Gender,Politics and Mass Culture

Books reviewed in this article: Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform and Pro‐Censorship Activism, 1873‐1933     

Violent Belongings: Partition,Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India

This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural friendship in eighteenth-century British expansion into Oceania. It suggests that it was in the breach more than the observance that discourses of friendship came to the fore, specifically in resistance to first contact and in accusations of theft. Seen to be motivated by either violent or avaricious passions, theft and native resistance tore the bonds of human sociability asunder. I argue that the significance of friendship was twofold. First, in a context of inter-imperial rivalry, friendship signified native consent in claims of possession over land and thus ensured conformity to legal norms. Second, it promised a system of order governed by norms of affective restraint that could sublimate the passions of natives, voyagers and nations.     

Adaptations: History,Gender, and Political Economy in the Work of Dugald Stewart

Summary

This paper notes and explores the attraction of Dugald Stewart's moral philosophy for women readers and a few women writers. Student lecture notes reveal the chronological development of his ideas, as he drew upon the works of Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, and responded to political events. Particular attention is paid to Stewart's comments relating to women and gender, through discussions of education, the institution of marriage, and population questions. After 1800, he shifted away from a speculative conjectural history towards a philosophy of moral progress rooted in common sense philosophy and a belief in perfectibility. He taught a system of practical morality relevant to the education of children and strongly emphasised the importance of the association of ideas in childhood. For women readers, the message was contradictory in that he united an apparently conservative reinforcement of the relations of the sexes with a belief in the improvement of the condition of women through education in a modern, progressive, and commercial society.     

Remembering the making of Gender,Place and Culture

Separately and together we offer our memories of how Gender, Place and Culture came into being. In so doing we seek to make available the kind of histories that often remain hidden from view. At the same time we illustrate the fallibility of memory and the conditions of possibility that frame what we can narrate.     

Gender,Technology and Local Culture: Tradition and transition in a Swedish municipality

The article is concerned with the gendering of technology, place and time and the interaction between them. The Swedish community of Lindesberg which changed its local policy towards industry and commerce in the 1980s is presented as a case-study. Before the changes, the local policy was restricted to traditionally male jobs; afterwards, it included jobs for women such as 'distance-working' or telecommuting opportunities. The expansion of the local policy is explained by the population's request for work opportunities for women also, although the local image is still very masculine. The old jobs were considered to be traditional but technically qualified jobs. The new jobs were described by the local authorities as new but technically qualified jobs. The first judgement was supported 'by everyone' while the latter was opposed 'by everyone'. The failure to keep the image of technically qualified work connected to the new opportunities for distance-working is explained by the gender labelling of the new work tasks. As they were given to women, and traditionally women are by definition lacking in technical competence, it was not possible to give the work tasks a label of technology and qualification.     

Work,Gender & History in the 1990s and Beyond

By the end of the 1980s, having amply demonstrated that the study of class could no longer be separated from the study of gender, feminist historians were advocating a new gendered history of work. At the beginning of the 1990s, American historian Ava Baron identified four problems that women's labour history had left unresolved: the need to move women's labour history out of its ghetto; an explanation for the mechanisms of sexual difference in labour relations; the theorisation of women's and men's ‘consent’ to oppression; and an understanding of the differences among women. The quest for a gendered labour history required new conceptual tools and new theoretical approaches. This paper tests this agenda against research on work and gender in the last decade of Gender & History. The moves toward the interrelation of public and private, work and family, as well as toward the construction of identities calls into question whether work remains a distinctive historical field.     

Gender Equality and Decent Work in Australia

In 1998 the International Labour Organization (ILO) advanced the notion of ‘decent work’ as a way to enhance opportunities for women and men to obtain productive work in conditions of freedom, equality, security and human dignity. This concept is now both salient and contested in national and international policy debates. In a 2008–09 campaign, the ILO asserted that ‘gender equality [is] at the heart of decent work’. This article examines appeals to decent work in Australian parliamentary discourse and proposes how best to make use of the concept. It argues that gender equality is fundamental to decent work.

1998年世界劳工组织提出了“体面工作”的概念以促进男女在自由、平等、安全和尊严的条件下从事有益的工作。这个概念在国家和国际的政策辩论中都占有显要的位置。国际劳工组织在2008、2009年的活动中,强调性别平等位居体面工作的核心。本文考察了澳大利亚议会的相关言论,并对使用好这个概念有所建议。作者认为性别平等是体面工作的基础。     

Gender,Pay Equity and Human Service Work: A New South Wales Case Study

The 1998 New South Wales Pay Equity Inquiry demonstrates some limitations of dominant theoretical approaches to the undervaluation of work in female-dominated occupations and industries. Campaigns for equal pay could be enriched with a firmer understanding of the complexity of caring and emotional labour in women's paid human service occupations such as nursing, hairdressing and childcare. Such understandings can help redefine skill and worth so as more thoroughly to recognise and reward interpersonal work performed in female-dominated service occupations. Rejecting common moral and economic objections to placing monetary values on these traditionally feminine and ostensibly ‘non-economic’s activities is another ingredient for the historic achievement of gender pay equity.