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“The history of every life … is important”: Lydia Olsson, Growing up Swedish American, and Midwestern Girlhood at the Turn of the Century
Get PDFOur knowledge of American girls at the turn of the twentieth century is incomplete. Scholarship on Victorian American girlhood most frequently draws evidence from the papers of privileged young white women from native-born Northeastern families. But their lives only tell part of the story. We must expand our scope to truly understand the options and opportunities for girls as they came of age in this period. This thesis explores the life of Lydia Olsson, a Swedish- American girl born to immigrant parents and living in a Midwestern city. She was one of a growing number of young women participating in a quiet revolution to fundamentally alter American women’s rights and opportunities at the turn of the century. Olsson and many of the girls in her network attended college, worked for wages, and delayed marriage or chose to remain single, forging different paths than their mothers and grandmothers before them.
Here, I look at identity formation in Olsson’s Swedish Lutheran world; Swedish and American norms and ideals of womanhood; friendship and community; and the shift towards companionate marriage with a focus on re-examining the stereotype of the spinster.
Lydia Olsson’s story serves as a crucial window onto a wider community of middle-class women living in Midwestern towns and cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that Olsson and girls like her merit our attention, and that women’s historians must consider lives like theirs to fully understand young womanhood at the turn of the century
Valuing Children’s Natural Thinking in the Classroom
Get PDFThis thesis discusses the importance of valuing children’s natural thinking in the classroom. Our education places a significant emphasis on literacy and math and recognizes human capacity mostly just through performance on standardized assessments in these two fields of study. But human capacity is much more than just math and literacy. Moreover, even math and literacy are taught in a very process-oriented, rote fact-based curriculum that does not allow children to learn through their own natural way of thinking. This contrived way of thinking and limited support for creative avenues leads to a very narrow definition of success, a fixed mindset and visibility only for the privileged. In this paper, I argue for knowing children, valuing their imagination, trusting their purposes for learning and making meaning and inculcating habits of mind through every aspect of study in the classroom. I provide examples of how our curriculum is riddled with contrived thinking and counter examples of how we can allow children to enter the same concepts through their natural thinking. I also provide examples of knowing children’s interests and provisioning a classroom that values imagination and creativity. If we trust the capacity of children to think and learn, our children will enter adulthood as confident, contributing, capable, curious, creative, compassionate, critical, community-minded citizens; citizens that are empathetic and happy, who are unafraid to deal with uncertainties and ready to persevere through hardships and dilemmas
Abortion And Dance/Movement Therapy: A Mind-Body Approach To Healing
Get PDFAbortion is one of the most common procedures in the United States with roughly a quarter of the female population receiving the procedure before the age of 45. Abortion is often an emotionally significant event that changes the course of someone’s life. For some of those women, negative physical and psychological symptoms can emerge post abortion. Grief, depression, trauma-based disorders, and concealable stigmas may accompany the range of physical changes. Communication is 55% nonverbal, therefore using a body-based modality for expression and healing is crucial. Dance/movement therapy is a body based modality that’s core principle uses the body as a form of communication. Addressing the physical and psychological symptoms therapeutically through bodily-felt experiences facilitates healing by integrating the mind-body connection. Fueled from the feminist movement which included agency over women’s reproductive rights and their bodies, dance/movement therapy was recognized as a profession in the 1960s. Using various techniques and interventions, dance/movement therapy honors the entire woman, where they are in their mental health journey, respecting their choice of reproductive health, and acknowledging the agency they have over their bodies and minds
Honey, I Am History: The Life and Legacy of Onnie Lee Logan, Alabama Midwife
Get PDFThis thesis explores the life of Onnie Lee Logan, an Alabama midwife, through the lenses of race, gender, and religion. I examine Motherwit, Logan’s autobiography as told to author Katherine Clark, and use secondary sources to analyze Mrs. Logan’s activism as evidenced in her text. In addition to exploring Mrs. Logan’s activism, I also examine the legacy she left behind in Mobile County, Alabama following the revocation of her midwifery license by the state of Alabama in the 1980s. Through a close read of Motherwit, readers can gain insight into Logan’s resistance to white supremacy and the coercive intimacy she encountered throughout her life; her understanding of gender and her progressive traditionalist views; and the role of religion and how it shaped her worldview. I also examine infant and maternal mortality rates in Mobile County, and how these rates can be seen as connected to the loss of midwives like Logan. By interviewing women in Alabama who had illegal homebirths, as well as Katherine Clark, the author who assisted Logan in writing her autobiography, a vision of the current state of birth in Alabama unfolds alongside a deeper understanding of Logan’s life and experiences
Mental Health Work With Youth Leaving Foster Care: Strengthening Resilience
Get PDFLeaving the foster care system is a major transitional experience for youth in the child welfare system. This thesis will explore the process of transitioning out of foster care through the policies and resources that affect this population and several clinical models that aim to encourage resilience in youth leaving care. The first section will explore the policies in place to support youth transitioning out of the foster care system and then examine several of the resources specifically available to youth leaving care in New York City. The second section will explore how clinicians might help to develop resilience in therapy through various theoretical perspectives. The third section will reflect on ongoing work with clients and the process of identifying strengths and cultivating resilience in the therapeutic setting. The goal of this thesis is to highlight the roles that both caseworkers and clinicians play in assisting youth to successfully leave care. This paper will provide resources for caseworkers in New York City and clinicians working with this population
Confessional Melancholy: W.G. Sebald’s Aesthetic Solution to the Inadequacy of Representation
Get PDFIn the wake of W.G. Sebald’s death in 2001, scholarship on his unique, genre-bending literary texts has flourished. Though much of this scholarship has paid due attention to the theme of the inadequacy of representation, little has been written that focuses on Sebald’s persistent expressions of melancholy in relation to this theme. In this paper, I argue that Sebald’s response to the inadequacy of representation is “confessional melancholy”: he expresses anguish at that which has been lost by admitting that his own literary representation is inadequate in portraying its subjects. Using a theoretical framework borrowed from Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School philosophers, I show that Sebald ties the inevitable inadequacy of representation to the history of material destruction; in this sense, his expressions of confessional melancholy are ethically motivated. I then explore the effect of this theme on the nature of identity in Sebald’s texts. Finally, I analyze the incorporation of photography in Sebald’s texts and the author’s use of narrative collages to argue that Sebald primarily expresses confessional melancholy through his aesthetic form, as opposed to the content of his literature.https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/undergrad_selectedworks/1003/thumbnail.jp