“The producers on the one side,and the capitalists on the other”: Labor Reform,Slavery, and the Career of a Transatlantic Radical

Abstract

Through exploring the neglected career of John Campbell, an Irish-born Chartist refugee who ascended to a leadership role in the antebellum American labor movement, this article seeks to shed light on how revolutionary upheaval in Europe, debates over immigration, and sectional conflict affected working-class politics. Focusing on the period 1848 to 1851, and tracing Campbell's rapid evolution from a radical opponent of slavery to an ardent supporter of black subjugation, I argue that labor historians need to pay closer attention to shifting local and national contexts to understand the racial politics of labor agitators. Yet even as Campbell's views changed, his commitment to a producerist vision remained constant; by 1851 he had simply added people of African descent to a list of “idle” nonproducers who lived off the labor of workingmen. His proslavery twist on producer ideology suggests historians of antebellum social relations may need to go beyond interrogating the racial dimensions of artisan republicanism to gain a fuller understanding of the variety of working-class attitudes to race.     

Perspectives: On Political Science: Annual Index Volume 30, 2001

Abstract

Although Tocqueville called Jefferson “the greatest democrat, who has yet issued from within the American democracy,” a close reading of their works suggests that Tocqueville’s assessment of Jefferson was far more mixed than first appears. In the first section, I take up Jefferson’s understanding of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and offer arguments for why Tocqueville chose not to cite the Declaration in Democracy in America. Using those writings of Jefferson available to Tocqueville in French translation, I show that Tocqueville saw in Jefferson’s own understanding of those principles certain dangerous tendencies of the democratic mind. Yet there is one principle on which both agree: the natural right to political liberty and association. Section two compares their contrasting views of republican constitutionalism, taking into account Jefferson’s evolving views of republicanism as well as Tocqueville’s analysis of both the American constitution and his contributions to the committee that framed the French constitution in 1848. The concluding section analyzes their differing assessments of philosophical materialism and religion in preserving the political liberty both sought.     

The Textile Millwright in the Early Industrial Revolution

Abstract

Newspaper runaway advertisements are one of the best sources of information on American women's working-class dress, but have only been minimally analysed in quantity. This article presents a project in which the notices of 900 women's elopements and their 5,600 garments have been catalogued in a relational database to provide greater access to garment data in runaway advertisements, including textile use, colour and patterning information. Data about the women, including physical characteristics, geographical location and ethnicity are linked to the garment data to allow contextual searches. Select initial investigations into preconceived notions of women's working-class clothing during this period are included to demonstrate future research directions based on this approach.     

Don Isaac Abravanel and Leonardo Bruni: A Literary and Philosophical Confrontation

Abstract

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the first Jewish thinkers to express republican positions, yet very little is known about his knowledge of humanistic republican conceptions. Had he read Leonardo Bruni’s republican writings? Had he even heard of them? In this essay I attempt to address this philological gap by comparing Abravanel’s republican commentary on 1 Samuel 8 with Bruni’s Laudatio florentinae Urbis, especially the motif of the plea to God to authorize a political regime. This comparison is particularly useful for illuminating their respective positions on republicanism, their shared interests and conceptions, as well as their divergent attitudes to their own political and historical environment. This divergence, I argue, sheds light on the early modern Christian and Jewish receptions of ancient republicanism.     

Men and anti-violence initiatives: transnational feminist reflections from Afghanistan and Pakistan

Abstract

This article looks at how international development’s rhetoric for enlisting men to take up anti-violence against women’s work is translated into reality. Based on fieldwork conducted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I argue that whilst there have been success stories of men’s behaviour changing, the localisation of gender concepts and ideas into local frameworks has not been as successful. Furthermore, inattention to how gender relations are shaped by conflict and violence results in the dilution of feminist values around work on violence against women. This inattention also privileges middle-class men’s activism at the expense of activism by women and men from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds. The article concludes with a call for further transnational feminist dialogue and interventions in the area of men’s involvement, so that current and future initiatives are critical, reflexive and relevant.     

