"Hats off, gentlemen, to our Australian mothers!" Representations of white femininity in North Queensland in the early twentieth century

This paper examines some representations of the anxiety and uncertainty about "white woman's place" in tropical North Queensland that were present in medical and general discourse in the early twentieth century. It focuses on white women's work in the private sphere as both the source of and the solution to these anxieties. Although 'White Australia' had been legislatively established in the "public sphere" by the 1920s, through the passage of the Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act of 1897, and the Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, in the tropics there was still public concern about how it would be established in the "private sphere". This was because even though the conventional wisdom that a white man could not work in the tropics and remain healthy had been successfully challenged by the early twentieth century, the same could not be said about such wisdom as it applied to white women and children. This paper looks at some of the ways that ideologies of race and gender intersected in the early twentieth century to construct white women and children as a group that could bring down the successful establishment of "White Australia", and this group was specially targeted for surveillance by the "new experts" of medicine, sociology and domestic science.     

Empowering women: an essential objective

The draft action plan of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) calls for enhancing women's participation in all levels of the political process and public life, promoting women's education and employment with attention to alleviation of poverty and illiteracy, halting discriminatory practices against women, establishing women's rights, and improving women's ability to earn income and achieve economic self-reliance. The document specifically refers to the importance of girls beyond their traditional roles as potential childbearers and caretakers. The action plan requests actions to enforce minimum marriage age laws and to assure women's choice in spouse selection. Female genital mutilation is prohibited. Preventive efforts are to be directed to infanticide, prenatal sex selection, trafficking in girls, female prostitution, and pornography. The men who are in positions of power have a particular responsibility to bring about gender equality and to focus on men's responsibility in parenthood and child support. Fertility is related to women's paid employment and higher educational levels. The longterm success of population programs is dependent on women's ability to make informed decisions at all levels and in all spheres of life.     

"A sudden and terrible revelation": motherhood and infant mortality in France, 1858-1874

In 1874, legislators in France passed a law regulating the wet-nursing industry. Citing recent medical research into the causes and social costs of high infant mortality, the law's supporters met little opposition, despite the fact that the law challenged the tradition of paternal authority and familial autonomy that had been inscribed in French law since the promulgation of the Civil Code of 1804. Extending state power into the familial realm required a concerted effort by reformers, who concentrated on two issues: maternal responsibility for newborn infants and the social costs of early death. Because working women in urban areas used wet-nurses to preserve their wage-earning capacity, reformers capitalized on widespread opposition to women's labor outside the home. The law met little opposition in part because the issues of paternal authority had already been thoroughly debated several months earlier in the child labor law of 1874.     

'Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place': Anti-discrimination Legislation in the Liberal State and the Fate of the Australian Disability Discrimination Act

This article offers a critical analysis of some of the practical implications for disabled people of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992. Specifically, it raises questions about politics and the role of the law as an instrument of social changetaking greater account of the interests of disabled peopleon the one hand, and of the reliance of the social model of disability on a strategy based upon legal rights on the other. The article also suggests that the constraining effects of Australia's constitutional protections of rights and its federal system of government hinder the mildly progressive elements of the Disability Discrimination Act. To illustrate this, the paper employs empirical evidence to suggest that these effects have been exacerbated by the passage of the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Act in 1999.     

浅析加拿大新移民法对华人的影响

加拿大的新移民法在 2 0 0 2年 6月 2 8日起开始生效 ,这一新法是进入 2 1世纪加国第一次对移民问题的立法。新法做了很大的修改 ,它将对约一百万名华裔社群 ,以及每年成千上万梦想移民加国的华人产生深远的影响     

The rights of a Florida wife: slavery, U.S. expansion, and married women's property law

Civil law rules were adopted in Florida that granted married women property rights long before legal reforms occurred in northern states. This article analyzes white wives' property and law in Florida between 1820 and 1860. Initially, married women's property rights were inadvertently protected by treaty law and limited to women who married before 1818. Wives' right to own separate property in Florida was subsequently reconfirmed in statute and extended to include later marriages. In contrast, nonwhites generally lost the rights and property they had enjoyed under Spain's civil law in the same period. This contrast reveals that in Florida (and other southern borderlands) it was not concern for women, or simply legal precedent, but the desire to incorporate new territory and expand slavery that influenced the development of marital property law. This challenges previous histories, which have excluded the earlier acts in the Southern borderlands and emphasized those passed in the Northeast beginning in the late 1840s. While those later acts were influenced by the early woman's rights movement and by concern for families reduced to poverty during the rise of market capitalism, this case study indicates that expansion of United States territory and slavery were responsible for the earlier married women's property rights in southern borderland territories such as Florida.     

