Essay Contest Winners 2007

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Essay Contest Winners

Lindsay Friedman
Graduated in May 2007 with a BA in History
My thesis, “Undressed, Redressed, Addressed: Women and Their Clothing in Colonial India, 1837-1901,” investigated British and Indian women’s histories and experiences of colonial India through an analysis of their interactions and relationships with dress and each other. Dress is a reflective and expressive feature of society, which I applied as a boundary-crossing framework to study various and diverse communities of women's thoughts, attitudes, and actions. My research revealed that in addition to the obvious racial relations that dominated the colonial landscape, women’s lives were significantly influenced by internal class divisions, their social and occupational roles in colonial society, the tensions between shifting and modernizing public and private domains, and regional and religious variations. Thus, investigating the operation of dress in society enabled a broader historical understanding of how British and Indian women experienced the Empire.

Katie Cristol
Graduated in May 2007 with a BA in Political and Social Thought
Current research suggests that voters in the South retain more traditional attitudes about the role of women and therefore elect fewer women to public office than in other regions of the country. Yet there are examples of Southern women holding the highest political positions. To what might we ascribe their success?

Through personal interviews with journalists, campaign staff, constituents, and academics conducted in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana, I attempt to establish a “360 degree” view of the election of Elizabeth Dole, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu to the U.S. Senate. These perspectives are complemented by a review of newspaper coverage beginning in January of the election year and continuing through election day.

A common theme in the findings is the aversion of Southern men to be seen as denigrating, or even criticizing, a Southern woman. The implication of this phenomenon is that Southern women are able to escape both negative attacks and the deleterious public image associated with women candidates who go negative themselves. Within this analysis, the traditional gender attitudes of the South may be viewed as a boon to Southern women candidates, rather than a barrier.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Honorable Mention

Danya Atiyeh 
Majoring in English Language and Literature
In this essay, I explore the gendered aspects of musical performance based on an analysis of the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra’s Youth Concert last October. I discuss the interplay between CUSO’s director and conductor, Kate Tamarkin, and the program's guest narrator, NBC 29’s local weatherman, Norm Sprouse, establishing the ways that the two speakers enacted gendered performances on several different levels of their presentation. By examining gendered patterns of dialogue and discourse, I look at the way Sprouse maintained discursive control over the performance, despite the fact that Tamarkin appeared to be in control of the orchestra and the performance space.

As I describe in the essay, “Through […] various levels of performativity, Sprouse and Tamarkin revealed the operation of traditional gender dynamics in what initially seemed to be a non-gendered musical performance.” Though this essay provided a single example of a much more complex issue, I hoped to point out, from an anthropological perspective, some of the many ways in which members of our society — even, perhaps, some of the most enlightened ones — enact traditional gender roles at an unconscious level.

Zora Neale Hurston Essay Contest Winner

Adam Jortner 
4th year Ph.D. candidate in the Corcoran Dept. of History
He is spending the 2007-08 academic year as the Carpenter Fellow in American Religious History at the University of Pennsylvania.
My essay on “Republican Shakerhood: Ann Lee, Morality, and Religious Freedom in the American Northeast, 1780-1819” investigates the eighteenth-century claim that Ann Lee — an illiterate woman living near Albany, New York — was the second coming of Jesus Christ. An examination of the writings of Lee’s followers (the Shakers) and her opponents reveals a surprising indifference to Lee’s radical claims about the gender of the godhead.  In fact, anti-Shaker writings worried more about Lee’s control over her followers than her ideas of a female messiah. When Shakers were arrested for political concerns (i.e., their refusal to perform military service), they crafted a defense based on the very femininity of their god, painting themselves as a domestic institution that valued but did not threaten the republican order. This examination of the Shakers therefore suggests that early American religion was more theologically tolerant than politically tolerant. This paper will serve as a chapter in my upcoming dissertation on the politics of miraculous claims in the early United States.