The Open University – So Far

Abstract

The Open University was founded out of Harold Wilson's vision of a Television University at the time of the Robbins Report of 1963; it was brought into being through Jennie Lee and Peter Venables and, later, Walter Perry. Lord Crowther, as first Chancellor, outlined the openness as to people, places, methods and ideas. Among the most interesting features of the innovation were teaching by teamwork, making possible laboratory experience at a distance, the use of broadcasting, supplying students with the written word, and problems of evaluation. About 20 000 students were finally registered for tbe first year. About 15 per cent classify themselves as working-class; the majority are from working-class homes but in middle-class jobs. The undergraduate population has now stabilized at 60 000. The total number of full courses or their equivalent is to be 88 in 6 faculties. Students graduate with 6 credits or 8 for honours. A student pays at present a little over £1000 for a full programme. In addition there is a new emphasis on short courses for assciate students. The University has had considerable impact overseas and in the United Kingdom.     

Introduction: The Historiography of Republicanism and Republican Exchanges

Abstract

Though the history of republicanism has been a popular topic of research since the mid-twentieth century, there are still various issues and areas that have remained neglected—not least the exchange of republican ideas from one cultural context to another, particularly across national boundaries. The purpose of this special issue is to offer some exploration of this neglected area, and this essay serves as an introduction to it. The essay offers an overview of the literature on republicanism that has been produced since the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the different ways in which republican exchange can be conceived and considers how the essays that follow contribute to our understanding of this issue, and finally it proposes a new way of thinking about republicanism.     

‘He Likes Women More Than He Likes Drink and That Is Quite Unusual’: Working-Class Social Clubs,Male Culture,and Heterosocial Relations in the United States, 1920s–1930s

Throughout the early twentieth century working-class men spent much of their leisure time in their basement hangouts, known as social clubs. Social clubs usually formed out of the associational life of young working-class men and remained attached to a larger male culture. But they were also used for dances and other heterosocial interaction. This essay examines the organisation of these clubs and how members used them to negotiate homosocial and heterosocial leisure. In particular, it explores the struggles between men and women over the use of club space and how those struggles affected their relationships and male culture.     

Gendered mobilities and immobilities: Women’s and men’s capacities for agricultural innovation in Kenya and Nigeria

Abstract

Social norms surrounding women’s and men’s mobility in public spaces often differ. Here we discuss how gendered mobilities and immobilities influence women’s and men’s capacities to innovate in agriculture. We analyze four case studies from Western Kenya and Southwestern Nigeria that draw on 28 focus group discussions and 32 individual interviews with a total of 225 rural and peri-urban women, men and youth. Findings show that women in both sites are less mobile than men due to norms that delimit the spaces where they can go, the purpose, length of time and time of day of their travels. Overall, Kenyan women and Nigerian men have better access to agricultural services and farmer groups than their gendered counterparts. In Southwestern Nigeria this is linked to masculine roles of heading and providing for the household and in Western Kenya to the construction of women as the ‘developers’ of their households. Access and group participation may reflect norms and expectations to fulfill gender roles rather than an individual’s agency. This may (re)produce mobility pressures on time constrained gendered subjects. Frameworks to analyze factors that support women’s and men’s agency should be used to understand how gendered mobilities and immobilities are embedded in community contexts and affect engagement in agricultural innovation. This can inform the design of interventions to consider the ways in which norms and agency intersect and influence women’s and men’s mobilities, hence capacity to innovate in agriculture, thus supporting more gender transformative approaches.     

Dancers in the Dark: Scientific Careers According to a Gender-Blind Model of Promotion

Abstract

The disparity between men and women in science is a hot topic in gender studies and a relevant target of scientific policies. The leaky pipeline metaphor illustrates the decreasing number of women along senior positions in academia; however many questions remain unanswered. What factors progressively diminish the number of women in scientific careers and why do they appear to be less successful than their male colleagues? In order to discover new insight, this work compares men’s and women’s career paths by taking into account academic and family milestones achieved throughout the life course. An innovative and interdisciplinary methodology (from bibliometrics, statistics, and sociology) has been constructed to examine men’s and women’s trajectories. Findings display gender differences in scientists’ trajectories. The evolution of scientists’ careers reveals linear careers for males, whilst women develop non-linear careers. Motherhood emerges as a problem for developing linear careers. And collegiate decisions of gatekeepers seem to systematically disfavour women scientists’ careers.     

