Infanticide and infant abandonoment in the new South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1915

The Civil War and Reconstruction and the South's postbellum industrialization produced economic dislocation on a tremendous scale. One product of that economic upheaval was an increasing problem of infanticides and infant abandonments. This case study of Richmond, Virginia, examines patterns of abandonment and neonaticide as documented in records of the city almshouse and the city coroner. It demonstrates that race shaped the options available to women with problem pregnancies in that African American women had access to fewer social welfare unstitutions such as maternity homes. As a result, unmarried black women kept their out-of-wedlock babies more often than did whites, but they also committed infanticide at higher rates than did whites. Moreover, racial trends in infanticides and infant abandonment suggest that Ricomond's white working class experienced economic advancements at the turn of the twentieth century, while the city's black working class continued to live in depression-like conditions throughout the period.     

FEMININITY, PLACE AND COMMODITIES: A RETAIL CASE STUDY

Recent accounts of the significance of consumption and commodities in the constitution of femininity have stressed the fluidity of consumption practices and the indeterminacy of their meaning for the oppression of women. The role of place in the construction of femininity has not been considered in these accounts, and as such uni-dimensional portraits of the consumption-femininity nexus have prevailed. In this article I offer an alternative place-based account of the construction of femininity through consumption, demonstrating the constitution of gendered relations of consumption in place. In so doing, some of the contradictions in the consumption-femininity nexus are highlighted. Using a case study of one facet of consumption - retailing - I demonstrate the importance of place and context in the construction of femininity through consumption, in three substantive ways. First, the selling of commodities by retail institutions entails the creation of place. Second, the construction of femininity - shopping as an important component of domestic labor and shopping as feminine, is part of this creation of place. Third, this environment and the process of shopping influence the meaning of commodities and associated constructions of femininity.     

The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia

Microfinance is a dominant strategy used to promote rural development around the world. Rather than directly track its impact on borrowers, however, microfinance institutions rely on indicators of financial performance adopted from commercial banking as proxies for positive social impact. Yet, as critical research has shown, the industry depends on coercive peer pressure, social shaming and various forms of gendered exploitation to achieve its high rates of loan repayment. This article maintains that there is a need to investigate how the microfinance industry's own indicators of impact contribute to the ways microfinance can harm borrowers. Based on qualitative research in Cambodia during 2021 and 2022, the article demonstrates how financial performance indicators, most notably portfolio quality, both hide and exacerbate the ways that borrowers juggle debt between formal and informal lenders. In making this argument, the article advances critical scholarship on microfinance by showing how microfinance repayment structures debt-juggling practices in ways that put borrowers at greater risk of over-indebtedness. As a result, the microfinance industry is able to claim that it successfully helps to alleviate poverty, even as it accumulates profits by appropriating wealth from poor and low-income households across the global South.     

Place in legal geography: Agency and application in agriculture research

Systemic failure of our land management, legal, and regulatory institutions is revealed by the serious and adverse social and environmental impacts of land use practices in private agriculture, evident in severe land and water degradation, precipitous decline in biodiversity, and reduced resilience to natural hazards and climate change. The efficacy of the standard treatment of environmental law and regulation is often hampered by the cultural and legal priority of property rights. We take a different approach, using legal geography to refocus attention on the salience and agency of place and responses to degradation, such as conservation farming and regenerative agriculture, which are reforming dominant land management cultures and institutions from within. By recognising the role of place in leading geographically responsive land use decision-making and more sustainable, resilient, and productive agricultural practices, an alternative model of private land ownership may be possible, as well as greater environmental sustainability. For researchers, our approaches too must be sensitive and responsive to place agency and our methodologies must evolve to acknowledge the agency of place. Place agency in legal geography has great potential for application in reforming suboptimal industrial agricultural practices and legal models of property ownership, and also for revitalising our scholarship.     

