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MSJ Thesis Information
Thesis General Information
Master's projects/theses in the J-School must conform to the University's Restricted Research Policy, Faculty Senate Rules and Regulations Article IX., Section III.10: Research that cannot be published or otherwise publicly disseminated because of restrictions shall not be presented to the University in fulfillment of academic requirements. In order to implement this standard, when students propose to work on restricted research for any purpose, including financial support, the students involved, the faculty member concerned and the Office of The Vice Provost for Research shall agree in writing on the following condition: that any theses, dissertations, or other work submitted to fulfill course or university requirements shall be unrestricted or shall not be submitted to the committee for formal defense until they are unrestricted, that is, until their procedures, techniques, tools, data, and results are open to inspection by any member of the Graduate Faculty. It shall be the responsibility of the faculty member concerned to ensure that this written agreement is secured before any graduate student begins work on restricted research; no student may be paid for their work until this agreement has been obtained and filed with the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.
Students begin the master's research component in JMC 899 Thesis/Project. Once approved by the advisor, a student may begin working on their project/thesis prior to enrolling in JMC 899.
Students may receive the grade of P (progress) in JMC 899 to indicate work is progressing but not complete. If the student does not complete during that term, they continue to work on it "on their own time." The student needs to be enrolled in 1 hour of JMC 815 Investigation and Conference (at least) the term of graduation.
Master's theses are filed electronically through UMI. Theses that exceed the file limit and/or contain multimedia components may require mailing (separately) a CD for the multimedia component. Details can be found online and assistance is available in the J-School Graduate office. Master's projects are filed electronically through KU ScholarWorks.
Guidelines and forms for preparation of projects/theses are posted on the school's website and are available through the graduate advisor.
Style Guide and Graduation Instructions
(Developed by KU Graduate School, Summer 2005; modified by J-School, Fall 2012)
This revision of guidelines supersedes prior instructions for formatting of theses. Do not use copies on file in departments and libraries as guides for formatting your thesis. Use only these J-School Instructions adapted from the Graduate School Instructions.
General Guidelines
The thesis is to be a coherent scholarly work, not a collage of separate, distinct pieces. Its unity of theme and treatment may still accommodate several subtopics by demonstrating their relationships and interactions. (Formats required by publishers for book and journal items are usually not satisfactory for theses and use of them may result in your thesis being rejected. Before using guidelines of this kind be sure they are acceptable to your department and to the Graduate School.)
Students are required by university policy, ProQuest/UMI policy, and the KU ScholarWorks policy to ascertain that use of all copyright-protected materials either falls within the "Fair use" guidelines of U. S. copyright law or are reproduced with the permission of the owner.
After any changes required by the student's committee have been made in the thesis, the thesis should be submitted electronically in PDF format to ProQuest/UMI on or before the date specified by the J-School. (Note: this date is in advance of the Graduate School deadline.) Supplementary materials may be added in other formats. (See Section 4, Publication Requirement.)
The J-School does not require bound copies. Binding for personal copies may be requested from commercial binders. Find more information on the KU Graduate Studies website.
Formatting and Style Manuals
In consultation with your chair and thesis committee, identify the style manual that you will follow. The J-School has used APA Style primarily, but MLA Style is also acceptable to the School. Check with your chair for any preference.
Text pages, bibliography, footnotes, and appendices should follow the style manual chosen. You may also contact Library Instructional Services or use electronic templates.
Title Page: Follow the Title Page Format (Page 5, below).
Acceptance Page: Follow the Acceptance Page Format (Page 6, below. Use the J-School version shown).
Font Size and Font: The body of the thesis should be 12-point type, Times or Times New Roman. The same font style and size should be used throughout the thesis, for text, captions, labels and references. Tables, captions and footnotes should use the same font style but may be smaller in size; however, font sizes smaller than 10-point type tend to be difficult to read in print and PDF format.
Chapter and section headings may be bolded and no more than 2 points larger than the text size. Non-standard typefaces, such as script, are generally not acceptable except for commonly accepted symbols. Some other fonts may also be used. It is recommended that approval of the font be obtained in advance from your thesis committee chair.
All fonts used in a thesis must be embedded in the PDF files submitted to ProQuest/UMI. This ensures that the document will be readable on all computers. See instructions on converting your thesis to PDF (section 3).
Line Spacing: Normally theses are formatted double-spaced. (Single or space-and-a-half spacing for the body of your thesis is accepted only with the prior approval of your thesis committee AND graduate division.)
Single spacing is to be used in the table of contents, footnotes and endnotes, charts, graphs, tables, quotations, captions, glossary, appendices and bibliography.
Margins: Each page must have a least a 1.5 inch left-handed margin and as least 1.25 inch top, bottom and right margins. Margins may be wider but not narrower than these standards and must be consistent throughout the document. With the exception of copyrighted materials found within appendices, all pages must meet thesis requirements.
Page Numbering: Number the pages 3/4 inch down from the top OR 3/4 inch up from the bottom. Page numbers should be consecutive and must appear on every page, including appendices, tables, figures, photographs, maps, charts, etc. The title page is the ONLY page not numbered. Blank numbered pages that will be included within the thesis must have the following statement on each page: "Page left intentionally blank." Landscape formatted pages will have the page numbers placed on the page in the location consistent with the rest of the thesis.
Illustrations: Charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, figures, musical scores, photographs and other pictorial components must be clear and pertinent to the subject matter of the thesis. Symbols or labels may be used in graphs/charts for identification rather than color. Lettering and symbols, after reduction, should generally be no smaller than 10-point type. Illustrations are placed within the text where they belong rather than appearing in the text with the following type of notation: "Table 1 here" etc. Table titles are generally found above the table and titles of figures are placed below but in any case the placement used should be followed consistently. If landscape formatted illustrations are used, the title of the table or title of the illustration should be positioned on the landscape edge. Page numbering should be placed on the page in the location consistent with the rest of the thesis. Legends or keys for illustrative material may be placed on the facing page if the page with the illustration has space limitations.
Images: Images must be clear and of high quality.
Final Steps to Graduate and Graduation Instructions
Final General Exam and Defense: Each student must pass a final general examination before graduating. This examination is part of the thesis defense. In your final semester, schedule and complete your defense with your committee chair. Notify the Journalism School's Graduate Office of these dates. Deadlines for scheduling the defense can be found on the Web site under Academic Deadlines.
"Application for Graduation" Form: Submit an "Application for Graduation" form on-line by the deadline date set by the University Registrar's Office. To file your "Application for Graduation" form online, access Enroll & Pay>Learner Services>Academics>Apply for Graduation and follow instructions. If you have questions or experience problems, contact the University Registrar's Office at 785- 864-5128 or 913-588-6589 on the KUMC campus. If you filed an application in an earlier semester but did not graduate, you must file a new form with correct, up-to-date information. J-School Recognition Events The School hosts a graduation recognition event in May each year. The recognition ceremony requires academic regalia. Tickets are not required. Information will be posted on the School's web site in late April.
Thesis Checklist
• Study areas of current faculty scholarship.
• Review faculty CVs and résumés.
• Identify an area to explore — one rich enough to sustain you over two or three semesters and one for which you have access to ample resources. FYI: The best access is local access. • Once you have determined a topic, identify one or two J-School faculty who share that interest. Better yet, find faculty already working on projects in the area. Make an appointment to discuss your interest and ask one faculty member to chair your committee. The graduate director and marketing communications program coordinator will assist you in this process. • In consultation with your chair, discuss two possible committee members. Be sure to consider an outside member (only one from outside the J-School Graduate Faculty) because they may contribute needed expertise.
• Working with your chair, develop a timetable for Project/Thesis development. Begin a review of what's been done in your area (even as part of other classes such as your research classes). Find out who the players are in your topic area. Scholars refer to this as the literature review. Don't let the terminology intimidate you. You just need to find out about prior work—what's been done, how good was it, who's done the work, who knows the most, etc.
Next Steps
• Complete the make-up of your committee if you have not already done so. Work with your chair on this. Notify (by email) the Graduate Program Coordinator that you are ready to complete your committee form.
• Based on the timetable discussed with your chair, begin to plan the stages of your project and how you will execute this research. This part is what scholars call the description of methods—how you will get data, who must be interviewed, etc. Keep in mind that you may change and adapt your methods as you move along, so keep notes on what you do and why you did it to write up later. (By the way, it is perfectly acceptable to acknowledge that you chose x, y or z source because it was conveniently located, or because KU had a complete collection.)
• Execute portions of the plan (reporting, surveying, conducting experiments, gathering data, shooting visuals, recording footage) and continue discussions with your chair and committee members about your progress and findings. This is especially important if you run into trouble. Your chair should help you sort out dead ends or detours.
