POOR MEN: ON THE MASCULINIZATION OF POVERTY IN SWEDEN, 1957–1981

This paper discusses the underlying causes behind the masculinization of poverty during the period of 1957–1981 in Sweden. Testable hypotheses are derived from a theoretical framework. The findings suggest that the male role as breadwinner disappeared during the analysed period. Lowly educated men and especially male immigrant labour lost their labour market position when industrial society gave way to a new post-industrial society, with an expanding service sector bringing numerous new employment opportunities for women. When sick or unemployed, social assistance was the only social security these men had available. On the other hand, the welfare-state expansion targeted women, particularly single mothers and widows, and thus reduced the number of native women claiming social assistance. The findings also point to the process character of the masculinization of poverty, arguing that women gained significantly more than men from the expansion of the welfare state.     

‘NOBLESSE DE ROBE’ IN A CLASSLESS SOCIETY

This article deals with the effect of ownership and control of land on women's remarriages in early modern Western Norway. Marrying a tenant widow gave her new husband the right to tenure. On freeholder farms the eldest son, according to Norwegian odelsrett and åseterett, had the right to inherit the farm. When land-seeking youngsters obtained tenure by marrying tenant widows, these widows became highly attractive marriage partners, in contrast to widows of freeholder peasants where no secure position could be obtained for the new husband. Legal succession rights thus highly restricted the decisions of freeholder peasants' widows. Tenant widows had a wider range of choices closely linked to their control over land and land transfer. They were not mere passive marriage objects. In an open tenant land market widows could choose between running their farm by hired labour or with assistance from their children, they could remarry and thus acquire male labour in their household or they might benefit from giving up their tenure. Their decisions to a considerable degree influenced succession patterns on Norwegian tenant farms in the early modern period.     

Women's Work in Urban Bangladesh: Is there an Economic Rationale?

The general phenomenon that women in Bangladesh engage less frequently in market work than men is commonly explained as the lack of response of female labour to economic imperatives due to the overarching influence of purdah. However, this emphasis on a cultural rationale for gender-differentiated work behaviour diverts attention away from the deep-rooted economic inequalities at the societal level. This article examines women's work in urban Bangladesh from a female labour supply and demand perspective that is rooted in the socio-economic institutional context. The study finds that, despite the strong gender segregation of economic roles, women's roles are more flexible and lend themselves to changing household strategies more easily compared to men's. The evidence indicates that female labour market participation is largely the outcome of the supply effect shaped by the pattern of gender roles and gender-specific access to human capital. Consequently, women are relegated to low-skill market activities and have lower earnings than men, even without any overt discrimination in labour demand. The covert discrimination that leads women to pursue a different pattern of labour use than men is the fundamental gender bias of socio-economic institutions that govern household allocational decisions and dictate gender-specific behaviour.     

MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF URBAN WELL-BEING

This paper examines the trends and changes in medical assistance at birth among poor and non-poor mothers in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. It also investigates the relative role of public and private health care providers, and social and economic correlates on the non-use of natal care, as well as reasons for this non-use. Data from three rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted over the period 1992–2006 were used. The wealth indices are estimated separately for rural and urban areas, and state-specific poverty line cut-off points are used to demarcate the poor and non-poor. Results show that birth assistance by skilled health professionals remained at an abysmal level, particularly for the poor. There had been no significant increase in the use of natal care among poor mothers during the period 1992–2006. Moreover, the increase in birth assistance by medical professionals came largely from private health care providers, and the use of natal care from public health centres had stagnated over the years.     

Legal status of widows in Denmark 1500-1900

The legal status of widows in Denmark between 1500 and 1900 has been analyzed from three main perspectives. First, we examine the widow as an actor in the private room and, secondly, as actor and object in the public room. The first perspective concerns the general rules as to inheritance of the husband's separate property, the division of the community property and the possibility of retaining the community property in undivided possession on one side, and on the other the possibilities for special agreements between the spouses as to the economy of the widowhood, and agreements between the widow and her kinship or other persons or institutions about her old age maintenance and support. The second perspective concerns the legal status of widows in business life as trading actors or as receivers of public or private pensions or life insurances, and thirdly as objects for social security help. The different economic solutions are evaluated from the point of view that they were favouring the widows at the expense of the children or other heirs.     

Conflict in Water Use in Victoria,Australia: Bolte's Divide

In 1964, the Premier of Victoria, Australia, Henry Bolte, announced that, in order to protect irrigation interests in the north of the state, he would prevent Melbourne from developing new water resources from the north of Victoria's Great Divide. Neither the water resource needs of Melbourne, the need for irrigation development nor the changing economic structure of the state provides a satisfactory explanation for this decision. Instead, Bolte's policy appears simply to have provided a means of improving the parliamentary position of the Victorian Liberal government. Bolte's principle has never been formally revoked and continues to influence water resource planning in the state. In order to make the most appropriate use of Victoria's limited natural resources, it is imperative that ‘Bolte's divide’ should not continue to influence future resource development and allocation.     

