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In the two papers presented in this thesis, I examine mealing facility architecture both within and beyond Chaco Canyon. Both ethnographic and archaeological evidence tie the secular and sacred action of grinding corn to the gendered labor of women in modern and Ancestral Pueblo societies. In both chapters I utilize the defining elements of context, scale, association, and access to measure the ways in which corn grinding facilities in various Chacoan sites are similar and dissimilar to one another. In chapter 2, I examine the dichotomy between great and small houses located within Chaco Canyon regarding mealing facilities. Utilizing legacy data available via the Chaco Research Archive, I look at the ways in which female power, prestige, and authority is reflected in mealing facility architecture at these sites. I also present data regarding groundstone tools, I include a discussion of funerary contexts, and I review previous studies that present data regarding corn pollen frequencies. Based on this data I argue I conclude that mealing rooms at neither great nor small houses represent one consistent type. The second paper in this thesis examines changes to mealing facility architecture in the Chacoan and post-Chacoan landscape. Utilizing legacy data and introducing new 360 degree photography I examine mealing rooms at Pueblo Bonito, Salmon Pueblo, and Aztec West to identify differences in the prehistoric contexts between each site and modern alterations to the individual spaces. In the cases presented I conclude that changes to mealing facility architecture are significant and the rate of change at these sites necessitates a more robust process by which they are monitored. In addition to my analysis of modern changes I compare mealing facility architecture as it was documented at the point of excavations. Differences in context, scale, association, and access at these sites lead me to conclude that a certain degree of fracturing occurred between mealing practices at Pueblo Bonito and those at Salmon Pueblo and Aztec West. Advisor: Carrie C. Heitman

The strong female character is a term tossed around writing groups, book clubs, and TikTok as something to both strive to see and critique in literature. This research paper transformed throughout the actual research as it went from a study on cozy fantasy emergence and its effects to strong female characters and how to write them well, to its current iteration along similar lines of writing strong female characters. Qualitative and quantitative data was gathered through the use of a survey that I wrote and put to the field, research done primarily through JSTOR, and interviews conducted with experts in the field of literature. The survey asked people about their knowledge of main character girl tropes and who they viewed as strong female characters. The interviews were conducted with leaders in cozy fantasy currently, Travis Baldree and Rebecca Thorne. The interviews were conducted with leaders in the cozy fantasy genre, Travis Baldree and Rebecca Thorne, popular TikToker Meagan Hood, and a local librarian, Erin Hughes. All helped clarify views on what the landscape of fantasy is looking like for female main characters. The basis for this research was that strong female characters are an archetype that is still overwhelmingly popular in fiction that traditionally does not hold nuance or lasting nature.

This paper sought to answer, “What is it like to be a female resident assistant (RA) in a society that has historically privileged men?” I structured this as a phenomenology within the transformative paradigm. I interviewed four participants twice with a prompt between interviews and one participant once. These participants were at least 19 years old and had held been an RA for at least one school year during the last five years. I worked in the realm of Joan Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations. I specifically had findings within the constructions she wrote about such as the division of labor, the division of allowed behaviors, and organizational logic. This theory was the backbone for my interviews and the way in which I studied the data. From these interviews, I found several essences. These include women being expected to connect with their residents through stronger relationships than males, the stereotype of women enjoying arts and crafts more than men inundating housing departments, men having more relaxed rules than women, women taking the role as a mothering figure where men are seen as a friendly authority, and women being expected to host stronger events than men. These findings led to my conclusion that several areas within housing departments and campuses could be changed. For example, resident directors (RDs) should do internal check-ups to ensure they have equitable expectations for their male and female RAs. It is also my recommendation that the full staff of RAs is adequately trained in mental health crises to ensure each staff member feels comfortable engaging in mental health incidents. I also encourage RAs to allow themselves to stand up for themselves to be treated equitably. This connects to the literature because research has shown the RA role is increasingly difficult and men and women have different experiences. Housing departments can find areas to check in with their staff to ensure they are treating their RAs with respect and equitable expectations. Adviser: Stephanie Bondi