Further Development
During the semester of enrollment in Master's Research:
• Continue the execution of all elements of your plan.
• Write chapter drafts, develop elements of the plan, shoot photos, write articles, etc. Your chair and/or committee members may want to see chapters as written. Sometimes the chair will want to see drafts before circulating them to the committee. You and your chair need to work out what is best for your thesis and for the committee members.
• You may be able to begin writing the introductory materials by this time: the topic, why this topic, the scope of your topic, the literature review and description of methods. The order that these various parts are taken up depend on your subject, on your chair's advice and on how you want to tackle it.
During the semester of enrollment: Early in the semester, schedule the defense or presentation of your Master's Project/Thesis. See deadlines below. To allow for possible changes and slight revisions, all defenses must be completed by these dates. Note: These dates do not change each year. (If the date falls on a weekend, the defense must be completed by the Friday before the weekend.
Post Defense Instructions
Now that you have met with your committee for the defense of your thesis, you will need to prepare to electronically file your document. The first step will be to complete any required changes to your thesis. Once the required changes are completed and you have the approval of your committee chair, you will need to print out the first two pages of the document: the Title Page and the Acceptance Page. If you would like to use the Word form version, contact Jammie Johnson to request access to a shared folder that contains the forms. All you will have to do is tab through these documents to fill in the pre-formed blanks. You will need to print out the Title Page and the Acceptance Page. On the Title Page form, you should secure the signatures of your committee chair, who should also enter the date of approval, and then the signatures of the committee members. Your chair must also sign the Acceptance Page form. You do not need the signatures of all committee members on the Acceptance Page. Electronic signatures are acceptable.


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Based in Seattle, CAPiTA Snowboards was formed by Jason Brown and Blue Montgomery in 2000, with the help of a few other fellow artists including Dustin Krysak and Corey Smith.
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Second, MEGA promises really tight security: 2048-bit RSA encryption no less. Your password acts as the master encryption key, so if it's strong enough it should be impervious even to brute-force attacks. Be wary, however: there are no password-reset options, so if you forget it, any data not shared with others will be lost.
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Once installed, you're able to either sync the entire contents of your MEGA drive or just specific folders within it to your computer. These are housed inside a MEGA folder that's created inside your personal Documents folder – if this doesn't suit, take a trip to the Sync tab of the program's settings to delete the default choice and add your choice of location instead. A bit fiddly, but at least it can be done.
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A capable tool for accessing and syncing your MEGA files on your computer.


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This policy brief is part of the Nereus Scientific & Technical Briefs on Marine Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) series. The briefs are products of a workshop held prior to the 4th International Marine Conservation Congress in St. John's, Newfoundland (July-August 2016). These briefs were prepared for the second meeting of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Prep Com, held from August 26 – September 9, at the UN.
The series includes policy briefs on 1) Area-based management tools, 2) Climate change in oceans beyond national jurisdictions, 3) Open data, 4) Tech transfer, 5) AIS data as a tool to monitor ABMTs and identify governance gaps in ABNJ fisheries, and 6) Impacts of fisheries on open-ocean ecosystems.
These briefs were organised by Daniel Dunn, Nereus Program Senior Fellow & research scientist in the Duke University Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab. Please contact daniel.dunn at duke.edu for any further inquiries. The workshop and coordination of the briefs was supported by the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program. All briefs are the product of the specified authors, not the organiser or Nereus. We thank them for their incredible generosity with their time and effort to inform this important process.


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Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work?
Research suggests that conditions in the workplace might be to blame.
The bitches, as Shannon saw it, came in three varieties. She categorized them on her personal blog, in a post titled "Beware the Female BigLaw Partner."
First was the "aggressive bitch"—a certain kind of high-ranking woman at the firm where she worked who didn't think twice about "verbally assaulting anyone." When one such partner's name appeared on caller ID, Shannon told me, "we would just freak out."
Next was the two-faced "passive-aggressive bitch," whose "subtle, semi-rude emails" hinted that "you really shouldn't leave before 6:30." She was arguably worse than the aggressive bitch, because you might never know where you stand.
Last but not least, the "tuned-out, indifferent bitch," Shannon wrote, "is so busy, both with work and family, that they don't have time for anything … This partner is not trying to be mean, but hey, they got assignments at midnight when they were associates. So you will too.
"There obviously are exceptions," she added. "But there aren't many."
You would expect someone like Shannon, who asked that I use only her first name, to thrive in an elite law firm. When she graduated in the mid-2000s from the University of Pennsylvania Law School—having helped edit the constitutional-law journal and interned for a district-court judge—she had her pick of job offers. She knew that by going to a big firm she was signing on for punishing hours, but she had six-figure student loans to pay off and hoped her outgoing personality would win over bosses and potential mentors.
It didn't quite work out that way.
The firm's pace was as frenzied as she'd feared. Partners would assign projects late in the day, she said, sometimes forcing associates to work through the night only to announce in the morning that the assignment wasn't needed after all. When Shannon wanted to leave at the early hour of 7 p.m., she would sneak out of her office, creep past the elevators, and take the stairs down to evade her bosses. She took up smoking to deal with the stress.
Early on, Shannon noticed a striking dynamic. Though her law-school class had been roughly split between the genders, the firm had very few female partners. This wasn't unusual: At the time, just 17 percent of all law partners in the country were women, and they've only notched up a few percentage points since then. And, at least at her firm, no one seemed to like the handful of female partners. "They were known as bitchy, bossy, didn't want to hear excuses," Shannon told me.
She once spotted a female partner screaming at the employees at a taxi stand because the cars weren't coming fast enough. Another would praise Shannon to her face, then dispatch a senior associate to tell her she was working too slowly. One time, Shannon emailed a female partner—one of the passive-aggressive variety—saying, "Attached is a revised list of issues and documents we need from the client. Let me know of anything I may have left off."
"Here's another example" of you not being confident, the partner responded, according to Shannon. "The 'I may have left off' language is not as much being solicitous of my ideas as it is suggesting a lack of confidence in the completeness of your list."
Shannon admits that she can be a little sensitive, but she wasn't the only one who noticed. "Almost every girl cried at some point," she says. Some of the male partners could be curt, she said, but others were nice. Almost all of the female partners, on the other hand, were very tough.
Still, the senior women's behavior made sense to her. They were slavishly devoted to their jobs, regularly working until nine or 10 at night. Making partner meant either not having children or hiring both day- and nighttime nannies to care for them. "There's hostility among the women who have made it," she said. "It's like, 'I gave this up. You're going to have to give it up too.' "
After 16 months, Shannon decided she'd had enough. She left for a firm with gentler hours, and later took time off to be with her young children. She now says that if she were to return to a big firm, she'd be wary of working for a woman. A woman would judge her for stepping back from the workforce, she thinks: "Women seem to cut down women."
Her screed against the female partners surprised me, since people don't usually rail against historically marginalized groups on the record. When I reached out to other women to ask whether they'd had similar experiences, some were appalled by the question, as though I were Phyllis Schlafly calling from beyond the grave. But then they would say things like "Well, there was this one time …" and tales of female sabotage would spill forth. As I went about my dozens of interviews, I began to feel like a priest to whom women were confessing their sins against feminism.
Their stories formed a pattern of wanton meanness. Serena Palumbo, another lawyer, told me about the time she went home to Italy to renew her visa and returned to find that a female co-worker had told their boss "that my performance had been lackluster and that I was not focused." Katrin Park, a communications director, told me that a female former manager reacted to a minor infraction by screaming, "How can I work when you're so incompetent?!" A friend of mine, whom I'll call Catherine, had a boss whose tone grew witheringly harsh just a few months into her job at a nonprofit. "This is a perfect example of how you run forward thoughtlessly, with no regard to anything I am saying," the woman said in one email, before exploding at Catherine in all caps. Many women told me that men had undermined them as well, but it somehow felt different—worse—when it happened at the hands of a woman, a supposed ally.
Even a woman who had given my own career a boost joined the chorus. Susannah Breslin, a writer based in Florida, yanked me out of obscurity years ago by promoting my work on her blog. So I was a bit stunned when, for this story, she told me that she divides her past female managers into "Dragon Ladies" and "Softies Who Nice Their Way Upwards." She'd rather work for men because, she says, they're more forthright. "With women, I'm partly being judged on my abilities and partly being judged on whether or not I'm 'a friend,' or 'nice,' or 'fun,' " she told me. "That's some playground BS."
