Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2005"

Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India

Abstract: This article examines how new, globally-inflected patterns of consumption among young people in the state of Kerala, India are configured in relation to a specifically postcolonial cultural politics of gender, class, and caste, rooted in the colonialist and nationalist projects. Rather than focus on the presence or absence of agency and/or resistance within consuming practices, the article elucidates the cultural-political terrain into which consumption as an objectified field of practice is inserted. By paying attention to this terrain, it becomes possible to examine the contradictions of consumption for young women and men who are both objects of commoditization and subjects of consumption. The article locates consumption within larger discursive domains, at both the national and regional level, which contest the meaning of globalization in ways that produce and circulate highly gendered constructions of consumer agency. Drawing on ethnographic material on gender, youth, and consumption in Kerala, the article traces the intersecting gender, class, and caste terrain that underlies this field of consumption. Negotiating the space of consumption under new conditions of globalization entails traversing a gendered terrain of masculinities and femininities in ways that reveal the link among youth, consumption, and globalization to be a fraught and contradictory.

From Good Cheer to "Drive-By Smiling": A Social History of Cheerfulness

Abstract: This paper attempts to outline the social history of cheerfulness using the constructivist perspective on emotions. The role of cheerfulness in American society grew in relation to modern ideological frameworks and various economic and social factors. Embraced by the middle class since the eighteenth century for reasons of social identity and philosophical outlook, cheerfulness became a national emotional standard perceived by outsiders of the culture as part of the American character. It was fostered by a tradition of optimism, self-reliance and self-centeredness. Being socially and individually beneficial, it was cultivated in the Victorian family. In the industrial age, cheerfulness was found to be economically productive and was administered in the workplace by the managerial leadership. The lower classes engaged in it through the job market and other social pressures. Cheerfulness escalated in business and corporate culture with competition. Thus, it proved to be the most useful of emotions in an increasingly rational culture and was individually sought and socially encouraged until it became the emotional highlight of the American social landscape. In late capitalism cheerfulness has been commodified, commercialized and recycled by media, possibly with some repercussions on depression.

The Jaombilo of Tamatave (Madagascar), 1992–2004: Reflections on Youth and Globalization

Abstract: In Madagascar, the cultural and economic changes that have accompanied economic liberalization have also seen the emergence of the jaombilo, a young man supported by the money that a woman earns from sex work. In this article, I explore the structural forces that have contributed to the emergence of the jaombilo as well as the more subjective process through which young men become jaombilo. I argue that the category of the jaombilo emerged because of the particular ways in which global economic change articulates with local conceptions of youth, gender and economy. I further suggest that the case of the jaombilo challenges the assumption that youth is a normative phase on the way to adulthood. Instead, I argue that for young men in Madagascar, youth is a phase that they cannot escape. Much as savages were figured as "children" in the 19th century evolutionary discourse, many contemporary Malagasy young men have become perpetual youth, and perpetually poor, thereby challenging normative models of human development that emerged in the context of modernity.

Children in Global Migrations

Abstract: Despite popular images of the adverse disruptions caused by migration in today's global world, the migration of children in the contemporary world often repeats patterns from the past. We are also witnessing genuinely new elements. In either case, to understand and evaluate these matters requires historical understanding of childhood and knowledge about earlier migrations, such as those of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Important areas affected by migration with significant consequences for children include education, social mobility, family authority, gender roles, and the potential contributions that older children can make to strategies for family success and survival. Changes in these areas have resulted in important social transformations and can be expected to do so again. Understanding contemporary globalization should involve the knowledge of American historians especially because of the long experience in the United States with many of the factors associated with globalization that are currently being played out around the world. The paper looks at how the American experience with migration in the context of free market economic activity and of the resulting interpenetration of many cultures can help us to frame questions about migration and globalization today.

Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Abstract: In eighteenth-century Britain and North America, newspaper advertisements were the primary means of publishing accounts of troublesome people and requesting further information about them. Army deserters and runaway convicts, slaves, servants, apprentices or husbands, are all described in great detail through this culture of advertisement. Knowledge of the bodies of social subordinates therefore was an essential means of controlling them, and through print culture, this private knowledge became public. Bodies of ordinary people were revealed to a wider audience by those who knew them, and were made available for public consumption. These descriptions also demonstrate different cultures of self-presentation, the ways men and women decorated their bodies, and, through marks and clothing, sustained their identities. This study compares American and English newspapers, the contrasting languages of description, particularly of color, and the different ways that intimate knowledge of the body was made public. The advertisements show that while eighteenth-century bodies were often marked by hardship, accident and corporal punishment, they were also decorated by words and symbols expressing pride and defiance. Only at the end of the eighteenth century was this culture of advertisement replaced by official processes of inspection and description of bodies of the poor and the deviant.

The schoolyard gate: schooling and childhood in global perspective

Abstract: Anderson-Levitt, Kathryn M. 2005. "The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective." Journal of Social History 38 (4):987-1006. doi: 10.1353/jsh.2005.0042.