Jane Holt,Milliner, and Other Women in Business: Apprentices,Freewomen and Mistresses in The Clothworkers’ Company, 1606–1800

Abstract

This article uses the newly digitised Registers of Apprentices and Freedom Admissions of The Clothworkers’ Company to provide a comprehensive survey of female membership in one City of London Livery Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By analysing who these apprentices, Freewomen and mistresses were and what they did, it aims to shed new light on women’s work in this period. It shows that apprenticeship was used by girls of middling and genteel social status to enter the textile trades and, although few went on to take up their Freedom of the Company, the Clothworkers’ records show an increasing level of female membership over time. Freewomen required membership in order to operate businesses within the City — although patrimony may also have been used to gain access to Company alms — and most mistresses operated through the Company as the wives or widows of Freemen, demonstrating that marriage was no bar to economic activity. Textile-related occupations predominated, with a significant cluster of female milliners in business in prominent City locations, charging high premiums to train apprentices in one of the few genteel and potentially lucrative trades open to women in this period.     

"Oh Mary,Don't You Weep": Progressive Religion in the Living Wage Movement

Abstract

Despite religion's absence in much of secular labor and social movement theories' analyses, progressive religious coalitions are a fundamental partner in the rise of new labor activism in the United States. At a time when media and academia focus on the strength of the "religious right" at the federal level, the success of the municipal living wage movement demonstrates the under-recognized power of the "religious left" in cities around the nation. Through examples from case studies, I document the importance of progressive religion's material and cultural contributions to the movement. In the end, I also contend that paying attention to the successful dynamics of religion-labor alliances at the municipal level can provide important lessons for revitalizing progressive religion's role at the federal level.     

“The ideal home of the South”: The Robert E. Lee Camp Confederate soldiers' home and the institutionalization of Confederate veterans in Virginia

For more than half a century, the Robert E. Lee Camp Soldiers' Home in Richmond, Virginia, provided shelter, food, and medical care to some of the South's neediest Confederate veterans. Applications to the Lee Camp home offer valuable insight into the post-war experiences of a substantial number of Confederate veterans and highlight the enduring effects of the Civil War upon those who fought in it. For such men, the long-term physical and economic ramifications of the conflict largely exceeded the capabilities of existing avenues of social assistance and necessitated the augmentation of state-based welfare efforts. Moreover, applications to the Lee Camp soldiers' home indicate some of the cultural assumptions which informed the home's application process and demonstrate the duality of purpose that has often been regarded by historians as a key characteristic of Confederate veterans' welfare.     

‘Dead dads’: memory narratives of war-related fatherlessness in Germany

After the Second World War, there were estimated to be around 20 million half-orphans in Europe. In Germany alone, 5.3 million soldiers killed in action left behind approximately 1.2 million widows, nearly 2.5 million half-orphans and about 100,000 complete orphans. This article examines how men and women from various social strata in western and eastern Germany remember their fathers who died in the war and in what way he has been stored in the family's collective memory. The analysis focuses on 30 life-history interviews with men and women from eastern and western Germany with various social and religious backgrounds, all of whom were born between 1935 and 1945 and had little or no memory of their fathers. The following questions are relevant: what memories did children have of their fathers, and what images of them were related by mothers and relatives? What individual, political, social and memory-cultural factors characterise a child's memory of her or his father? The article also analyses trans-generational transmissions and conflicts of how the father's past is remembered.     

The Bridgwater Infant Welfare Centre, 1922–1939: from An Authoritarian Concern With 'welfare Mothers' to a More Inclusive Community Health Project?

Abstract

The infant welfare movement in Britain has received considerable scholarly attention but continues to generate controversy and debate. Many of the services began with nineteenth-century voluntary initiative but were later developed by local authorities. Critics have drawn attention to the limitations of such provision; arguing that it was predicated on unattractive assumptions about class and gender roles. Under this interpretation working-class mothers were viewed with suspicion and targeted for advice aimed at inculcating middle-class standards of childcare and housekeeping. This paper accepts that there was an authoritarian character to much of the early welfare work but suggests that over time this gave way to more inclusive approaches that sought to provide clients with the services that met their real rather than assumed needs. This paper reviews the recent historiography, develops an overview of national trends, and then takes a detailed look at the Bridgwater Infant Welfare Centre. The case study benefi ts from unusually comprehensive records and, by drawing on evidence from a small Somerset town, adds to our understanding of infant welfare work that has previously been developed from research on major urban centres.     