Other women I interviewed, meanwhile, admitted that they had been tempted to snatch the Aeron chair out from under a female colleague. At a women's networking happy hour, I met Abigail, a young financial controller at a consulting company who once caught herself resenting a co-worker for taking six weeks of maternity leave. "I consider myself very pro-woman and feminist," Abigail said. Nevertheless, she confessed, "if I wasn't so mindful of my reaction, I could have been like, 'Maybe we should try to find a way to fire her.' "
Of course, these are just anecdotes. I also heard positive stories about female co-workers, including from prominent women in fields like foreign policy and journalism who described how other women had mentored them or acted as unofficial support groups. (I've been fortunate to have both of those experiences myself.) What's more, research suggests that women actually make better managers than men, by certain measures.
Yet, fairly or not, many women seem to share Shannon's fear that members of their gender tend to cut one another down. Large surveys by Pew and Gallup as well as several academic studies show that when women have a preference as to the gender of their bosses and colleagues, that preference is largely for men. A 2009 study published in the journal Gender in Management found, for example, that although women believe other women make good managers, "the female workers did not actually want to work for them." The longer a woman had been in the workforce, the less likely she was to want a female boss.
In 2011, Kim Elsesser, a lecturer at UCLA, analyzed responses from more than 60,000 people and found that women—even those who were managers themselves—were more likely to want a male boss than a female one. The participants explained that female bosses are "emotional," "catty," or "bitchy." (Men preferred male bosses too, but by a smaller margin than the female participants did.)
In a smaller survey of 142 law-firm secretaries—nearly all of whom were women—not one said she or he preferred working for a female partner, and only 3 percent indicated that they liked reporting to a female associate. (Nearly half had no preference.) "I avoid working for women because [they are] such a pain in the ass!" one woman said. In yet another study, women who reported to a female boss had more symptoms of distress, such as trouble sleeping and headaches, than those who worked for a man.
Some people find these studies literally incredible. (When the ABA Journalpublished an article about the legal-secretary survey, angry readers demanded a retraction. The journal wrote a follow-up piece about the controversy and issued a mild apology for the hurt feelings.) And indeed, it is hard to believe that women would hold a fierce bias against members of their own gender. Perhaps in part because it's such a thorny topic, this phenomenon tends to be either dismissed (nothing to see here) or written off as inevitable (women are inherently catty). But in fact, psychologists have been attempting to explain it for decades—and the sum of their findings suggests that women aren't the villains of this story.
Iwasn't looking for bitchy behavior when I walked into an upscale restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., one night last fall, but it found me. I was there for a small get-together of female executives. Several of the women grimaced when I introduced myself as a journalist, so when I approached a cluster of them, I opened by saying that they didn't have to be interviewed if they didn't want to be.
At that, a middle-aged blonde in a leopard-print jacket looked at me and said, "When you go to your shrink, do you say, 'Nobody likes me! Nobody wants to talk to me'?"
I blinked in disbelief, then asked her whether she had ever gotten pushback for her communication style.
The woman, Susan, said her brusqueness is actually an advantage at the financial-services firm where she works as an adviser, a very Mad Men–esque environment, as she described it. "I have a different way of communicating that's more like a guy," she said. "I played a lot of sports, and I expect us to knock around a bit and still be friends at the end of the game. Guys like me."
The fratty environment doesn't seem that great for other women in her office, though. Most of the financial advisers at her firm are men, but most of the assistants are women—a situation Susan called "a hotbed of badness." "There's a finite amount of space that these women get," she said. "They're in their little prison and they're all eating each other up."
As it turns out, researchers have competing theories as to why this happens—why women sometimes find themselves trapped and sniping at one another.
Joyce Benenson, a psychologist at Emmanuel College, in Boston, thinks women are evolutionarily predestined not to collaborate with women they are not related to. Her research suggests that women and girls are less willing than men and boys to cooperate with lower-status individuals of the same gender; more likely to dissolve same-gender friendships; and more willing to socially exclude one another. She points to a similar pattern in apes. Male chimpanzees groom one another more than females do, and frequently work together to hunt or patrol borders. Female chimps are much less likely to form coalitions, and have even been spotted forcing themselves between a female rival and her mate in the throes of copulation.
Benenson believes that women undermine one another because they have always had to compete for mates and for resources for their offspring. Helping another woman might give that woman an edge in the hot-Neanderthal dating market, or might give her children an advantage over your own, so you frostily snub her. Women "can gather around smiling and laughing, exchanging polite, intimate, and even warm conversation, while simultaneously destroying one another's careers," Benenson told me. "The contrast is jarring."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Benenson's theory is controversial—so much so that she says she feels sidelined and "very isolated" in academia.*
If Benenson is right, women would have to struggle mightily to repair their poisonous dynamic, since it is biologically ingrained. But many other researchers think women aren't hardwired to behave this way. Instead, they argue, bitchiness is a by-product of the modern workplace.
In the late 1980s, Robin Ely, then a graduate student in the Yale School of Management, set about trying to understand why women's office interactions sometimes turn toxic. "My most difficult relationship at work had been with a woman," Ely told me, "but women had also given me the most amazing support." She didn't buy either of the prevailing stereotypes about women—that they are nurturing earth mothers or manipulative traitors. Instead, her hypothesis was simply that "women, like all human beings, respond to the situation they're in."
To test this idea, Ely cracked open a law-firm directory and picked some male-dominated firms, where no more than 5 percent of partners were female, and some other firms where women were slightly better represented in the top ranks. Then she asked the female lawyers at both types of firms how they felt about their female colleagues.
No matter where they were, the attorneys endured a grueling work environment. But in the overwhelmingly male firms, competition between women was "acute, troubling, and personal," Ely said. Compared with the women in firms where they were better represented, women in the male-dominated settings thought less of one another and offered weak support, if any. Female partners in those firms were "almost universally reviled," Ely said. One young lawyer described her boss as "a manipulative bitch who has no legal talent."
Perhaps the most enduring takeaway was this: Women in the male-dominated firms believed that only so many of them would make it into the senior ranks, and that they were vying with one another for those spots. Ely, who is now a business professor at Harvard, had hit upon a dynamic known as tokenism. When there appear to be few opportunities for women, research shows, women begin to view their gender as an impediment; they avoid joining forces, and sometimes turn on one another.
Think of the "cool girl" who casually notes, "All my friends are guys"—as though it just naturally happened that way. Or the overachiever who saves her harshest feedback for her female colleagues, while the men in the office get sports talk and fist bumps. Women like Susan, the financial adviser I met in Washington, "get along with men better," as she put it, because it pays to get along with whoever's at the top.
Around the same time Ely conducted her tokenism study, a Dutch psychologist named Naomi Ellemers was working as an assistant professor in Amsterdam and trying to understand the near-total absence of senior women in academia. Women then made up just 4 percent of all full professors in the Netherlands. Ellemers thought perhaps biased men were keeping women from advancing.
Ellemers put together a list of all the female professors in the country and mailed them (as well as a sample of male professors) a survey about their relationships with their colleagues. Her findings suggested that women were actually part of the problem. The female professors described themselves as just as "aggressive" and "dominant" as the men did; they felt unsupported by their female colleagues, and didn't want to work with other women.
Eleven years later, Ellemers surveyed doctoral students and university faculty members in Amsterdam and Italy and found similar results. Although the junior men and women were in fact equally committed to their work, the female professors thought the younger women were less dedicated. Ellemers called these senior women—who coped with gender discrimination by emphasizing how different they were from other women—"queen bees," repurposing a term first coined in the 1970s by researchers at the University of Michigan.
After these studies were published, Ellemers was disheartened to read news articles trumpeting them as proof that women are nasty by nature. "Some journalists are very happy to make headlines that women are catty to each other," she told me ruefully. She thought about giving up on this line of research, but a student of hers, Belle Derks, persuaded her to keep probing.
Along with some of their other colleagues, Ellemers and Derks conducted a small study in 2011 for which they asked 63 Dutch policewomen—who are far outnumbered by their male colleagues—to recall a time they had experienced sexism at work. That reminder prompted many of the officers to emphasize the ways they're not like other women and to downplay the prevalence of sexism. In other words, thinking about how bad it is to be a woman made certain officers not want to be seen as women. And it wasn't just something women did: In another small study, when Derks and other researchers prompted Surinamese immigrants in the Netherlands to recall an instance of discrimination against their group, many expressed lower opinions of one another and behaved more stereotypically Dutch.
With that, Ellemers and Derks believed they had pinpointed the conditions in which queen bees emerge: when women are a marginalized group in the workplace, have made big sacrifices for their career, or are already predisposed to show little "gender identification"—camaraderie with other women. (Think of former Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer's quote about another of her old jobs: "I'm not really a woman at Google; I'm a geek at Google.") Women like this, Ellemers says, "learned the hard way that the way to succeed in the workplace is to make sure that people realize they are not like other women. It's not something about these women. It is the way they have learned to survive in the organization."