Instagram is one of the newest forms of social media that impacts its audience on a visual level, since the content is centered on photos and videos. Their newest feature, Instagram stories, is temporary videos and/or photos strung together to form a gallery, which has been compared to Snapchat’s version of live stories. Instagram stories offer a unique opportunity for businesses to take advantage of the temporary, 24-hour platform that shows specific frame-by-frame analytics that help create efficient and compelling content to repost permanently that helps organic search engine optimization. As a cost-effective means of advertising, early adopter large and small brands alike have responded and are setting the tone in terms of how Instagram stories are used to attract their audiences. This paper studied 222 Instagram story posts made by 81 different female online business and brand accounts over a one-week time period in order to observe the common themes of posts as well as compare the structure of their posts to the Brand–Consumer Storytelling Theory. The observed results presented that there were 15 common themes; in addition, the general flow of events were presented as an episodic structure, characterized by several indices that can help a story be more relatable to the viewers when it comes to using their own past experiences to relate to the story. Adviser: Sriyani Tidball

There is a great disparity in the amount of males diagnosed with ADHD compared to females. This paper reviews a large collection of literature ranging from the history of the disorder, neurological studies, potential genetic differences between genders, as well as potential gender biases. These topics are all examined with the purpose of trying to determine which effect, if any, they may have had in creating the criteria necessary for a diagnosis and how that relates to each gender. The study examined each individual symptom necessary for an ADHD diagnosis and asked teachers to complete a survey designed to attempt to associate that symptom with a specific gender. Teachers were specifically chosen due to their involvement in the diagnosis of school aged children as they are often required to fill out ADHD rating scales. Data was analyzed in SPSS 23 using a Repeated Measures One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The study revealed that there was a significant (p

Mentoring programs are important for youth for many reasons. A mentoring relationship often leads to tangible, positive outcomes for the adolescent such as increased performance in school, better psychological and emotional health, improved behavior, and increased confidence about the future (Herrera, Grossman, Kauh, Feldman, McMaken, and Jucovy, 2007; Rhodes, 2005). This paper discusses youth mentoring on several different levels, including gender differences in mentoring, mentoring and prevention of juvenile delinquency, and faith-based mentoring, among other youth mentoring topics. Its primary purpose is to analyze youth mentees who make the transition to a mentor role. This qualitative study is comprised of interviews in which twelve female Young Life mentors who had been mentees were asked about their experiences transitioning from mentee to mentor. The study identified several major findings and themes: (1) initiation into Young Life; (2) the role of gender in mentoring relationships; (3) juvenile delinquency and mentoring; (4) junior leadership; (5) what it takes to be a mentor; and (6) the phenomenon of mentoring while being mentored. Program implications are also discussed.

Helen Kotas was an accomplished musician and teacher who helped open the door for women in major US orchestras. In 1941 the Chicago Symphony hired its first female brass musician, principal hornist Helen Kotas. With that daring move, she became a pioneer for her gender in the major orchestras of North America. Despite her many contributions to the musical community, Kotas's life has not been researched and documented. This paper looks at Helen Kotas's career as well as a glimpse at her life and personality. In addition to documenting her life, this dissertation attempts to show at least a portion of Kotas's philosophy of teaching and horn playing. She was an accomplished horn soloist and studied the literature extensively. Kotas performed in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, the Woman's Symphony Orchestra, and Leopold Stokowski's All-American Youth Orchestra. Kotas was hired by Fritz Reiner as third horn of the Pittsburgh Symphony. When Frederick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, heard that Helen Kotas was going to Pittsburgh, he insisted that she audition for the CSO. Kotas auditioned on the Concerto for Horn by Richard Strauss and the concertmaster said, "Hire her!" She performed as principal horn with the orchestra until Artur Rodzinski was hired as conductor in 1948 and replaced Kotas with Philip Farkas. Following her time with the CSO, Kotas was principal horn of the Chicago Lyric Opera and taught at the Sherwood and American Conservatories. She was an active soloist and premiered works by Arne Oldberg and Hugo Kauder.

