Exit Routes from Welfare: Examining Barriers to Employment, Demographic and Human Capital Factors

This paper investigates how barriers to employment, human capital, and demographic characteristics affect women’s exit routes off welfare. Specifically, I address two questions. First, what are the avenues through which women leave welfare? Second, are mental and physical health problems, domestic violence, and lack of access to transportation, characteristics that have been ignored in other studies of welfare dynamics, associated with different welfare exit routes? Using multinomial logistic regression and data from the Women’s Employment Survey, this project examines the specific exit route chosen in detail and goes beyond general dynamics associated with welfare exit in order to capture the full heterogeneity of outcomes now witnessed in the post-Welfare Reform world. Results indicate that women with physical limitations are less likely to leave welfare either through obtaining a new job or through a non-work exit. Finally, women with transportation problems or with post-traumatic stress disorder are less likely to leave welfare through combining work and welfare

Where Ethics and Drama Meet: Shakespeare\u27s Othello

Othello presents unique challenges to modern literary critics because of its ethically problematic attitudes. I explore the ethical paradox Othello presents to audiences by analyzing what attitudes the play attempts to inspire in readers and theatergoers. On one hand, sympathy for Desdemona relies on unethical assumptions about black masculinity; on the other, sympathy for Othello endorses misogyny. This paradox leads to a broader question: How do we appraise a work\u27s aesthetic value in the light of serious ethical shortcomings? A philosophical framework helps to answer this question as it relates specifically to Othello

Submerged Surrealism: Science in the Service of Subversion

The obsessive representation of and violence against the eye is inescapable in Surrealist art, with works like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien andalou and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye being the most renowned for their depictions of acts of ocular defilement. Over the years scholars have questioned these artists’ intentions and have even gone so far as to position them as anti-ocular as a reaction to the trauma of the Great War. I argue that the compromising of the eye’s physical integrity is not necessarily an outright rejection of vision. It symbolically questions the hierarchy of the senses. The use of marine animals in Surrealist works by Eileen Agar, Jean Painlevé, Robert Desnos and Man Ray represents beings which rely on other modes of sensing, navigating their worlds without the primacy of vision. These artists were not anti-ocular, but rather they were using depictions of the marine to question the regimes of ocularcentrism, gender roles and anthropocentrism. Furthermore, they were doing this in a way that displayed their engagement in empirical, materialist science, which has been overlooked in favour of discussing Surrealism’s interest in the metaphysical.Considering the early twentieth century scientific discoveries widely discussed in popular science journals and read by Surrealist artists, I argue that they were using these creatures to question the status quo. Surrealism’s depictions of marine life reflect an interest in exploring alternative sensory regimes – rejecting the primacy of vision above other senses – calling into question the position of the human-animal relation by blurring these boundaries and by challenging the traditional places of men and women at this time. These representations express a desire to adapt to a society that has been turned upside down by war to merge with the capacities of these creatures, expanding perception and exploring the faculties of sensing typically denied to the human

The Works Progress Administration in Daviess County, Kentucky, 1935-1943

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) aided 8.5 million people across the United States during its existence WPA projects in Daviess County, Kentucky, admirably served as an example of the way national laws and regulations filtered down and worked in a single county. The federal program touched the lives of a variety of Daviess Countians in a positive manner. Blue collar workers, white collar workers, women, slacks, and even people involved with the arts received jobs through this program. Local WPA projects illustrate the various jobs obtained by needy men and women from the relief rolls. The WPA aided these local citizens physically and socially by giving them jobs, which in turn put food on their table and restored their pride. This federal program, which received much criticism at times, functioned efficiently and effectively in Daviess County

“Photos from Hollandia N.G. 1944”: World War II Combat Nurse Beulah Johns’s ‘Everyday’ Scrapbook Testimony of War and Recovery

“Well, Diary, Restricted no more . . . . Hope you pass the censor to get to Alma for confidential peeping.” ~ Beulah Johns, last lines of her 1942-43 diary In July 1942, 36-year-old nurse Beulah Johns left her rural Western Pennsylvania hospital to join the ranks of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, which had enlisted only 1000 nurses prior to 1941 and exploded to 59,000 nurses—almost entirely women crossing national and workplace boundaries—during the war. While in training, Johns wrote a detailed diary of her service, and upon being sent to what she called the “Asiatic Blue Ribbon Campaign” at Hollandia, New Guinea, in 1944, she compiled a rich scrapbook of 85 photographs, 7 sketches, and numerous notes and captions—devising an alternative mixed visual and verbal life-writing document to tell her own story of trauma, healing, testimony, travel, and adventure. Represented among the images that make up this haunting scrapbook are a mix of soldiers suffering acute combat injuries, amputations, and chronic tropical fever conditions. The outdoor medical tent compound is visibly rustic, and the scrapbook is organized largely by ward numbers, indicating a nurse’s working perspective in creating the book. Mixed throughout are images of Johns and her fellow nurses caring for monkeys and stray cats, plus several joyful photos of nurses playing with local children who visited the compound. Johns’s notations and careful photographic selections tell volumes about nurses’ and patients’ experiences of war in the Pacific theater, and they simultaneously bear witness to the steely perspective that she shared with 59,000 other combat nurses, lending significant insight into the working lives of a new class of enlisted women that was created through the experience of World War II. My archival discovery of this unknown diary occurred as part of a small grant I received to study and develop an online archive repository for women’s “everyday” diary drawn from little-studied archives, and in this essay, I read this never before studied volume of alternative life-writing through a feminist New Historicist lens in order to illustrate the crossing of intersecting borders of nation, gender, genre, work-life, testimony, and archival process