Artful Women

Two women in the Republic of Venice, Veronica Franco (1546-1591) and Isabella Andreini (1562-1604), utilized letter writing, fashion, and portraiture to earn personal and social respect while pursuing their intellectual aspirations. As a courtesan and an actress respectively, Franco and Andreini transgressed traditional definitions of virtuous femininity, centering on “cultivating chastity, silence, obedience” (Ross 2009, 76). Through letter writing and engagement with their visual representation for contemporaries and for posterity, they bolstered their reputation for knowledge and virtue. They participated in eternalizing their fame and reshaped the boundaries of women’s roles in Late Renaissance society in ways still relevant today.

This thesis examines musicians’ experiences with jazz music through a psychological lens with particular attention to differences in female and male experiences. The project utilizes data from a self-designed survey of adult musicians as well as an examination of existing literature to determine how musicians’ experiences and perceptions influence their motivation to participate in jazz and how these experiences, perceptions, and motivations differ across gender. In doing so, the project identifies factors that contribute to disproportionately gendered attrition rates and gender disparity in jazz.

By exploring the semantic and syntactic elements of nine works of contemporary women-authored lesbian literature, this project seeks to define fictionalized lesbian life-writing as a distinct and important literary genre. I have previously established a clear connection between male-authored lesbian literature and historical social pressures that seek to diminish the visibility of lesbianism, and with this essay I will examine the rebellion of lesbian self-actualization through novels which blend (auto)biographical realism and aspects of fantasy, arguing that the construction of character and story in these works is a reflection of the essential imagination in a construction of lesbian identity.

Diaries have been used for centuries by women as a place to engage in writing their daily activities and emotions. This genre differs from other circulated genres as the authors are writing without a large identified audience or with publication in mind. This key difference changes how diary authors engage with the genre. Writing and rhetoric scholarship often does not acknowledge diary writing, and this lack of acknowledgement ignores a large group of authors, historically women, who engage with authorship in a unique way. 

Through examining the diary as a genre, I redefined diary writing as a valid form of authorship for women, defining functions of authorship based on the author-function and genre function frameworks, and analyzing four diaries that span from 1851-2022. I found that diary writing has stayed consistent and operates with similar structures and topics even though the genre itself isn’t formally taught and has spanned centuries.