It's worth noting that some of Ellemers and Derks's findings are not very robust. But other researchers have since published work that echoes theirs. Michelle Duguid, a Cornell University management professor, has explored something called "favoritism threat," or women's concern that they'll seem biased if they help one another. In a working paper, Duguid showed that "token" women who had helped other women in the past avoided doing so again when given the chance. In a separate study, she found that token women in "high prestige" settings were more reluctant to recruit female candidates to join their team than were women who worked in less prestigious settings or had more female colleagues.
As Joan C. Williams, a distinguished professor at the UC Hastings College of the Law, put it to me: "Women are people. If the only way to get ahead is to run like hell away from other women, some women are going to do that." And research suggests that this kind of distancing occurs in minority groups as well, which means these dynamics may be doubly hard on women of color, since they face both gender and racial bias.
Even levelheaded, feminist women can exhibit elements of queen-bee behavior at times, and they don't have to be in senior positions. The biggest issue I heard about is what's known as "competitive threat," which is when a woman fears that a female newcomer will outshine her. She might try to undermine her rival preemptively—as happened to one woman I interviewed, whose work friend spread rumors that she was promiscuous and unqualified. Or she might slam her rival with demeaning comments, as has happened to seven in 10 respondents to a 2016 survey of women working in the tech industry. "I had two female colleagues who suggested I try to look 'less pretty' to be taken more seriously," a respondent wrote. "One suggested a breast reduction."
This kind of behavior can take a toll. My friend Catherine had always been the most unflappable and cheerful in our group, but about six months into her stint with a queen bee, she began feeling like "a terrified puddle of a human being," she said. She felt sick to her stomach and had trouble eating her lunch at work. "Whenever the phone rang, my legs would shake," she said. "Anytime we were on a call and her voice came on, I shuddered."
About 15 years ago, Margarita Rozenfeld, who is now a leadership coach in Washington, D.C., found herself reporting to a queen bee. Rozenfeld's boss was just in her early 30s, but her clothes and demeanor made her seem much older. She had high expectations for everyone on the team, including Rozenfeld, and she would grumble when her subordinates didn't exhibit the same relentless ambition she had.
One day on her way to work, Rozenfeld tripped on the parking-garage steps and twisted her ankle. It swelled as the day wore on, and she worried that it would get even worse. She wasn't particularly busy, so she knocked on her boss's door and asked whether she could leave early to see a doctor. Her boss asked Rozenfeld to come in and close the door.
"You know, I had high hopes for you," Rozenfeld remembers her saying. Her boss questioned why "you feel like you can leave" when "things like this happen."
"But I feel like I'm not going to be able to walk," Rozenfeld said.
"I will tell you something about my career and how I got to be where I am today," her boss continued. "Do you know how many times I worked with men who basically sexually harassed me? Did you know that man over there missed his kid's high-school graduation because he was working on a proposal? And you have a sprained ankle and you think it's okay to leave?"
As tears welled in her eyes, Rozenfeld realized that she was never going to be the kind of worker her boss wanted. Six months later, she quit.
Complicating all of this is that, well, bitchiness is in the eye of the beholder, and the term queen bee sometimes gets flung at women who are just trying to do their job. You could call it managing while female: Many studies have shown that people—men and women alike—can't tolerate so much as a hint of toughness coming from a woman, even when she's in charge.
The most notorious double standard is that women can't break into important jobs unless they advocate for themselves and command respect. But they're also reviled unless they act like chipper and self-deprecating team players, forever passing the credit along to others. Laurie Rudman, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, said the "poster woman" for this predicament is Hillary Clinton, who, according to surveys, was more popular when in office than when she was vying for office. Writing in The Boston Globe last summer, former Vermont Governor Madeleine May Kunin noted the dramatically lower behavior bar set for Donald Trump than for Clinton: " 'Boys will be boys,' but girls must be goddesses."
Rudman first witnessed this tendency when she was a grad student at the University of Minnesota, where she sat on a hiring committee for an open professor position. The female candidates touted their records by saying things like "I'm so fortunate I found so-and-so for my mentor," Rudman told me. One male candidate, meanwhile, waltzed in, folded his arms, and declared, "I'm going to change the face of psychology within the next five years." The committee picked the man.
"It's very difficult for women to ask for power," Rudman said. "If you stick your neck out and say 'I'd like to be considered for this promotion,' somebody's revving up a chain saw in the background."
After Rudman earned her doctorate, she began researching why women can't get away with behaving the way men do. Her work helps explain why male bosses can be frank, while female managers are stuck serving up compliment sandwiches to soften their criticism. In one of her experiments, women who doled out honest feedback were liked less and considered less hirable than similarly candid men. Other academics have argued that workers just don't respect female bosses as much as male ones—which prompts the bosses to treat the workers worse, which causes the workers to think less of their bosses, and so forth.
Rudman found that some women's disparagement of other women can be explained by what's called "system justification," a psychological concept in which long-oppressed groups, struggling to make sense of an unfair world, internalize negative stereotypes. Women simply don't have the same status in American life that men do. So when people think, Who do I want to work with?, they subconsciously leap to the default, the historically revered—the man. Some women look around, see few women running things, and assume that there must be something wrong with women themselves.
Indeed, Kim Elsesser, the UCLA lecturer whose study unearthed a preference for male bosses, pointed out another interesting wrinkle in that study: Participants were biased against women only when they were asked about the gender they preferred to work for in general. "When participants were asked about their current bosses, the bias disappeared," Elsesser said.
When women do slip outside the lines and behave assertively, other women are sometimes the ones who blast them for it. In one series of studies, Rudman asked participants to pick teammates for a round of computerized Jeopardy. They could choose among insecure and confident men and women. A cash prize was offered, so it behooved the participants to pick someone competent. But while the confident contestants of both genders were seen as more capable than the insecure ones, the female participants were nonetheless torn between the insecure woman and the confident one.
Rudman says that in general, research shows men are more biased against women at work than women themselves are. But in this case at least, the male participants didn't hesitate to pick the confident woman over the insecure one, and had no preference between the confident man and the confident woman. Not a single female participant, on the other hand, chose the confident woman over the confident man. "I could not believe it!," Rudman exclaimed, letting out a long "Wooooow."
She saw this as a sign of what psychologists call the black-sheep effect, in which people are harder on rule-breaking members of their own group than they are on the deviants of other tribes. As Rudman told me this, I played a mental highlight reel of the various times in my life when a man had completely dropped the ball on a team project, and I'd excused him as either a nutty professor or a devilish rogue who couldn't be bothered with tedious details. He was the mischievous Peter Pan to my businesslike Wendy: I'll handle it myself, you scamp! If a woman behaved this way, though, I'd be more likely to draft a dozen never-sent emails asking her what her problem was.
Some writers and researchers argue that true queen bees are extremely rare, and that the concept has been co-opted by misogynists to show how awful women supposedly are. Even Carol Tavris, one of the social psychologists credited with coining the term queen bee, has been quoted rejecting the concept. "I hate it," she told the Today show in 2013.
In 1974, Tavris had published an article in Psychology Today in which she and two colleagues, Graham Staines and Toby Epstein Jayaratne, wrote:
There is a group of antifeminist women who exemplify what we call the Queen Bee syndrome … The true Queen Bee has made it in the "man's world" of work, while running a house and family with her left hand. "If I can do it without a whole movement to help me," runs her attitude, "so can all those other women."
When I called her at her home in Los Angeles, Tavris said that her theory had since been misinterpreted, carved into a cudgel for bashing women. If women are their own worst enemies, after all, why should people push for women's workplace advancement? She regrets that giving "a catchy name" to a complex pattern of behavior helped launch queen-bee-ism as "a thing"—one that has endured despite all the gains working women have made since the 1970s. After publishing that paper, she moved on to examine other topics in psychology.
I could understand why Tavris would want to distance herself from this research—who wants to throw more chum to the internet's sexist trolls? And given the complexity of the queen-bee phenomenon, its prevalence is impossible to determine. Still, queen bees are clearly a real thing, and ignoring the problem won't make it go away. Maybe by understanding its causes, we can finally start to address them.
The key point to remember, according to Naomi Ellemers and other researchers, is that queen-bee behavior arises under certain circumstances—like when a woman believes that the path to success is so narrow, she can barely squeeze through herself, let alone try to bring others along with her.
When I'd initially emailed Tavris for an interview, she had written back, "Your request makes me sad." But as I described the experiences of the women I had interviewed, she acknowledged that in some contexts, women do sometimes bully one another—just as members of other discriminated-against groups would.
Toward the end of our conversation, Tavris complimented Ellemers's research. How we behave at work depends on "how safe we feel at work," she said. "Does our work give us a chance to thrive? Or are we feeling thwarted at every step?"