Toward Equity: The Poor and University Students

Abstract

This is a response of the College of Commerce, University of Santo Tomas, to poverty and inequity in the Philippines. Started in 2004-2005, the entrepreneurship course is known as the Triple E program: Entrepreneurship and Ethics education toward Equity. The course unites knowing and doing through opportunities for students to know the poor more as producers and consumers. The vision is for graduates to provide affordable goods, services, and paid work especially to low-income women and out-of-school youth. As a guide, students are oriented to the Triple L model of working with grassroots women—Listening, Leadership, and Livelihood.     

‘A real woman has to do it all – with the kids and in the office’: Doing femininity in the transcultural context of Russian-German migration

The au pair stay allows young women to experience the doing gender of family work and waged work in another cultural context than their own. This article investigates how Russian university graduates, who had been working as an au pair in Germany, developed transcultural strategies to balance work and family for their prospective future referring to these different experiences. It will be shown that interviewees rejected the Soviet family model of the fulltime ‘working mother’. Some women positively evaluated that in Germany the equality of gender has been better established than in Russia and aimed at sharing housework with their partner. Criticizing the outsourcing of childcare to an employee, in this family model femininity is not based on housework but on women's dedication to motherhood. Other women negatively evaluated that in Germany the family model of the ‘business woman’ characterized by women's role as the main breadwinner of the family and the primary provider of family work has developed. These women preferred to work part-time to be able to care for their families. In this family model the responsibility of breadwinning is ascribed solely to men, while women's waged work is constructed as time devoted to women's individual needs by offering an intellectual challenge and an individual income.     

Metamorphosis: The Making of Daniel Guérin, 1904–1930

This article explores the early years of Daniel Guérin (1904–88), who from the 1930s onwards became known as a leading revolutionary socialist and campaigner for decolonisation, antimilitarism and homosexual liberation. It examines the ‘making of Daniel Guérin’ in two senses: (i) his transformation from a son of the grande bourgeoisie into a workerist revolutionary and anti-imperialist; and (ii) Guérin's own retrospective representation of his early years through his autobiographical works, as well as interviews. Based on a close reading of these sources, his two novels as well as his private papers and other archival material including police reports, it provides fresh insights into the formative influences on his ideological development. Rather than focusing exclusively on the influence of his liberal, Dreyfusard family, or the impact of his relationships with working-class men or his experiences of colonial realities, it brings to light the influence on him of Tolstoy and of Gandhi, an influence which would inform a strong ethical core in his libertarian conception of socialism. The article also argues that despite the apparently protean nature of his political itinerary, there was in fact always an underlying ideological consistency to Guérin's libertarian Marxism.     

Learning to be suburban: the production of community in Westwood Hills, Pennsylvania, 1952–1958

In 1952, working-class women in the newly built suburb of Westwood Hills, Pennsylvania began publishing a mimeographed newsletter entitled The Hilltrotter. They used the newsletter to shape their community and by doing so learned and taught how to be suburban. This process occurred both discursively and materially, as the staff of The Hilltrotter simultaneously sought to create a shared conception of community and to shape the everyday lives of Westwood Hills' residents. This paper investigates the work of women on The Hilltrotter and by doing so shows how they produced a constellation of identities – of community, class, age, gender, and citizenship. They constructed these identities through their efforts to make Westwood Hills into a safe, stable, and well-ordered suburban community. In doing so they contributed to the formation of a postwar hegemonic order that enlisted the working class in the reproduction of capitalism.     

Rethinking the value of unpaid care work: lessons from participatory visual research in central Tanzania

Abstract

The contemporary international development agenda addresses several important gender issues, including the contribution of unpaid care work (UCW) to human well-being. The inclusion of UCW into the mainstream policy debate is undoubtedly a major milestone in the history of feminist scholarship and activism. However, we argue that the universalistic and capitalocentric assumptions laden in the dominant policy discourse belie the diversity of the lived experiences and subjective meanings of UCW often performed by women and girls in different cultural and geographical contexts, particularly in the predominantly agrarian global South. We draw on participatory and visual ethnographic fieldwork to show that rural women in Tanzania perceive UCW as an experience that entails not only physical toil and drudgery, but also positive emotions of joy, satisfaction, and fulfilment, which are integral to affirming their self-perceived identities and roles as farmers and mothers in their communities. These material, affective, and symbolic dimensions of UCW emerge from agrarian women’s situated knowledges and experiences of ensuring household social reproduction on and with the land, as well as the gender relations and seasonal dynamics that shape the organization of work tasks in agrarian landscapes. To achieve transnational gender justice, we suggest that a more fine-tuned and nuanced approach to understanding the variability and complexity of care work as practiced and perceived by heterogeneous groups of women (and men) in particular places and times is needed.     