The trial of the new woman: citizens-in-training in the new Soviet Republic

This essay examines the texts of Soviet plays from the 1920s known as agitation trials that deal with issues of women's emancipation and participation in the public sphere. It argues that, far from showing women to be men's equals (the ostensible purpose of the plays), the trials give a shocking portrayal of their heroines' faults, from passivity and meddling to gossip and lack of discipline. Given these weaknesses, the women delegates are supposed to recognise their need for tutelage from the new authorities. Their citizenship is thus held, at best, on contingent approval from those authorities.     

The Genesis of the 1906 Trades Disputes Act: Liberalism, Trade Unions, and the Law

The Trades Disputes Act of 1906 occupies an important positionin the history of trade unionism, industrial relations, andlabour politics. Far less attention has been devoted to itsplace in the development of Liberal politics. Historians ofliberalism tend to portray the act as an uninteresting reversionto the pre-Taff Vale position and symptomatic merely of theparty's desire to placate labour. This article suggests thatexisting accounts of the Act's genesis place insufficient emphasison its Liberal origins and that arguments about trade unionlaw provide important insights into the character of the partyand its creed. The argument is in three parts. The first considersthe constraints on liberal legislators. The second investigatesthe meaning of the debates surrounding the Act's passage. Itrestores the Act to its proper intellectual context by recoveringthe variety of views about trade union law present in Edwardianliberalism. The last section uses these arguments to demonstrateboth the resilience of radicalism within the party and the emergenceof a novel social democratic progressivism. Only thus, it isclaimed, is it possible to understand the passage and meaningof the Act. * A number of people have helped in the preparation of thisarticle. I would like to thank David Armutage, Eugeruo Biagiru,Elizabeth Emens, Jon Lawrence, Nomi Levy, Alastair Reid, EmmaRothschild, Lisa Tiersen and Philip Waller I benefited greatlyfrom the comments of the anonymous referees and the assistanceof the editors of Twentieth Century British History. I owe aspecial debt of gratitude to David Cannadine, Peter Clarke andVictoria de Grazia.     

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMPHREY-HAWKINS*

Humphrey-Hawkins, enacted into law as the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, is the most important step the Federal government has taken for overall economic coordination since passage of the Employment Act of 1946. The centerpiece of the new law is specific goals for unemployment and inflation. All Federal programs and policies are to work toward achieving a 3 percent adult and 4 percent overall jobless rate within five years, and inflation rates of 3 percent by 1983 and 0 percent by 1988. The present article outlines the major changes made in Humphrey-Hawkins from its introduction in June 1974 to its enactment in October 1978, the contents of the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, and the politics surrounding its passage.     

'I Thought from Her Appearance That She Was in the Family Way': Detecting Infanticide Cases In Ireland, 1900–1921

Abstract

Between 1900 and 1919 nine hundred cases of infanticide and concealment of birth were recorded as being known to the police in Ireland. There was often no suspect in these cases and many more infanticides must have gone undetected during the first two decades of the 20th century. This article examines the ways in which infanticide cases involving unmarried women came to police attention in Ireland between 1900 and 1921. Many suspected cases of infanticide at the time were investigated by the police because of 'information' they received from members of the public. A considerable number of investigations began even before a body was discovered. It is clear from an examination of these cases that the sexual behaviour of single women, particularly those living in tight-knit rural communities, was closely monitored. This article also explores the ways in which employers, doctors and the relatives of unmarried women responded to suspected cases of infanticide.     

Religion,Community and The Infanticidal Mother: Evidence From 1840s Rural Wiltshire

Abstract

The existing literature on the history of infanticide has typically considered the crime as a reaction to a specifi c set of diffi cult individual circumstances, but has not attempted to place the infanticidal mother within a longer personal timeframe. Nor has the role of her religious belief been much examined. This article investigates three key elements in the case of Rebecca Smith (1807–1849), the last woman executed in England for the murder of her own infant: her bad marriage; her poverty; and her Baptist religion. These factors provide context for her socio-economic and psychological development, and thus for her status as England's best documented serial infant killer. The article suggests that, as a married woman, Smith's choices were infl uenced by conditions both wider and deeper than the more immediate issues which have tended to be associated with infanticide by unmarried women.     

The problem of “technological unemployment” in the industrial research of the 1930's in the United States∗

The article surveys the findings and debates about “technological unemployment” carried out in the 1920's and 1930's in the United States. The huge productivity increases of the 1920's had sizable labour‐displacing effects, which were not matched by the job‐creating trends of prosperity. Unemployment was therefore a sizable and observable phenomenon as early as the late 1920's, while manufacturing employment shrank. After 1929, it was found that the Depression had hit production and investment hard, but productivity per man‐hour continued to increase. This meant that, because of the increases in population of working age and because of technological progress, in the late 1930's it would have been necessary to outgrow the levels of investment and production of 1929 in order to bring unemployment down to the 1929 rate. Even the recovery of 1937 remained much below those levels: the cause was seen in the behavior of large, concentrated industrial firms that administered prices and only applied technological advances in order to reduce costs. Their limited spending did not foster enough demand to move the economy out of the slump. The recovery was eventually brought about not by spontaneous, market‐driven economic behaviour, but by the deus‐ex‐machina of war‐induced Government spending.

