Tales from the Other Side of the Bridge: YMCA Manhood,Social Class and Social Reform in Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Philadelphia

This article examines the interplay of gender and class ideologies at University House, a settlement house run by University of Pennsylvania Christian Association students in Philadelphia. University House exemplified a pioneering national movement to inculcate social responsibility in college youth. As an initiative sponsored by a campus Christian Association that joined a national YMCA movement to evangelise college campuses, the settlement had a unique agenda. The settlement's advocates intended to reform the neighbourhood's working‐class Irish Catholic boys, but also to forge character and manhood in the students who worked there. Moreover, settlement leaders and volunteers preached a brand of manhood steeped in the rhetoric of evangelical Protestantism, an ideal that guided their actions among city boys. Though their publicly stated mission was to make men of city youths, they turned manhood into a tool for preserving class distinctions and cementing their own place among the country's educated élite. Meanwhile, they modified their own definitions of manhood through the practice of social reform.     

In Search of the Social: Steamboats, Square Wheels, Reindeer and Other Things

This paper examines the concept of the ‘social,’ particularly from an archaeological perspective, and explores how it relates to the ways in which we seek to understand the processes of technological innovation and change. It is demonstrated that the concept ‘social’ is far from well defined and that enquiry is bedevilled by artificial polarization between subject-centred approaches and object-centred particularism. Through the medium of early United States steamboat technology a different approach is forged through the melding of people and things with the idea of viewing artefacts as active social actors along with people. Ultimately, it is argued that maritime archaeologists should be more bullish in their approaches to material things—instead of adopting social theories ‘wholesale,’ we should insist that they include the things we study: boats, material objects, people, artefacts, landscapes and animals.     

Tackling the Down Side: Social Capital,Women’s Empowerment and Micro‐Finance in Cameroon

Micro‐finance programmes are currently dominated by the ‘financial self‐sustainability paradigm’ where women’s participation in groups is promoted as a key means of increasing financial sustainability while at the same time assumed to automatically empower them. This article examines the experience of seven micro‐finance programmes in Cameroon. The evidence indicates that micro‐finance programmes which build social capital can indeed make a significant contribution to women’s empowerment. However, serious questions need to be asked about what sorts of norms, networks and associations are to be promoted, in whose interests, and how they can best contribute to empowerment, particularly for the poorest women. Where the complexities of power relations and inequality are ignored, reliance on social capital as a mechanism for reducing programme costs may undermine programme aims not only of empowerment but also of financial sustainability and poverty targeting.