Ionce worked with a queen bee—a woman a couple of decades my senior. (She outranked me but wasn't my supervisor.) Soon after I started, she and I were alone in our shared workspace. It was a busy day, but I needed to ask her a question about an internal process. I waited until late afternoon, then asked.
She glared at me and turned bright red. Then she screamed at me like I had never been screamed at before by someone I'm not related to. (Later, when I complained about her, my boss said, by way of explanation, that the office was a family-like environment.)
That was probably our worst encounter, but it wasn't the only bad one. She would seethe at me for things beyond my control and complain about me to my boss. Once, I let out a sigh after a frustrating phone call, and she lambasted me for seeming entitled. Another co-worker overheard and told her to cool it.
"I'm sorry, but she had a tone!" she responded, like a baroness exasperated by the impertinent help.
I began to have stomachaches and cold sweats when I walked into work. Still, I couldn't quite hate the woman. She was obviously miserable in her job, and every time I looked in her stress-deadened eyes, I saw a little of myself.
Is this the ghost of future Olga?, I sometimes wondered. Is this what happens when the totally normal, societally sanctioned choices you've made—work hard; have children; slave away for a promotion; go on a little vacation, not too long!; come back and work even harder—don't add up to the life you envisioned? You said the right thing at the meeting, didn't you? You helped on the important project. Why not you, then? It would be enraging.
The truth is, I too sometimes feel like the day is just too exhausting, that I cannot possibly handle one more thing with grace. I like to think I haven't taken it out on my colleagues. But my queen bee had a rougher go of it than I did, climbing her way up before Lean In, before '90s-style sensitivity training. She probably experienced the kind of sexism that doesn't take a Sarah Lawrence degree to sniff out, the kind where your male equals call you "sweetie" or tell you, up front, that you don't belong. I had to ask myself, How many years of treatment like that would it take for me to become mean like her? Ten years? Twenty? Or would it require only the right opportunity—like an unusually bad day, when no one else is around?
Curious to know what career gurus have to say about dealing with queen bees, I took a spin through some of the top-selling "getting ahead" books aimed at women. What I found was eye-opening, but not in the way I'd hoped.
For example, the 2014 "revised and updated" version of Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office, which was originally published in 2004, notes that women "often wind up making mountains out of molehills, much to the consternation of their male colleagues." The authors of the 2006 book The Girl's Guide to Being a Boss (Without Being a Bitch) offer a long tale of woe from a woman with a bitchy boss, then write simply that if you (the boss) feel that you are a bitch, you should take an anger-management course. Problem solved.
In Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman, former CNN Vice President Gail Evans recommends avoiding workplace tension by not having any contact with colleagues outside the office. If an emotion somehow surfaces during work hours, a true executive-track gal stuffs it back down. "If you can't help but become angry with a female co-worker," Evans writes, "for the sake of the rest of us, keep it to yourself."
Even when workplace bullying becomes severe, employment lawyers told me, women are less likely to sue for gender discrimination if their tormentor is another woman, since people tend to assume that women look out for one another. (One lawyer said that this is why companies often appoint members of "protected classes," such as minorities and women, to human-resources roles. Having someone from one of these groups handle a firing can make it harder to sue for wrongful termination.)
Still, the answer can't be to simply capitulate to queen bees, as some of the women I interviewed suggested. Even if you later quit, you only foist your awful boss on the next underling. At another women's networking happy hour, I met a woman named Marie, who, when I asked whether she had ever clashed with a female boss, burst into knowing laughter. At a previous job as a defense-industry analyst, Marie had had two bosses, a man and a woman. She was assigned to cover Haiti when the 2010 earthquake struck, forcing her to work long, difficult hours. The male manager praised her, but the woman made her a target. When Marie forgot to close a quotation mark in a report, her female boss denounced her as a plagiarist and eventually pushed her out. Marie's takeaway: "You should not outshine the boss."
Nurses might have a better solution. Their profession is rife with female bullying, but a group of nurses has floated an idea in which hospitals would have financial incentives to eliminate staff infighting. According to this plan, levels of bullying would be measured, publicly reported, and factored into the payments hospitals get from the federal government for providing quality care.
Better support for working moms could help, too. From my reporting, it seemed that while having family-friendly policies was important, having a boss who bought into those policies mattered just as much. One woman I spoke with, for example, was technically allowed to work from home when her kids were sick, but her older female manager would make her feel bad about it every time, thus negating the point of the policy.
Employers could also make more of an effort to show talented women that they're valued, since women who feel optimistic about their career prospects are less likely to tear one another down. "We need to change our society so that it becomes normative for women to see other women succeeding in all kinds of roles," Laurie Rudman says. Indeed, industries that are new and therefore lack entrenched social roles tend to be where this type of change takes place.
Toward the end of our conversation, Rudman emphasized how important it is for high-achieving women to own their success rather than chalking it all up to mentors and luck, even if doing so comes with a price. Stereotypes about how female leaders should behave, Rudman said, will only change when enough of us defeat them. I felt like I was talking with the hip, feminist aunt I never had.
"Have you felt resistance to your success?" she asked me.
Occasionally, I said, thinking of a handful of times people had wondered, a little too pointedly, how I'd scored one career win or another.
And what, she asked, did I do about it?
"I said I just got lucky," I replied, "or came up with some excuses."
"YAAAAA!" she cried. "See? See? So do you think women should rethink that strategy? Should maybe women start being stronger in our confidence?"
I admitted that it was a good idea, but that "something is keeping me from acting in a more confident way, even though that would be good for women in general."
"It would be good for women as a whole," Rudman said. "But individual women have to be shot down first. And you don't want to be one of those. And I don't blame you."
Someone has to be the first, though—to behave confidently, to risk knee-jerk bitterness from our colleagues as a result, and to not hold it against them. But it would be easier if we could do it as a hive.
NEXT STORY: Contractors Begin Early Shutdown Preparations


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To view a detailed map of Eastern Thrace click here
The Greek Genocide began in the region of Eastern Thrace, otherwise known today as European Turkey or Turkish Thrace. At a global conference of Thracian Greeks at Didymóteicho in June 2006, April 6 was assigned as the day of remembrance for the genocide of the Greeks of Eastern Thrace. April 6 was chosen because it was on this day during Easter of 1914 that the persecution of Greeks in the region intensified. The Greeks of Eastern Thrace refer to this day as Black Easter (Gr: Μαύρο Πάσχα).
The regime responsible for the persecution of the Greeks of Eastern Thrace before and during the First World War was the Committee of Union and Progress (C.U.P) otherwise known as the Young Turks. The methods used to eliminate Greeks in the region included, boycotting of businesses, looting, murder, deportation, extortion and the pillaging of towns, villages and places of worship. The methods were so effective, and were met with such little or no resistance and international condemnation, that similar methods were later used against Greeks and other ethnic groups throughout the Ottoman Empire to bring about their destruction.
The population of Greeks in Eastern Thrace at the beginning of the 20th century was more than 350,000. During the genocide, many of these Greeks were exiled to Greece, while 100,000 were deported to the interior of Asia Minor and only half returned.1
Persecutions from 1912-1913
Between the years 1912-1913, 15,690 Greeks were massacred in Eastern Thrace.2 A November report describes how the Ottoman Army at Aivali near Lüleburgaz massacred 167 Greek men, women and children. Four hundred Ottoman cavalry destroyed the Greek villages of Yagato and Golcuk, Bayramiç and Elmalı in the Malgara region. At Keşan, 300 Greeks were massacred.3
Montpelier Examiner (Idaho), 1 Aug 1913. Source
Massacres of Greeks continued and intensified throughout 1913. In July, the Ottoman Army massacred Greeks at Gönence, Tekirdağ, Hayrabolu, Hasköy, Hemit, Kürtüllü and Bayramtepe and committed widespread looting and rape. The burning of churches and entire villages usually coincided with massacres.4 In the region of Malgara alone, 18 Greek villages were wiped out. The Greek Patriarchate protested vigorously both to the Ottoman Government and foreign consulates but with no effect. In 1913, authorities also implemented a policy of deportation to destroy Greek communities. The deportations escalated in 1914. According to Taner Akçam:
The forcible expulsions and migrations from the area of Eastern Thrace began in the Spring and Summer of 1913. Attacks against the local Christian population continued throughout the year, but after 1914, the forcible removals began to take on a more systematic form.5
Persecutions in 1914
During 1914, the forced deportation of Greek communities in Eastern Thrace began in earnest. Entire villages and towns were uprooted, often with brutal force. On the 6th of April 1914, 200 Greek families from Binkılıç (Gr: Strantza) were deported. After being beaten, stripped of their valuables and having large sums of money extorted from them, Turkish corporals and gendarmes with swords drawn, ordered them to leave. Aspasia Constantinides lived through the deportation and she recounted:
After a two hour march, we reached a deep and narrow ravine where we found Corporal Ismail with a number of immigrants, apparently waiting for us. As soon as he saw us, he ordered our drivers to stop, and dragging the women out of the carts beat them savagely. They snatched the earrings the women wore and in so doing cut their ears; they forced them to undress in order to get at the necklaces they wore, and often tore them off their necks with such violence that in one instance a woman's throat was cut, causing the blood to flow in torrents.6
They arrived at Marmara Ereğlisi (Gr: Heraclea) where they were boarded onto the S.S Markella and deported.