The House, the Street, Global Society: Latin American Families and Childhood in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: Globalization has produced a common vision of the experience of childhood, a kind of global "morality." However, this "global notion" fails to coincide with the experience of childhood in Latin America. In Latin America family and kinship have served as critical institutions for social stability. Perhaps the starkest example of the impact of globalization on children in Latin America is the growing number of so-called street children. While the nuclear family is widely seen as ideal, it is not prevalent. Latin American families which are often extended and matrifocal often appear in the media or popular literature as being "deviant" or "in crisis." Neoliberal reforms restrict social programs that support education, welfare, housing, and medical care. Nevertheless, children still utilize kinship and family relations in creative and adaptive ways. Structures of dependence and reciprocity sustain children in the wake of economic crisis, marital strife, and parental death or disappearance. Parents also depend upon children. The majority of "street children" are working in the street to bring resources to their families. Globalization has limited the ability of popular families in Latin America to participate in the formal society and economy; what it has not done is to destroy the family.

Black Archipelago: Politics and Civic Life in the Jim Crow City

Abstract: The relationship between segregation, black political experience, and civic culture in urban America is neither simple nor straightforward. This paper examines the development of a rich and varied black civic life in St. Louis during the first half of the twentieth century amid a climate of deepening racial hostility. As African-American migration accelerated, the city's white power structure mobilized for segregation. At the same time, African-Americans in St. Louis shifted political alliance to the Democratic Party, earlier than national trends. Black leaders capitalized on increasing numbers to seize the vote-getting power of the political machine, and used the Democratic Party to challenge old-line Republican ward bosses. Republican complicity in segregation, coupled with Democratic delivery of a major black teaching hospital, sealed the shift. Meanwhile, while segregation remained a constant feature of daily life, its application on the ground was uneven. African-American religious leaders, politicians, publishers, trade unionists, educators, and women's clubs took advantage of this uneven racial climate to construct a vibrant array of civic institutions. The clubs, churches, schools, hospitals, and media organs developed under Jim Crow nurtured a generation of African-Americans that would reject the segregationist framework of civic life in St. Louis.

Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence

Abstract: In Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe, his thought provoking essay on the premodern family, Stephen Ozment justifies dependence on personal letters to document family dynamics, stating, "Particularly in correspondence between family members, colleagues, friends, and lovers, where clarity and truth have a premium and can be matters of life and death, 'live' personal reactions to people, experiences, and events have been preserved as reliably as can be done in historical sources." Precisely, however, because the psychological and material stakes are highest in dealing with such significant others, the costs of "clarity and truth" may often be deemed too high by writers of personal letters. On the basis of research in the correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century, this essay accounts for the telling of untruths and the maintenance of strategic silences through examining the real world of situations and choices within which immigrants sought simultaneously to maintain ties with family, kin and friends in their homelands and to mislead those same parties about the circumstances of their lives.

Wild Workhouse Girls and the Liberal Imperial State in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ireland

Abstract: This article is about an 1860 riot in a South Dublin workhouse, when sixteen-year-old girls assaulted workhouse officials so violently they could only be pacified by the police. When a Roman Catholic chaplain was fired for defending the girls, he became a cause celebre for the Catholic church. The church, together with lady reformers such as Louisa Twining, attacked the cold machinery of the British state and envisioned new ways of bringing up children. This incident reveals the tensions within nineteenth-century liberal governmentality, to use Foucault's term, between an idea of the individual as a subject of an institution, and an individual as a self-governing subject. The state also relied on religious and female philanthropists to supplement its disciplinary institutions, but these agents could also use their participation to challenge the state. This tension was particularly acute in Ireland, symptomatic of the problems of colonial modernity.

‘A Good Beating Never Hurt Anyone’: The Punishment and Abuse of Children in Twentieth Century Ireland

Abstract: In recent years allegations have been made against the male and female religious orders that ran Irish industrial schools. These allegations range from sexual abuse to neglect of educational, training, and employment opportunities to malnutrition and starvation. One of the most common allegations relates to physical abuse and excessive corporal punishment. Media and popular accounts of these allegations have tended to highlight the most salacious and lurid details while silencing alternative memories or accounts and ignoring the historical context. In order to assess these allegations, it is necessary to examine prevailing policy and practice in homes and schools, to see what was regarded as acceptable and legitimate corporal punishment there. The physical chastisement of children was widely tolerated for much of the twentieth century, even to extremes that by today's standards would be regarded as abuse. This article examines corporal punishment in Ireland, in policy and practice, from the 1930s to the 1980s, drawing on a wide variety of sources including Department of Education files and circulars, Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) case files, Dail (Irish parliament) debates, letters to newspapers, newspaper coverage of court cases, and biographical and autobiographical accounts of twentieth century Irish childhood.