A separate study of the theories of technological progress out‐distancing the job‐creating trends of prosperity is in preparation.     

‘Arsenic of the size of a pea’

It is one of criminology’s (few) established truths that women commit far fewer violent crimes than men do. This has been especially evident when it comes to deadly violence. Besides witchcraft and infanticide there is, however, another serious crime that has been associated with women: poisoning. This article studies female poisoners in 19th-century Sweden. The investigation shows that poisonings were fairly common during this period, albeit far from being an exclusively female affair. The empirical findings reveal that these crimes were directed at several different categories of victims: spouses, children and elderly household members, as well as other women. It is also shown that a considerable number of the women accused of poisoning was acquitted, in many cases thanks to the strict process rules associated with the statutory theory of legal proof. Theoretically, the article hypothesizes an understanding of these poisonings where agency is placed at the centre. They are thus seen as acts where (female) subjectivity was created during this period.     

WESTMORLAND WEDDINGS: A STUDY OF THE 1787 CENSUS

Abstract

There has been much speculation about marriage practices in 18th century England, and many commentators have assumed that cohabitation was common, particularly among the lower orders. More recent work on southern parishes has, however, suggested that formal marriage was the norm, and cohabitation vanishingly rare, both before and after the passage of the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753. This article sets out to test whether that conclusion holds good for those more remote parts of the north-west in which, it has been claimed, informal practices still flourished. Drawing on a cohort of over a thousand couples identified from the Westmorland ‘census’ of 1787, this article discusses the challenges in tracing where and when those couples had married, and shows how all the evidence nonetheless suggests very high levels of compliance with the formal legal requirements. This in turn has important implications for the assumed completeness of parochial registers and the likelihood of family historians being able to trace a marriage.     

“Reading the riot act”;: The discourse of law‐enforcement in 18th century England

During the past two decades historians have devoted much attention both to the crowd as a socio‐cultural phenomenon and a political force, and to the discontinuities between the increasingly Draconian legal discourse of the 18th century and the discretionary practice which accompanied it This article combines both concerns: study of the working of the Riot Act in 18th century England, by focussing on the use of penal law against crowds rather than single offenders, brings into particularly sharp relief the contradictions of a legal system which depended heavily on the support of the general public both for law‐enforcement and for the efficacious operation of the practice of ‘exemplary’ public execution of selected offenders. Government was particularly anxious in the case of riots that the law should be seen to be effectively enforced, yet reluctant to abandon the ‘rule of law’ for indiscriminate use of troops against rioters. The ambiguities of the situation are well reflected both in the ostensible respect for law which characterised debates on interpretation of the Riot Act at all levels from the Privy Council to the popular press, and in the wide discretion tacitly used in applying the law by judges and juries.     

Wives and mothers like ourselves? Exploring white women's intervention in the politics of race, 1920s-1940s

This paper takes the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children, and the broader white anxiety over the 'half-caste problem' which underpinned the policy, to explore white women reformers' intervention in the politics of race in the years 1920-40. In these years middle-class women's citizenship was based on maternalism and the defence of motherhood. At the same time the national feminist lobby, the Australian Federation of Women Voters, joined the public debate about the 'Aboriginal problem'. In this context it is necessary to ask: What was the feminist view of Aboriginal women's status? Were they considered 'wives and mothers' like themselves, as Louisa Lawson suggested in the 1890s? What was their view of the 'half-caste problem' and the 'absorption proposal' formulated to solve it? By asking such questions I hope to modify the current feminist historiographical view of white women reformers as 'pro-Aboriginal' and 'radical' and their policies as challenging White Australia in these years.     

Between affiliation and autonomy: navigating pathways of women's empowerment and gender justice in rural Bangladesh

Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent." They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. It draws on their narratives to explore the collective strategies through which these organizations sought to empower the women and how they in turn drew on their newly established "communities of practice" to navigate their own pathways to wider social change. It concludes that while the value attached to social affiliations by the women in the study is clearly a product of the societies in which they have grown up, it may be no more context-specific than the apparently universal value attached to individual autonomy by many feminists.     

Rethinking British Communist Party Women in the 1920s

Until very recently, writing on the Communist Party of GreatBritain (CPGB) concentrated primarily on the party's relationshipwith the Communist International (to which it was affiliated)and the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow. Far less attention hasbeen paid to the actual men and women who made up the ranksof the CPGB and sought to establish the party's identity ata grass roots level. This article examines the experiences ofwomen in the CPGB during the 1920s, particularly in relationto women's politics in the period, and with regard to the socialisttraditions that preceded and partly informed the CPGB's earlydevelopment. It argues that despite communist avocation of aparty of a ‘new type’, the CPGB inherited many ofthe existing uncertainties as to the role of women within socialistorganization.