This dissertation is a collection of three empirical essays on Albania and Iran. In December of 1990, the communist system in Albania came to an abrupt end. The collapse of communism led to a number of macroeconomic reforms that, among other things, brought dramatic changes in the Albanian labor market. This study uses data from the first nationally representative household survey to examine one outcome of a decade-long transition in Albania, the earnings gap between men and women. The average gender earnings gap is calculated at 31 percent, but it is found to be as high as 50 percent in the upper parts of the distribution. The traditional Oaxaca-Blinder method and a recent method that combines quantile regression with the bootstrap are applied to decompose the gender gap into a portion attributable to differences in characteristics and a portion explained by returns to characteristics. Results show that differences in human capital characteristics do not explain any of the existing gap. Furthermore, a large proportion of the gap can be attributed to segregation in occupations and industries. Simulations of female counterfactual wages show that the gender gap is significantly reduced for the entire distribution, and disappears in the higher quantiles of the distribution when occupation and industry are controlled for. The next two essays analyze welfare and female labor force participation in post-Revolution Iran. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 and a number of subsequent macro shocks dealt a huge blow to Iran's economy. In this paper we ask the question of how families and individuals have fared through these tumultuous times. Conventional measures of change in welfare, such as average consumption or GDP per capita, do not accurately reflect the experience of individual cohorts. We utilize annual surveys of expenditures and income conducted between 1984 and 2004 and decompose changes in average earnings and expenditures into cohort, age, and period effects. The estimated period effects accurately reflect the fluctuations in the economy noticeable in the macro data, and the life cycle earnings and expenditures profiles show a typical inverted U-shape. The cohort effects, which compare the position of life cycle profiles of different cohorts, and are of most interest to us, show a rising trend for cohorts born before the 1950s (about 30 years or older at the time of the Revolution). They also indicate that younger cohorts, those born after 1965 and therefore entered adult life after the Revolution, seem to have lost out. We discuss possible reasons for the asymmetrical lifetime experience of the two sets of cohorts. We believe that the disruptions caused by the Revolution itself and the subsequent eight year war with Iraq (1980-88) may have caused lifetime losses for the cohorts who came of age in the early 1980s. The purpose of the third essay is to understand changes in the labor force participation rate of women in Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Studies consistently show that like other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Iran has experienced only a modest improvement in female labor force participation rates, despite having gone through the fertility transition and significant improvements in education of women. Utilizing 21 consecutive household surveys from 1984-2004, we decompose changes in the participation rate into age, cohort, and period effects. We find some evidence that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 did indeed have a negative impact on the cohorts that were in their teens or early 20s at that time. However, viewed from a cohort perspective, the evidence shows that women born after 1965 have continuously increased their participation. This is in contrast to the evidence that has been observed by others who have compared cross-section averages over time.

This research paper addressed the following question: Do select case studies conform to Dr. Freda Adler's theory regarding socio-economic influences on female criminal behavior or dispute her theory? My research involved three female criminals: Karla Faye Tucker, Andrea Yates, and Susan Smith. I addressed Adler's theory in detail, other theories, the makeup of the female criminal and various female crimes. This study provided evidence that all three case studies conform to Adler's theory. nIn accordance with Adler's theory, each of these three females committed crimes of accessibility. None of the three individuals sought to commit a premeditated act or to murder unknown victims. They were motivated by emotions arising at a point in time when access/opportunity presented itself.

The American Missionary Association (AMA) proved to be the largest and most enduring of the benevolent societies which sponsored teachers in the South. Local affiliates of the society were organized throughout the East and Midwest to raise funds, gather donations, and enlist teachers. Many of those who went South as teachers were recruited from colleges, theological seminaries, female seminaries, and normal schools in these areas. Not surprisingly, a significant group of individuals who were sent South by the AMA was recruited from Oberlin College. Most of those who came from Oberlin College, as was true of the missionary teachers on the whole, were women.This paper explores this particular group of evangelical Oberlin women who became teachers and missionaries to the freed-people. It looks at how their experience in the Southern work brought together both the larger historical cycle of post-Civil War reform and their own life cycle patterns as evangelical women. These two cycles would be important in shaping the motivations of the women, their perceptions of the work, and their conceptions of reform.

A female study utilizing one hundred and ten subjects from a midwestern university focused on the measurement of relationships between gender role, as defined by instrumental (masculine) and expressive (feminine) trait measures of the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, and body attitudes, as defined primarily by the Evaluative, Potency, and Activity measures of the Body Attitude Scale. Additional measures labelled Body and Self, plus some demographic and high school body dimension estimates were added to the pool of information used to try to predict associated variance in the gender outcomes. Subjects were administered a paper and pencil test, that was completed anonymously in their regular college classrooms. Data from these protocols were analyzed by means of correlations, analysis of variance, and stepwise forward regression. The study was limited by use of a nonrandomized sample and a narrowly defined group of subjects. These included only Caucasian females between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six who fell within normal limits on weight. Test results indicated that positive evaluative body feelings and a high sense of body activity are associated with the acquisition of instrumental attributes. In addition, a thin body image in adolescence plus negative Self potency scores are related to masculinity. Positive feminine attributes are associated with positive evaluative body feelings, a high Body activity measure. Discrepancies occurred between Body and Self measures indicating different meaning within the Masculine and Feminine context. The pattern of these research data suggests that body attitude is related to gender role choices and represents a fruitful avenue of study. The explained variance on both masculinity (40%) and femininity (30%) were high and appear worthy of future investigation.