‘Whose name's on the awning?’ Gender,entrepreneurship and the American diner

While, in recent years, women-owned businesses have become increasingly common, entrepreneurship itself remains a deeply gendered institution, and one that is constructed through everyday practice rooted in space and place. The purpose of the present study is to explore the woman-owned diner as a distinct environment in and through which configurations of gender and entrepreneurship are mutually constituted, socially enacted, and spatially defined. Drawing upon a case study of a present-day diner in Worcester, Massachusetts, I trace the life narratives of two working-class women through their emergence as entrepreneurs in the diner industry. I reflect upon the distinctive space of the woman-owned diner as it is produced through the interaction between the gendered body-subjects of women owners, the social meaning of ‘feeding work’, and the spatial character of the diner institution. Through the gendered social practice of diner ownership, these two women have overcome substantial social, economic and geographic obstacles to their independence and worked to bridge the divide between the value of public and private work. Building on existing scholarship in the field, this study demonstrates the potential for women's agency through everyday practice as business owners, to create new spaces and alternative means of practicing both gender and entrepreneurship.     

Classical and Liberal Republicanisms and the New Consumer Culture

United States archaeologists working on the East Coast have recognized a massive discard of consumable goods, such as ceramics and glass, in archaeological contexts that date to the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Explanations for this phenomenon have varied from "changing households" to "style consciousness" to the "Americanization of the U.S. population." I examine the acquisition and eventual discard of consumer goods from several working-class households found at a former industrial armory town, Harpers Ferry. The town is about 60 mi from several coastal port towns and the domestic assemblages display a pattern similar to that of the East Coast sites, although there is a lag of about a decade. While economic models are often used by archaeologists to explain human behavior, cultural patterns are more complex and a variety of phenomena needs to be examined. The growth of consumerism and the eventual massive discard of goods in Harpers Ferry may also be explained by the fall of classical republicanism and the rise of liberal republicanism and romantic ideals in the United States.     

Learning to Serve? Employment aspirations and attitudes of young working-class men in an era of labour market restructuring

Economic restructuring in cities in advanced industrial nations has, perhaps for the first time in more than a century, resulted in young working-class people facing poorer economic prospects than their parents did at the same age. For poorly educated and low-skilled young men, in particular, the decline in urban manufacturing employment means that their employment opportunities are limited and the possibilities of gaining and retaining relatively well-paid work have declined in the final decades of the twentieth century. As the socially-valued attributes of masculinity are so dependent upon economic participation, the loss of work for men is seen by many commentators as a crisis, and it has undoubtedly led to increases in poverty, as well as being associated with rises in suicide rates, especially among younger men. In this article, the author explores the ways in which young men on the verge of entering the labour market think about themselves and their employment opportunities. The article is based on interviews with low-achieving young men in Cambridge and Sheffield who were in the final year of compulsory schooling and beginning to think about their working lives.     

Children's Strikes, Parents' Rights: Paterson and Five Points

While Karen Calvert's book, Children in the House, deals with middle-class play, there is very little work devoted to children's toys and games in a working-class context. This paper uses the toy assemblages from two working-class sites to begin a discussion of working-class play and the struggle nineteenth-century working-class parents waged to impart their own values to their children. Because marbles were the predominant toy recovered from both sites, the nature of the game is discussed, and its relationship to working-class values is considered.     

La République, l’affaire Dreyfus et la raison d’État

It is often said that the Dreyfus Affair was a key moment in the history of french republicanism. But the philosophical sens of this turning point remains to be elucidated. Indeed it is not certain that the republican discourse can then be reduced to the apology of the individual and of justice against the reason of State. The aim of this article is to analyse the arguments mobilised in the Dreyfus camp by certain figures of republican socialism, like Jean Jaurès, or of republicanism like Alfred Fouillée, Emile Durkheim and others. The examination of the positions of Célestin Bouglé, a young sociologist close to Durkheim, is here privileged: it is situated, through his biography and his work, at the crossroads of diverse tendencies, from positivism to neo-criticism.