Marriage as a Marker of Secular Inclusion? Oral History and Lesbian and Gay Narratives on Marriage in Contemporary Australia

Same‐sex marriage has been one of the most widely discussed social issues in contemporary Australia for some time. In late 2017, after holding a contentious national postal survey that year, the Australia government introduced legislation allowing same‐sex couples to marry. This article draws on a major national lesbian and gay oral history project conducted in partnership with the National Library of Australia between 2012 and 2015, when discussions of same‐sex marriage were becoming increasingly widespread. It investigates the way interview subjects incorporated marriage into their narratives. In doing so, it highlights how understandings of marriage — both amongst lesbian and gay people and heterosexual people — have shifted and evolved over time. While some subjects saw marriage as a somewhat outdated, religious, and patriarchal concept, many others invested personal significance in the institution, arguing that allowing gay men and lesbians access to marriage would be a strong symbol of social progress and equality in a secular society. We conclude with one young interviewee who had managed to reconcile his faith with his sexuality and desire for marriage equality.     

SOME EVIDENCE THAT WOMEN ARE MORE MOBILE THAN MEN: GENDER DIFFERENCES IN U.K. GRADUATE MIGRATION BEHAVIOR

ABSTRACT.  In this paper we employ dichotomous, multinomial and conditional logit models to analyze the employment-migration behavior of some 380,000 U.K. university graduates. By controlling for a range of variables related to human capital acquisition and local economic conditions, we are able to distinguish between different types of sequential migration behavior from domicile to higher education and on to employment. Our findings indicate that U.K. female graduates are generally more migratory than male graduates. We suggest that the explanation for this result lies in the fact that migration can be used as a partial compensation mechanism for gender bias in the labor market.     

Legislating fear and the public health in gilded age Massachusetts

Between 1876 and 1881 Massachusetts experienced an outbreak of human rabies (hydrophobia). The entire state--the Governor, the legislature, the State Board of Health, newspapers, and the citizenry and elected officials of every town and city--reacted to the disease. Central to the response was the Commonwealth's legislature--called the General Court. Through public hearings, their own debates, and the passage of legislation, it resolved widespread fear and anger, mediated conflicting concepts of disease, and promoted social solidarity in the face of an epidemic. This article first narrates the General Court's legislative actions; it then examines the conflicting understandings of disease causality; finally, it explores the social and political rituals the legislature drew upon to deal with this public health crisis. Arguing that public health legislation is simultaneously instrumental and symbolic, this article demonstrates that attention to both enriches the study of epidemics, historical and yet to come.