentalist care ethics has been developed and defended as a normative ethical theory alongside and in opposition to Kantian liberalism. Carol Gilligan introduced the idea of a woman’s moral perspective that emphasizes maintaining relationships and responding to need, and saw it as a different way of framing moral issues. Care ethics is no longer associated only with women, and it is presented as a theory for both men and women that has its own distinctive accounts of ethical notions like justice and autonomy. These accounts have developed from analyses of injustice towards women and uncaring attitudes that they face in patriarchal societies, but ironically, care ethics has failed to discuss women’s anger at their own mistreatment, and their inability to deal with that anger. This notable lacuna in the care ethics literature is of philosophical importance because analyzing the phenomenon of women’s anger uncovers epistemic issues that have not been addressed. I discuss these epistemic issues in order to strengthen care ethics from within and extend it into other areas of ethics. My goal is to make care ethics a real contender among normative ethical theories and a truly feminist ethic.

The focus of this study is to compare works by the Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay 1909-1996) and by the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad 1935-1967). Although Farrokhzad and Livesay were from different generations, their love poems emerged around the same time. Farrokhzad published her poems between 1955 and 1965, and Livesays collection of love poems The Unquiet Bed was published in 1967. There are interesting similarities between the use of voice and theme in their love poems. The speakers in the poems try to keep their individuality and are looking for freedom in love, but often see love as disappointing. My discussion highlights Livesays “The Touching,” “The Taming,” and “Consideration” as well as Farrokhzads “The Sin,” “Love Song,” and “My Beloved.” I also refer to many of their other love poems, discuss their biographies and map out their respective cultural contexts, all of which reflect different worlds. A comparison of Farrokhzads and Livesays personal lives shows that Livesays father and her mother, who were both journalists, helped her to improve and publish her writings while Farrokhzads parents discouraged their daughter from composing and publishing poems. Livesay was a highly educated woman who lived and studied in different countries, but Farrokhzad did not have access to advanced academic studies. Neither had happy marriages and both left their marriages in search of more freedom. Through their love poems, Farrokhzad and Livesay questioned the patriarchal conventions of their respective societies and tried to express their need for freedom and individuality as women. One of the most important differences between Iranian and Canadian societies was that Iranian society was deeply affected by conventional Islamic ideologies. Farrokhzads love poems resisted these Islamic ideologies and, as a result, her works were ignored for years. Again, at the time Livesay published The Unquiet Bed 1967), there were some similarities between gender constructions in Iran and Canada, for example, the importance of marriage and the confinement of women to the private sphere, but to a very different degree. Since Livesay lived in a society that was being greatly affected by the feminist revolution in the 1960s, the feminism in her love poems was better received. As this research is done in English, translated versions of Farrokhzads poems are used. A translated poem never conveys the exact meaning of the original poem. The translator of a poem should be a poet herself or himself. What he or she should do is to read and understand the original poem and reproduce a new poem in the target language. This research discusses some interesting images in Farrokhzads love poems. As a native speaker of Farsi, I explain the real intention of these images to see if translated versions could convey a similar meaning. I also consider the challenges when translating poetry from Farsi to English and the effects of reading Iranian poetry that has been mediated by translation. An important approach to Farrokhzads and Livesays works is to analyze their poems in terms of feminist ideologies. There is a great difference between Iranian and Canadian feminist ideologies. Feminist thought in Iran is based on Islamic ideologies. The question is if Islamic feminism can defend womens rights against men or not. Farrokhzad was one of the anti-Islamic feminists who opposed Islamic rule in her poems. Canadian feminist ideologies, however, are divided into liberal, Marxist, radical, and French schools, and are most often based on secular ideologies. This thesis examines the critical reception of poetry by both poets in the context of different schools of feminist thought in Canada and Iran. Livesay traveled to Zambia later in life and one of the love poems she wrote after that called “The Taming” comments ironically on womens submission to a dominant male lover. The comparison of poems by two authors from different worlds shows how their love poems, their feminist voice, and their themes of freedom, independence, and disappointment in love are rooted in the cultural context of their lives. Keywords: love poetry, Dorothy Livesay, Forugh Farrokhzad, feminism, women, gender, Canada, Iran, translation

The etiology of iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS) is not fully understood, however, dysfunction at the hip and decreased resistance to fatigue have been suggested to contribute to development of the syndrome. The objective of this study was to investigate differences in hip abductor strength and fatigue resistance, hip muscle activation timing and hip joint kinematic, kinetic and joint coupling patterns in female runners with and without ITBS. In addition, this study examined the effects of a run to exertion on these variables. Twelve female runners with ITBS and 20 healthy female runners participated in this study. Gluteus medius strength and electromyographic (EMG) data were collected during isometric testing. In addition, EMG data from the gluteus medius and tensor fascia latae muscles as well as 3-dimensional kinematic, kinetic and joint coupling data were collected during overground running. All data were collected prior-to and following a run to exertion. Prior to the run to exertion, with runners in a “fresh” state, there were no differences in hip abductor strength, kinematic joint coupling and terminal swing phase muscle activation timing between runners with ITBS and healthy runners. In a “fresh” state, ITBS runners demonstrated less resistance to fatigue at their gluteus medius muscle than did the healthy runners. As a result of exertion, runners with ITBS demonstrated decreased peak hip adduction angles during the stance phase of running gait. There were no group-by-exertion interactions for peak hip internal rotation angles, hip abductor and external rotator moments, kinematic joint coupling or hip abductor strength. There was a main effect of exertion for hip abductor moments, hip external rotator moments and hip abductor strength whereby both healthy and injured runners demonstrated 3.8, 4.2 and 7.3% decreases respectively following the run to exertion. In addition, there was a main effect of exertion on hip frontal/knee transverse plane kinematic joint coupling during the first half of loading where runners demonstrated a 7.3% increase in joint coupling values following the run to exertion. Our data did not detect group-by-exertion interactions or main effects of group or exertion with respect to terminal swing muscle activation timing. There was a significant group-by-exertion interaction when examining fatigue resistance. In a fresh-state, runners with ITBS demonstrated less resistance to fatigue than their healthy counterparts. Following the run to exertion, these differences did not exist. The results of this study suggest that currently symptomatic runners with ITBS demonstrate a potentially compensatory pattern of decreased stance phase hip adduction as compared with healthy runners. Hip internal rotation, abductor moments, external rotator moments or kinematic joint coupling do not appear to discriminate between the two groups. The results of this study also suggest that hip abductor strength may not be as large of a factor in the development of ITBS as previously thought. Instead, this muscle’s endurance, or its ability to resist fatigue may play a larger role.

When do social expectation and ruling ideology become a part of a society’s “tradition”? When does a society have the freedom to look back on this tradition with a sense of irony? Using Antonio Gramsci’s construction of “interregnum,” a period where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” this project addresses these questions through an examination of women’s literature. In China’s twentieth century, “woman” was used as a marker of the nation’s wellness as well as an embodiment of social failures, by groups in power and those seeking it. But what of the women themselves? This dissertation examines how women writing under these changing icons benefitted from representation even as they were restricted by criterion for inclusion under these highly politicized articulations of their subjectivity. By juxtaposing women’s narratives of interregnum from four periods: the May Fourth movement, the early years of socialism, the Cultural Revolution’s aftermath, and Beijing hosting the 1995 UN World Conference on Women, I consider the significances and fragmentations of “woman” in each period. This consideration leads to an alternative history of the implications of gender, as well as a focused consideration of the subjective experience of social change.