(Ad)dressing Pregnant Bodies in New Zealand: Clothing,fashion, subjectivities and spatialities

The article examines the ways in which pregnant women in the West use clothing as a means of constructing a range of complex and seemingly contradictory gendered subjectivities in public spaces. The article draws on interview data collected from 19 first-time pregnant women in Hamilton, New Zealand. These women were asked about maternity wear, body image, fashion, activities they had continued, reduced or stopped during pregnancy, and the places/spaces they occupied during pregnancy. The article focuses on four different ‘looks’ and subjectivities that pregnant women in this research tried on: the thrifty, self-sacrificing mother to be; the sexy, proud pregnant woman; the growing woman who fears her body will be read as fat; and the pregnant professional. For first time pregnant women making the transition to motherhood clothing the body can be a complex act. What women wear during pregnancy speaks volumes about their subjectivities—what they reveal, what they conceal, what images they create, for whom and where.

Este artículo examina las maneras en que mujeres embarazadas en el Oriente utilizan ropas como medio de construir una gama de complejo y evidentemente contradictorio subjetividades de género en espacios públicos. Este artículo emplea información se dedujo de 19 entrevistas de mujeres se embarazan por primera vez en la ciudad de Hamilton, Nueva Zelanda. Se preguntaron estas mujeres sobre ropas maternidades; sus imágenes de cuerpos; moda; las actividades normales ellas han continuado, reducido o detenido; y los lugares/espacios ellas ocuparon durante sus embarazos. Este artículo enfoca las 4 ‘apariencias’ diferentes y los subjetividades que las mujeres embarazadas en esta investigación se han probado: la económica, abnegada, futura madre; la sexy, orgullosa mujer embarazada; la mujer engordada que tiene miedo de que su cuerpo se interpretaría como gordo; y la profesional embarazada. Para las mujeres embarazadas por primera vez y que hacen la transición a la ropa de maternidad, el cuerpo pueda ser un acto complejo. Lo que llevan las mujeres durante sus embarazos habla fuerte de sus subjetividades—lo que revelan, lo que ocultan, cuales imágenes crean, para quien y por donde.     

The Constitution and Democracy in Victoria: Westminster on Trial

This article provides a broad overview and critical appraisal of the major changes to the role and rationale of government and public administration in Victoria brought about by the Kennett Liberal‐National Coalition government (1992–99). It does so in order to revisit and highlight the fading relevance and viability of the Westminster system of 'responsible government' in the constitutional systems of the States. We show how the Victorian Constitution provides very few restraints upon a government seeking to undermine civil and political rights, weaken the Opposition, marginalise contestatory institutions and restrict information. Against the Westminster system, we defend a republican constitutional arrangement that is able to maintain the contestability of public power. To this end, we suggest a range of workable reforms designed to strengthen democracy and to improve the accountability of public power, particularly that of the political executive.     

The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia’s Future

This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city.     

The Multiple Roots of Party Loyalty: Explaining Republican Dissent in the U.S. House of Representatives

Why does any member of Congress choose to be loyal to one's party? The conventional wisdom is that party loyalty stems from constituent expectations, electoral concerns, or a lawmaker's ideological beliefs. However, this neglects two other, less-instrumental reasons for sticking with a political party: partisan identity and personal connections with party leaders. I test these alternative theories as well as conventional ones on a set of key moments in the 113th Congress (2013–2014) when rebellion against House Republican leadership by the rank-and-file was especially noteworthy. The results provide some support for both the party identity and personal connection hypotheses. They also indicate that although constituency characteristics help predict the likelihood of dissent from GOP leaders, there is little evidence for the electoral hypothesis, while cross-cutting ideological preferences as well as preferences along the traditional left-right spectrum prove statistically significant. In short, evidence reveals both personal and instrumental roots of party loyalty in Congress.     

Monthly London Meeting

When the Catholic Mass was outlawed by Edward VI, ‘The sacrifice of Masses, in which it was commonly said that the Priests did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits’—the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 1553, Article Thirty-one (Bickwell 1955, 410), not only were priests loyal to Rome forced underground, but altars, vestments and chalices used in the Mass were destroyed. Clandestine priests had to either rescue and hide such items or purchase new ones.

Few chalices survived this iconoclasm and most Catholic priests must have had to purchase new plate, and there is evidence that some such plate was made in base-metals, an area which has so far been little researched.