Masculinity,Modernity and Male Baldness,c.1880-1939

Male baldness was a very common experience but it has rarely been considered by historians of any period or place. This article argues that baldness reveals a precariousness and vanity to masculinity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Baldness limited men's ability to self-fashion their appearance. It made them the target of jokes, marked the fact they were getting older, undermined their looks and, perhaps, made them less attractive to women. There was thus a vigorous market for cures and preventatives. Such products show how deep superstitions and irrational thinking could run, but understandings of the condition were also rooted in the social and cultural conditions of the day. The glamour of Hollywood, a keep-fit culture, growing advertising of male-grooming products and the fading of hat wearing from fashion, all intensified interwar anxieties around baldness. Not everyone worried about baldness, however, and men's feelings about their hair owed much to personality and circumstance. Baldness thus not only reveals the precarious nature of masculinity but also its inconsistent and inherently personal dimensions.     

Hospital contributory schemes and the NHS debates 1937-46: the rejection of social insurance in the British welfare state?

This article considers the discussion and rejection of social insurance model of funding for the British National Health Service. Specifically it asks why the hospital contributory scheme movement had so little impact on policy debates in the 1940s. We argue that at the start of the policy-making process serious consideration was given to the incorporation of this mode of funding, not least because the contributory schemes, with some ten million members, played a major role in financing existing voluntary hospital provision. Early sections describe the growth and nature of the schemes, noting that, despite their large working-class constituency and the presence of labour movement representatives amongst their leadership, they remained peripheral to discussion of reform in the interwar period. We then trace the emergence of the proposal for an insurance-based 'hotel-charge' in civil servants' discussions about hospital funding the Beveridge Report. Officials, however, remained sceptical about the contributory schemes' capacity to deliver a comprehensive and efficient funding mechanism, given their lack of uniformity, the gaps in their coverage, and the limited progress of reciprocal arrangements between them. Finally, we note the ineffectiveness of the British Hospital Contributory Schemes Association as a player in the policy community. Its leadership had no clear strategy for influencing events and was reluctant to deploy pressure group tactics such as lobbying through the press or parliament. Crucially, the movement was divided internally between those members who supported the voluntary system and others who welcomed a publicly funded health service.     

Publications briefly noted

SUZANNE CULTER. Managing Decline: Japan‘s Coal Industry Restructuring and Community Response. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. 256 pp. US$53.00, hardcover; US$29.95, paper.

NIELS MULDER. Indonesian Images: the Culture of the Public World. Yogyakarta: Kanisius Publishing House, 2000. 250 pp. US$20.00, paper.

DAVID SLOPER (ed). Higher Education in Cambodia: the Social and Educational Context for Reconstruction. Bangkok: ACEID UNESCO PROAP, 1999. x, 339 pp. US$20.00 (surface mail), paper.