Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975(2016) Moura, Shawn; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.Item Women as Producers and Consumers in 1950s America: An Analysis of Spatial Hysteresis(2006-02-20) Thorn, Elizabeth Kathleen; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bourdieu employs the concept of hysteresis to describe a temporal lag or mismatch between habitus and field. I expand on this concept to develop a theory of spatial hysteresis, in which multiple fields are included in the analysis. Spatial hysteresis may occur when one field undergoes change at a faster rate than another field, producing changes in capital holdings and habitus that affect the second field. Twelve in-depth interviews provide limited evidence of spatial hysteresis in women's positions in consumer society and the labor force in the postwar United States. Rapid changes in consumer society may have increased women's capital holdings and altered their habitus, paving the way for the changes that subsequently occurred in the labor force.Item Easton: A 21st Century (R)evolution in Consumption, Community, Urbanism, and Space(2005-04-28) Ryan, John Michael; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research was designed, planned, and implemented with three overarching and interrelated objectives in mind - to apply existing theoretical knowledge on consumption, community, urbanism, and space to the specific case study of Easton Town Center; to enhance, contribute, and extend the research and literature surrounding these four areas; and to flesh out the paradigm of Easton into a more coherent, comprehensive theory with potential applications for future social scientific inquiry.