The Teskilat-i Mahsusa (Special Organization, or SO) was a Turkish paramilitary unit that was often used during the genocide to co-ordinate attacks on Greeks. A report dated 8th of April 1914 by one of the foreign embassies in Constantinople made mention of 'Special Committees' operating in the Thrace region that were terrorizing Greeks and forcing them to flee. With the aid of the police, they were confiscating property and making residents sign declarations that they were leaving of their own free will.7 A report by the Consular Agent in Kirklareli on the 23rd of April 1914, stated that the hodjas (Muslim teachers) in local mosques were exciting the hatred of Christians and Greeks, and officials were arming local Turks with army rifles to commit crimes.8
The situation had become so critical for Ottoman Greeks that on the 6th of May 1914, the Greek deputies and senators of the Ottoman Parliament made a protest to the Ottoman Government against the persecution of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, but to no avail. Later that month, the Ecumenical Patriarchate declared the Orthodox Greek church in a state of persecution in the Empire and ordered the closure of all churches and schools.
Port Pirie Recorder and Western Mail (South Australia), 19 May 1914, page 2.
In September 1914, the Mudir (local governor) Sarakin Tahsim Bey forced the residents of Yenice (Gr: Skepastos) to hand over 40,000 okas (Ottoman unit of mass) of corn which he then distributed to the Turkish immigrants at Vize. Rigorous boycotts were also enforced on the Greeks of Tekirdağ causing many to flee. Out of 250 shops only 20 remained.9
Yeniköy was located on the main road that linked Gallipoli to Keşan and Constantinople through Tekirdağ. Before 1914, the village comprised 689 people, all Greeks. In 1914, 567 of the village-folk of Yeniköy were deported to Vizir Hani (near Bursa) a distance of 300 km. They were first taken to Şarköy (Gr: Peristasis) and from there deported to the interior of Turkey. Only 275 returned after the war in 1918.10
Persecutions in 1915
Between January and April of 1915, there were reports of Greeks being buried alive and arrests of people on dubious charges. Priests, teachers and entire families were thrown in jail.11 During WW1, Greek males were enlisted into the notorious Labour Battalions (Amele Taburlari) and were literally worked to death, doing back-breaking work with little food or water. The rate of desertion was so high that women were beaten by gendarmes with whips on their soles in order to disclose the location of their husbands. The Greeks in the Diocese of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles were given two hours notice and deported during April 1915 on the pretext of military necessity. They were sent to the interior of Asia Minor without food and water to places near Bandirma and Balikesir some 200 km away. In total, a dozen towns and villages in the Gallipoli region were destroyed and 22,000 Greeks were sent to the interior where they were at the mercy of hostile Turks.12 The Metropolitan of Gallipoli, Konstantinos Koidakis witnessed the persecution of his flock and wrote:
More compassion is shown here to dogs than to the Christian refugees... Close to the Panderma [Bandirma] Railway Station the deaths of the refugees occur daily, and according to my information many die in the interior of the country... The extermination of the Christian refugees is most methodical. If they are deported for strategical reasons alone, they could have been left to settle in the place to which they were originally sent. Such, however is not the case. What is obviously aimed at by constantly shifting them from place to place is to exhaust them and so cause their death.13
Frank W. Jackson, of Pennsylvania, USA was president of the Greek Relief Committee, an organization established during WW1 to provide relief to Greeks during the genocide. In 1917 he stated:
The Greeks of Asia Minor have always been law-abiding and perfectly loyal to the Turkish Government. Under Abdul Hamid they were well treated, but his successors adopted a program to crush them...Along with the Armenians, most of the Greeks of the Marmora regions and Thrace have been deported on the pretext that they gave information to the enemy.14
On the 15th of April 1915, the Greeks of Çavuşköy (Gr: Amygdalia) and Yenice (Gr: Maistros) in the district of Enez were deported to Turkish villages such as Beyendi and Pasait, while the Turks of the nearby villages plundered their properties, churches and monasteries.15 From the 1st to the 15th of May 1915, the Greeks of Büyükdere, Kirits and Yeni-Machala (Dercos district) were deported. In some villages, people were compelled to sign a declaration that they left of their own accord and out of fear. Protests were made regarding these deportations, but even still, the houses and properties of those deported continued to be seized by Turks.16 On the 1st of June 1915, the inhabitants of Burgaz (Gr: Pyrgos) in the district of Dercos consisting of 3,000 persons including men, women and their babies, children and old people were ordered to abandon their villages and forced to walk for hours to Büyükdere. From there they were deported to the interior of Turkey and settled in Turkish villages such as Ik-kiol and Soulio in the district of Iznik. Their homes were seized by Turkish refugees.17
The diocese of Enos (Tr: Enez) was made up of 10,057 Greeks. In August 1915 these Greeks were deported to Malkara. Of the 17 churches, 15 were destroyed and the library which contained 1,900 volumes was pillaged. The monastery of Skalotis was burnt and those of Agios Panteleimon and Tsandiri were completely demolished.18 A report from Constantinople dated 8th of September 1915 stated that all the villages of the district of Kırklareli had been emptied of their Greek inhabitants. From Yenice (Gr: Skepastos) 3,000 Greeks were deported toward Tekirdağ. On the 8th of September 4,000 inhabitants from Sophides were evacuated. The Greeks of Demirköy (Samacovo) in the district of Vize (5,000 inhabitants) were also deported. Tourla and St. Stefano of the Vize district (3,150 inhabitants) were surrounded by Turkish gangs and no one remained.19
In September 1915, the Greeks of Yenice (Gr: Skepastos) were deported after being stripped of all their belongings and they arrived at Heraclea after a four day march. The majority of them crossed over to the Asiatic side and settled at Balikesir and Ada Pazar. Murder and floggings preceded their deportation.20 The town of Üsküp (Gr: Skopos) and its 6,000 inhabitants had a similar fate. On the 5th of September the town was surrounded by gendarmes and 200 Turks under the command of the ex-chief of the Izmit gendarmes, Yussuf Bey. The residents were forbidden from leaving. For five whole days they were subjected to an orgy of cruelty and were stripped of 3.000 Ltq (Turkish lira). Some Greeks were buried alive after being forced to dig their own graves. On the 10th of September they were finally deported.21
Harry Stürmer was a German journalist and correspondent for the Kölnische Zeitung newspaper in Constantinople between 1915-1916. In his memoir titled Two War Years in Constantinople, Stürmer was highly critical of the Turkish authorities and their treatment of Ottoman Greeks. He wrote:
I would like to say here a word about these Greek persecutions in Thrace and Western Anatolia that have become notorious throughout the whole of Europe. They took place just before the outbreak of war, and cost thousands of peaceful Greeks – men, women and children – their lives, and reduced to ashes dozens of flourishing villages and towns.22
Persecutions from 1919-1922
At the conclusion of the First World War, C.U.P leaders responsible for the atrocities against Ottoman minorities during the war were tried in Ottoman courts and many were found guilty of war crimes. While this may have offered some justice to victims' families, the Allied occupation of Constantinople, and the occupation of Smyrna by the Hellenic army in May 1919 led to the formation of the Nationalist Kemalist movement of Mustapha Kemal. The continued persecution of Ottoman Greeks by the Nationalists from 1919-1922 was a continuation of the program initiated by the C.U.P and concluded with their final expulsion.