The Historical Impact of Welfare Programs on Poverty: Evidence from the American States

Over the years, there has been a spirited debate over the impact of the welfare expansion associated with the War on Poverty. Many analysts have maintained that public assistance expansion during this period decreased poverty by raising the incomes of the poor (an income enhancement effect), while others have contended that welfare expansion increased poverty by discouraging the poor from working (a work disincentive effect). There has been considerable empirical research about the historical effect of welfare on poverty, nearly all of which relies on the poverty rate (i.e., the percentage of persons with income less than the “poverty threshold”) as an indicator of the extent of poverty. However, this work has not employed designs that allow researchers to sort out distinct income enhancement and work disincentive effects. We develop a model of poverty rates in the American states that permits estimation of these distinct effects—based on state‐level time‐series data observed annually for the years 1960–90—and we find that welfare had both effects during our period of analysis. We also calculate the net impact of increases in welfare benefits on the poverty rate—taking into account both work disincentive and income enhancement effects. Our results indicate that this net impact is dependent on three variables: the initial level of cash benefits, wage levels for unskilled workers, and the share of the benefit increase provided through cash rather than in‐kind assistance. Because of historical trends in these variables, since the 1970s welfare spending has become increasingly less effective in reducing the poverty rate. However, the significance of this result for policymakers must be tempered by evidence that flaws in the poverty rate as an indicator of poverty make it so that any finding about the net effect of an increase in welfare benefits on the poverty rate underestimates welfare's ability to lessen the true extent of poverty.     

Women in Genoese commenda contracts, 1155–1216

An examination of the earliest notarial documents preserved in the State Archive of Genoa reveals that Genoese women were regular and active participants in their city's commercial operations through the use of the popular commenda partnership contract. In fact, women recorded investments in nearly one-quarter of over 4000 surviving contracts dating from 1155 to 1216. Nearly three-quarters of all women named in commenda contracts were investing their own property within the act and most of the remainder were proctoring investments for someone else. Women's individual investments were, on the average, less than half as large as men's, and women tended to concentrate their commercial involvement into long-distance trade rather than local or regional ventures. Study of family investment patterns reveals two especially important connections involving women. Women married to travelling merchants invested their husbands' property during their spouses' long periods of absence, and widows sought to increase both their own property and the patrimony left to their sons by putting capital from both sources into trading ventures.     

Everyone Begins as Fish & Captivated – by that

Abstract

An invited address in 1964 constitutes the pre-history of fractals, and a justification is given here why its publication is now of interest because of its interdisciplinary nature. Fractal geometry has been successful as mathematics and has – through computer graphics – pioneered a new art. But until 1975, the author's work was generally considered as premature. In the original address of 1964, which here follows the historical introduction, the author states the mathematical basis for his philosophy of the Second Stage of Indeterminism in Science. The term fractals was not coined until 11 years after the original address of 1964.     

Locating widows in mid-nineteenth century Pictou County,Nova Scotia

This article takes up the challenge of how to begin to include women in the historical geography of the Maritimes. It makes an intervention through a case study of the place of widows in one mid-19th century county in Nova Scotia. For women, widowhood was a life-phase of conflicting emotions, replete with the contradiction that came from the loss of a patriarch. While it offered potential freedom, widowhood could also signal uncertainty, and often, dependence. The cultural identity and economic and legal treatment of widows represented a strongly patriarchal age in which the doctrines of a ‘cult of domesticity’ and an ideology of ‘separate spheres’ influenced the life-course of widows. Spatial change often accompanied widowhood, with widows moving into a room in their old house, or to a new location.     

Knitting,Autonomy and Identity: The Role of Hand-Knitting in the Construction of Women's Sense of Self in an Island Community,Shetland, c. 1850–2000

Abstract

Hand knitting of woollen clothing by women was a key economic activity throughout the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century in the Shetland islands. It integrated women into the market and enabled women to construct an identity for themselves based on their relationship with production and the wider economy. Generally regarded as a either a backward remnant of the pre-industrial economy or a traditional craft with little economic value, hand knitting does not belong to the story of women's work and independence in the modern industrial era. This article argues that hand knitting and the means by which it was produced and traded occupied a central place in the web of female relationships on the islands, helping to create a female culture characterized by an acknowledgement of women as producers with economic autonomy.     

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

Resettlement in Lao PDR: mobility,resistance and gendered impacts

Villagers in northern Laos have been on the move for generations. Recent changes, however, in the location of their village and their daily mobility patterns differ from what they have experienced before; the government's resettlement programme has changed their livelihoods and made them more socially and economically vulnerable. The ethnic groups we studied have decided to use mobility to resist state control and seek livelihood security for themselves. By using the concept of motility, this article analyses how this household and community choices have a gender-differentiated impact. The mobility patterns of men and women have changed. While men attend to long-term investments, women are forced to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis. Men visit the market and public places more frequently, while women spend more time looking for non-timber forest products and working as hired labour. Although women now support the family and their mobility has increased, their say in the household seems to be on the decline, resulting in weakening women's motility.