Christianity,Gender, and the Working Class in Southern Dunedin, 1880–19401

This article is a study of the southern suburbs of Dunedin, which during the late nineteenth century became the most industrialized and working class urban area of New Zealand. Analyzing the social composition of fifteen southern Dunedin churches, I question the idea, widely held by New Zealand historians, that the working classes had largely turned their backs on organized religion. In keeping with recent scholarship in the social history of British and Irish religion, I show that unskilled workers were better represented in many southern Dunedin congregations that previous historians have acknowledged and that skilled workers numerically dominated most churches. When women are included in the analysis, working class predominance increases further. Signing the suffrage petition in remarkable proportions, working class Christian women turned the southern suburbs into a world‐leading first wave feminist community. Moreover, varieties of popular Christianity flourished beyond the ranks of active churchgoers. I conclude by suggesting that New Zealand historians need to rethink the old “lapsed masses” and “secular New Zealand” assumptions and to investigate the diverse varieties of Christianity shaping the culture, and their sometimes conflicting this‐worldly meanings.     

Class,Place, and Gender: Contested Industrial and Domestic Space in Kohler,Wisconsin, USA, 1920–1960

The Kohler company, a family‐owned plumbing manufactory in Wisconsin, USA, known for the ‘garden industrial village’ erected for its workers during the 1910s, managed class relations through a gendered spatial arrangement of its model town. In the 1930s and 1950s, unionists striking at the plant responded by articulating their class alliances within and outside the town in spatial terms that revised the meaning of the place. In the process, the Kohler unions also necessarily refigured domestic space in ways that challenged the company's mapping of domesticity in the 1930s, but they drew back from such challenges in the 1950s.     

Ideal Homes and the Gender Politics of Consumerism in Postcolonial Ghana, 1960–70

This article uses the 1967 Ideal Home Exhibition in Accra as a window onto understanding connections between gender and consumerism in postcolonial Ghana. Drawing upon newspapers, comics and novels, it argues that the home was placed at the centre of national debates about economic recovery and political stability. Major goals of attracting Western investors and building Ghana's private sector simultaneously promoted conservative gender roles and restrictions on consumer behaviour. Cultural stereotypes targeting the consumption habits of women and youth intensified in the postcolonial period, masking larger issues like unstable wages, increasing foreign debts, high costs of living and government corruption.     

Die Berechnung von Wasserfluten. Tideforschung in den Niederlanden, 1920–1960

In the first half of this century a computing problem became evident in the course of preparatory research for major hydraulic projects in the Netherlands. One of the most novel problems was to predict the changes in the tidal movements caused by hydraulic works in coastal waters. Between 1920 and 1960 several solutions were proposed and put into practice: numerical methods, contracting young men for the calculations, analogue electronical networks and large scale models. The amount of computing labour played a decisive part in the choice between these methods. After a storm surge in 1953 causing estensive inundations in the southern part of The Netherlands, the requirements of the Delta Works project gave an enormous impetus to all three types of methods.     

‘To Women in the Year 2000’: Norwegian Historians of Women,c.1900–c.1960

The lives and writings of three women who during the first half of the twentieth century wrote books on women's history are the subject of this article. Ragna Nielsen, a teacher and an amateur historian, in 1904 published her account of women's lives during the first part of the nineteenth century, stressing the sad consequences of patriarchal attitudes, but also the importance of women's contribution to the maintenance of a national identity. Anna Caspari Agerholt and Mimi Sverdrup Lunden, both with masters' degrees in history, belonged to the next generation. Agerholt is mainly remembered for her impressive book of 1927 on the Norwegian women's movement, while Lunden's books of 1942 and 1948 on women's work were important contributions to social history. The writings of these three women's historians are related to dominant positions within Norwegian historiography of their times, highlighting how they helped change central concepts by adding gender to class analysis and to the process of constructing a national identity, stressing the importance of voluntary organisations to the formation of politics and widening the concept of work.     

Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79

In Los Angeles, Hollywood in particular, straight‐themed pornography and gay male nightlife became more visible and, moral reformers believed, of grave public concern between the early 1960s and the early 1970s. As a result, defining the limits of sexual freedom became a problem for urban public officials, who resolved the dilemma by casting heterosexual sex entertainment as disruptive of neighbourhood quality of life, making it a question of property values and crime, and reframing gay nightlife as an issue of privacy and the right of public assembly. The article considers battles over commercial pornography and battles over gay male rights and culture. As the civil rights and black power movements commanded, then lost, the attention of liberals, sexual libertarians and a mobilised gay rights movement forced urban politicians to reconsider the place of sex and sexual identity in public life. A new generation of urban liberals faced a difficult challenge: to respond to their constituents' libertarian views of sex and sexuality while not appearing to endorse civic disorder and economic decline. They had to defend both privacy rights and property rights.