Many atrocities committed by the Kemalists from 1919-1922 were reported to the Armenian-Greek Section (A.G.S) which was formed by the British High Commission in Constantinople. Between February 1919 and November 1922, the A.G.S met 87 times and heard numerous reports of atrocities against Greeks, but no action was taken against the perpetrators since the Allies were reluctant to act militarily. On the 20th of May 1919, it was reported that Lieutenant Alwyn Hadkinson, a Relief Officer for Southern Thrace, toured the region and concluded that arms were being distributed with the knowledge and assistance of Government officials. Public security he said was poor and the anti-Christian propaganda was on the increase.23 On the 25th of June 1919, Dr. Theotokas representing the Greek Patriarchate reported that brigandage, murders and pillaging was occurring throughout Thrace.24 The A.G.S heard that the kaimakam (governor) of Shehnikeuy [Şarköy?] was responsible for Greeks of Tekirdağ, Malkara and Keşan abandoning their homes and that the Military Governor of Adrianople was encouraging marauding bands there, and that the situation was worsening.25 At the meeting of 12 November 1919, Mr Calvocoressi representing the Greek Patriarchate reported that Tekirdağ was full of fedais (fighters prepared to sacrifice their lives) who were menacing the Christians. The Turkish notables at Şarköy met at the mosque and stated that they were officially joining the Kemalist Nationalist movement and were preparing to distribute arms and impose payments to those unable to undertake military duty.26 On the 10th of December 1919 the A.G.S heard that Christians returning to their homes at Tekirdağ found that the Turks had taken possession of their houses and were pulling down their churches to build barracks.27 At the A.G.S meeting of the 10th of March 1920, it was reported that five villages at Tekirdağ were pillaged by 50 unknown persons wearing gendarme uniforms. A month earlier Nationalists had arrived at Tekirdağ with their leader and arms were distributed among the population.28
The New York Times, 4 March 1920.
At the 30th of June 1920 meeting, it was reported that the Greeks of Marmara Ereğlisi (Gr: Heraclea) fled to Constantinople after their shops and houses were pillaged and some of the residents were killed. The village of Karahovouz containing 100 families was set on fire and its population massacred.29
The Greeks of Eastern Thrace continued to be persecuted until July 1920 when Hellenic forces were given Allied permission to occupy Eastern Thrace to offer them protection. However this was short-lived. In October 1922, Eastern Thrace was ceded to Turkey after the signing of an Armistice at Mudanya following the Hellenic military defeat in Asia Minor in September 1922. After hearing that Turkish forces were to occupy Eastern Thrace, panic-stricken Christians fled to Greece to avoid meeting the same fate as Christians who were massacred en-masse in Asia Minor the previous month. They fled mostly in ox-carts and on foot.
American writer and journalist Ernest Hemingway (1892-1961) arrived in Constantinople on the 30th of September 1922 as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star to report on events following the Smyrna fire. The following month he was in Thrace and witnessed the expulsion of the Greeks. In his October 20 dispatch, Hemingway described the wretched state of Greeks who were attempting the arduous journey to Greece by foot. He wrote:
In a never-ending, staggering march, the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads toward Macedonia. The main column crossing the Maritza River at Adrianople is 20 miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.30
The Greeks of Ganochora fleeing their homes, 1922. Photo: Georgios Lykidis. Source: Photographic archive EΛΙΑ-ΜΙΕΤ
A scene during the evacuation of Eastern Thrace. A woman and three children gaze at the camera as they are taken away in a freight train with a soldier above them. Adrianople, November 4, 1922. Photo: Frédéric Gadmer. Source
Evacuation of Gallipoli, 18 Nov 1922.
1. Hofmann, T. The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, Caratzas USA, 2011, p 50.
2. Hofmann, T. The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide. Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center, 2012, p. 49.
3. Archimandrite Alexander Papadopoulos, Persecutions of the Greeks in Turkey before the European War: On the Basis of Official Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 1919, pp 24-25.
4. Archimandrite Alexander Papadopoulos, ibid, pp 32-52.
5. Taner Akçam. The Greek Deportations and Massacres of 1913-1914. In: Shirinian, George N (editor), The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide. Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center, 2012. p 73.
6. Greek Patriarchate, Persecution of the Greeks in Turkey 1914-1918, Constantinople 1919, 19-20.
7. Arch. Alexander Papadopoulos, ibid, p 91.
8. Arch. Alexander Papadopoulos, ibid, p 98-99.
9. Greek Patriarchate 1919, ibid, 31.
10. Arsenis Paraskakis, The Roots of Thrace, Neohori Peristasis, Viewed 29 March 2016, http://neoxoriperistasis.blogspot.com.au/2014_02_01_archive.html
11. American Hellenic Society, Persecutions of the Greeks in Turkey Since the Beginning of the European War, Oxford University Press, 1918, p 35.
12. File No 391, 867.4016/123, American Embassy Constantinople to the Secretary of State Washington, 10 August 1915.
13. Ecumenical Patriarchate, Persecution of the Greeks in Turkey 1914-1918. Constantinople, 1919. The Hesperia Press, pp. 43-44.
14. Turks Turned Against Greek, 700,000 Suffer, The Evening Independent. 17 October 1917, 6.
15.American Hellenic Society 1918, ibid, 40-41.
16.Ibid, 41.
18.Greek Patriarchate 1919, ibid, 16.
19.American Hellenic Society, ibid, 42-43.
20.Greek Patriarchate 1919, ibid, 10.
22.Stürmer, H 1917, Two War Years in Constantinople, George H. Doran and Co, New York. 169.
23.Yeghiayan, V (comp.) 2007, British Reports on Ethnic Cleansing in Anatolia: 1919-1922, Center for Armenian Remembrance, USA, 49.
24.Yeghiayan, V, ibid, 68.
25.Yeghiayan, V, ibid, 82.
26.Yeghiayan, V, ibid, 102.
27.Yeghiayan, V, ibid, 112.
28.Yeghiayan, V, ibid, 132.
29.Yeghiayan, V, ibid, 155.
30.Hemingway, E 1922, A Silent, Ghastly Procession, The Toronto Daily Star, 20 October.
Last updated 14 July 2020.


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Week 18
It occurred to me the other day that sometimes I am stuck in the bad...not seeing or recognizing the good as often as I should.
I allow myself to be filled with weight and worry and woes.
Not always.
But sometimes too often.
I forget to remember the wonderful small, positive things that happen each week...a card in the mail, someone holding a store door or asking where I get my hair cut, a funny little story, or a ray of sunshine warming my face.
Warm Heart Wednesday is for me. To start remembering. And to make a journal of joy.
I hope you will consider joining me on this adventure by sharing something that made YOUR heart warm over the past week. I think it will be fun and uplifting to read your ongoing journals as well.
Warm Heart Wednesday #18.
If you have any questions about Warm Heart Wednesday or problems doing your link just post it in a comment or send me an e-mail. I'll do my best to help you as quickly as I can.
The McLinkey will be live from 1:00 pm MST time Wednesday afternoon.
And remember.... link back to this post, you need to be registered as a follower of my blog, PG posts only, and you must visit at least 10 other posts...perhaps consider starting from the last posts and work backwards. The links will stay live after the final post deadline has passed so you can even wait and visit over the weekend or whenever you have more time.


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Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
The Language of Flowers
1. What potential do Elizabeth, Renata, and Grant see in Victoria that she has a hard time seeing in herself?
2. While Victoria has been hungry and malnourished often in her life, food ends up meaning more than just nourishment to her. Why?
3. Victoria and Elizabeth both struggle with the idea of being part of a family. What does it mean to you to be part of a family? What defines family?
4. Why do you think Elizabeth waits so long before trying to patch things up with her long-lost sister Catherine? What is the impetus for her to do so?
5. The first week after her daughter's birth goes surprisingly well for Victoria. What is it that makes Victoria feel unable to care for her child after the week ends? And what is it that allows her to ultimately rejoin her family?
6. One of the major themes in The Language of Flowers is forgiveness and second chances --- do you think Victoria deserves one after the things she did (both as a child and as an adult)? What about Catherine? And Elizabeth?
7. What did you think of the structure of the book --- the alternating chapters of past and present? In what ways did the two storylines parallel each other, and how did they diverge?
8. The novel touches on many different themes (love, family, forgiveness, second chances). Which do you think is the most important? And what did you think was ultimately the lesson?
9. At the end of the novel, Victoria learns that moss grows without roots. What does this mean, and why is it such a revelation for her?
10. Based on your reading of the novel, what are your impressions of the foster care system in America? What could be improved?
11. Knowing what you now know about the language of the flowers, to whom would you send a bouquet and what would you want it to say?
The Language of Flowers
- Publication Date: April 3, 2012
- Genres: Fiction
- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books


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Frequently Asked Questions


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Video Length: 41 minutes
The Matchmaker Program at Austin Pets Alive! (APA!) is designed to match the right dog to the right home.Thanks to its volunteers, fosters, and behavior team, APA! has extensive notes on many of its dogs. Their Matchmaker Program guides adopters through the information available on each dog and the adoption process and ensures safe and productive interactions between the dogs at our rescue and the public. Though emphasis on dogs as individuals and a commitment to knowing each dog as thoroughly as they can, APA! eases the process for potential adopters and is able to find homes for even the most difficult to place dogs.Learn about how this program develops and maintains cutting-edge initiatives aimed at decreasing dog length of stay and improving the success rate of adoptions. This presentation was recorded at the 2016 American Pets Alive! Conference.
Ryan Plunkett is the Matchmaker Program Manager at Austin Pets Alive! With years of experience in dog behavior and training and customer service, he is committed to advancing the national No-Kill movement through programs that can bridge the divide between the public and difficult to place dogs.


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'Cobra Kai's Creators Are Exploring Potential Spinoffs
Of all the legacyquels in the world of film and TV, Cobra Kai may be the very best. It took the old Karate Kid film series, updated the setting, and turned all of it — even the sequels that were less than stellar — into an epic multigenerational saga. After two seasons on YouTube, the show came to Netflix and became an instant smash on the service. Season 3 premiered last year, and Season 4 is just a few months away.
Series co-creator Jon Hurwitz seems to have no plans to slow things down, either. In fact, during a Twitter Q&A this week, Hurwitz hinted at the possibility of Cobra Kai getting one or more spinoffs.
"We're batting around ideas," Hurwitz replied to a fan asking for a possible Mr. Miyagi prequel series. "Some further along that others. Won't spoil anything beyond that."
Well that's definitely not a no. And a Miyagi prequel could be very interesting. (The character's backstory in the years prior to the first Karate Kid is arguably more interesting than anything that's happened to Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence.) Kreese is another character you could envision getting his own spinoff, although a lot of his backstory was told in flashbacks during Cobra Kai Season 3.
Here's the official synopsis for Cobra Kai Season 4:
Season 4 finds the Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang dojos joining forces to take down Cobra Kai at the All Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament... and whoever loses must hang up their gi. As Samantha and Miguel try to maintain the dojo alliance and Robby goes all in at Cobra Kai, the fate of the Valley has never been more precarious. What tricks does Kreese have up his sleeve? Can Daniel and Johnny bury their decades-long hatchet to defeat Kreese? Or will Cobra Kai become the face of karate in the valley?
Season 4 of Cobra Kai premieres on Netflix in December of 2021.


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Book Hooks is a weekly meme hosted by Marketing for Romance Writers as part of the MFRW Authors Blog. It's a chance each week to hook readers on your current WIP or any previously published book. By sharing samples of your writing in a meme, readers will have the chance to jump from one author to another. Here's your opportunity to hook some new readers!
- Add your blog link to the list below. You will need to do this on each weekly list every time you participate.
- Create a post on your own blog that includes the Book Hooks logo, an excerpt from your book, your book cover, the blurb and a buy link.
- Also include the linky list code. To get this code, click below the list where it says "Get the Code here...". Insert it into the bottom of your blog post in the HTML window. For Wordpress use the alternate link provided. If you have difficulty using the code, please link instead to:http://mfrwbookhooks.blogspot.com
- Use a unique post title - don't title it "Book Hooks #1". One word posts are less likely to be tweeted (one word tweets can look like spam).
- Schedule your post to go live directly after midnight, your time (12:10 or 12:15, etc.)
- Place the Book Hooks logo on your blog's sidebar to help advertise the meme.
- Use #MFRWHooks in your tweets and title.
- Jump around using the linky list to see what other authors are writing. Leave comments to let them know you were there. Tweet about their post.
- Your blog link listed in each of the other participating blogs.
- Your blog post tweeted by MFRW's twitter account.
Any questions or concerns about the hop (including requests for link removal) should be directed to Kathryn R. Blake at krb_chats at kathrynrblake dot com or krblake at KathrynRBlake dot com


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On Wednesday's Mark Levin Show, The White House plans to implement a merit-based proposal to increase the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the U.S based on merit specifically for employment and skills in specialized vocations. This would limit family chain migration and eliminate the VISA lottery altogether. The U.S knows how to responsibly manage immigration that encourages assimilation and we need to get back to doing it the right way. Then, the president has ordered ships and bombers on high alert and has removed American personnel from some areas of the middle east. While it's unclear why the United States is taking a defensive posture, what we do know is that Iran has lost 6% of its GDP under President Trump Administration sanctions. We also know that Iran has sponsored terror groups in the region to arm intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with nuclear devices, as they block off navigable waters preventing other nations from purchasing oil from Iraq. This move would threaten the economic stability of the world—this is not a veiled excuse to go to war as some critics suggest. Later, the media and the free press are not the same thing; our media isn't about freedom of the press it's about advancing their political agenda. After, the media continues their slanted reporting and advocacy for the Democrats and anti-Semites like Reps Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Legal Analyst Jonathan Turley testified in Congress and explained, point blank, that Rule 6 (e) prevents AG William Barr from releasing Rule 6 (e) information like secret Grand Jury information, to do so would be a crime.
The Washington Times
Iran-backed militias move rockets in range of U.S. troops: Report
BizPac Review
Chuck Todd frustrated over Dems' lack of 'strategery' in attempted takedown of Trump
The Washington Free Beacon
MSNBC Host Invokes Nazi Comparison to Describe Potential Trump Administration Deportation Policy
The Washington Post Wants Team Trump Removed or Jailed
Washington Free Beacon
Omar: Criticism of Tlaib Part of Efforts to 'Eliminate the Public Voice of Muslims'
Right Scoop
Jonathan Turley drops a TRUTH BOMB on the House Judiciary Committee over Barr contempt vote…
Conservative Review
DOJ report: 43% of all offenders last year were non-citizens
The podcast for this show can be streamed or downloaded from the Audio Rewind page.
Image used with permission of Getty Images / Joe Raedle


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With an added effect of concussions. You know that that kind of head injury brings pain, nausea, dizziness and confusion. It's something to take seriously. Researchers say it can also cause trouble with how someone responds to sound. Here's NPR's Jon Hamilton.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Tiny nerve cells in the inner ear allow us to detect sounds, but it takes a lot of brainpower to process the signals coming from those cells. Nina Kraus is a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
NINA KRAUS: Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs that we ask our brain to do. So you can imagine that a concussion, getting hit in the head, really does disrupt sound-processing.
HAMILTON: Kraus' lab, called Brainvolts, is studying this problem in hundreds of elite college athletes, including football players. And she devotes an entire chapter to concussion in her book "Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs A Meaningful Sonic World." Kraus says athletes who sustain a concussion usually have normal hearing when it comes to detecting faint sounds, yet they often fail something called the speech-in-noise test.
KRAUS: You have the athlete listen to a sentence that is embedded in increasingly loud noise.
HAMILTON: A sentence like this.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Sugar is very sweet.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Sugar is very sweet.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Sugar is very sweet.
HAMILTON: Kraus says a concussion may also leave athletes hypersensitive to sounds. To learn more, her lab has been analyzing the electrical signals in areas of the brain that process auditory information.
KRAUS: You just need to put on a couple of scalp electrodes and stick some earbuds in a person's ear and play some sounds.
HAMILTON: That reveals which sound-processing areas in the brain have been affected by a head injury. But researchers are only beginning to understand the problem. Kraus says most athletes recover from a concussion in a week or two. For those with lingering symptoms, she's experimenting with something called rhythm therapy.
KRAUS: The athlete needs to listen to sounds and kind of move their whole body so that they can align their movement with what they're hearing.
HAMILTON: A lot like dancing. The idea is to strengthen the pathways that process sound.
The military is also studying the link between head injury and sound processing. Melissa Papesh is a research investigator at the Veterans Affairs National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research. She says that during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the VA began to see something odd in military personnel.
MELISSA PAPESH: We have, all of a sudden, this large influx of relatively young and middle-aged people. They're coming into our audiology clinics and saying, hey, I'm having problems hearing. We test their hearing, and their hearing essentially looks normal.
HAMILTON: Their ears are fine, but their brains can't process what they're hearing. Papesh says that like athletes with concussions, they have trouble separating speech from background noise. And she says they often have another symptom.
PAPESH: They have problems processing rapidly spoken speech. Even the rate that I'm speaking right now might be too rapid for some of these folks to actually process the information.
HAMILTON: The scientists knew that the blast wave from a roadside bomb could cause a concussion, so Papesh says they took a closer look at the patients who had trouble processing sounds.
PAPESH: And when we started looking into some of those cases, it definitely seemed like brain injury and, in particular, blast exposure was really the main thing that was linking those things together.
HAMILTON: Some veterans still have symptoms more than a decade after being exposed to a bomb blast, and Papesh says researchers are trying to figure out whether exposure to lots of smaller blast waves can also affect certain military personnel.
PAPESH: So these are folks who fire shoulder-mounted weapons, or they are folks who are using explosive munitions to try to break through doors.
HAMILTON: This sort of exposure is especially troubling because it can occur during training, as well as in combat.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.