'Make Lisle the Style': The Politics of Fashion in the Japanese Silk Boycott, 1937-1940

Abstract: This article examines debates about the merits of a boycott of Japanese products, especially silk, in the late 1930s as a lens through which to examine the relationship between consumer activism and consumer society in the United States. It argues that both supporters and opponents of the silk boycott, in promoting a politics that was both virtuous and pleasurable, marked a departure from the dominant tradition of consumer activism before and since, which has defined virtue and fashion as opposing forces. As the article shows, the silk boycotters (and their opponents) took fashion and pleasure seriously and embedded their campaigns in popular culture.

Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London

Abstract: This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Linda Colley's thesis about the formation of British identity, using the public response to black war veterans as a case study. Colley's contention that behavior, not birthplace or bloodline, was enough to qualify a person as "British" is in keeping with recent scholarly interpretations of Enlightenment theories of human difference, which were xenophobic or ethnocentric, but not racist in the modern sense. Responses to the significantly named "Black Poor" of the late 1780s, however, demonstrate that color-coded thinking could play an important role in shaping philanthropic and government responses to poverty in London. Jonas Hanway, who was best known as an advocate of charities to foster Britain's "nursery of seamen," led an effort to name, register, and remove the "Black Poor"—despite the fact that about half of these individuals had sea experience. In response, black sailors such as Joseph Johnson sought to articulate a different definition of Britishness, exploiting the ambiguity of the term. Johnson's successful career as a street entertainer who sang patriotic war songs with a model ship bound to his head illustrates the possibilities of a social history of citizenship "from the bottom up.

At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (review)

Abstract: 1. E. G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 48 (1885): 167–277. For discussion of women migrants see Floya Anthias and Gabriella Lazaridis (eds.), Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: Women on the Move (Oxford, 2000); Gina Buijs, ed., Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing Identities (Oxford, 1996); Donna Gabaccia, ed., Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States (Westport, CT, 1992); Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, & Immigrant Life in the U.S. 1820–1990 (Bloomington, IN, 1994); Gregory A. Kelson and Debra L. DeLaet, Gender and Immigration (New York, 1999); Silvia Pedraza “Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender,” Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991): 303–325; Patricia Pessar, “Engendering Migration Studies: The Case of New Immigrants to the United States,” American Behavioral Scientist 42 (1999): 577–600; Patricia Pessar, “The Role of Gender, Households and Social Networks in the Migration Process: A Review and Appraisal,” in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (New York, 1999), pp. 53–70; Rita James Simon and Caroline B. Brettell, eds., 1986. International Migration: The Female Experience (Totowa, NJ, 1986); Katie Willis and Brenda Yeoh, eds., Gender and Migration (Cheltenham, UK, 2000).

Friends, Aliens, and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the Lusitania Riots of 1915

Abstract: In May, 1915, a wave of anti-alien rioting spread through the poorer neighborhoods of Liverpool, Manchester, London, and other English cities, resulting in the most wide-spread civic unrest in modern British history. The ostensible cause of the rioting was the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915 by a German U-boat hiding off the Irish coast. This essay examines the riots in the context of neighborhood politics and family life, focusing particularly on the impact of the riots on interpersonal relations. While the German navy sank the Lusitania, ordinary Britons ransacked, beat, and looted German neighbors who were often long-time associates and friends. Unable to stem the riots though police measures and legal action alone, the government responded to popular hostility with the internment of enemy aliens and the repatriations of large numbers of ethnic Germans. This paper draws on archival and published materials to make sense of the local and interpersonal dimensions of the Lusitania riots and to explore the emotional dimensions of civic expulsion.

Manhood and the Neutered Body in Early Modern Spain

Abstract: This paper examines the links between the construction of masculinity and the male body in eighteenth century Spain. It scrutinizes unpublished cases of annulments due to impotency in a northern Spanish church court between 1650 and 1750, in the diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada. The proceedings against a hermaphrodite, several castrates, and many impotent men are explored thoroughly. The author follows the lead of James Farr and Joan Scott, agreeing with them that refining sexual differences reinforced social order and hierarchy in Counter-Reformation Europe. But, instead of examining how this was done to clarify the male/female binary hierarchy, the author applies this conceptualization to argue that there were also progressively more reified definitions of manhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The article concludes that a legal confidence in the medical profession during the eighteenth century focused attention on the male body and allowed authorities to expose "unmanly" bodies. Communities called upon an increasingly self-assured medical profession to diagnose the physical attributes of non-masculinity, in much the same way they would describe the unhealthy, the abnormal, or the insane.

Women and the Paradox of Economic Inequality in the Twentieth-Century

Abstract: This article uses the history of women in twentieth-century United States to explore the paradox of inequality in American history: the coexistence of durable inequality with immense individual and group mobility. Using census data, the article traces inequality along four dimensions: participation, distribution, rewards, and differentiation. Differentiation, the article argues, resolves the paradox of inequality by showing how mobility reinforces rather than challenges existing social structures. The analysis highlights differences in women's experiences by cohort and race and emphasizes the role of education, technological change, and, especially, government's impact on labor markets. The article concludes by evaluating and extending Charles Tilly's theory of durable inequality in light of the trends in women's experience.

Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood: The Nation-State, the School, and 19th-Century Globalization

Abstract: Japan's initial encounter with globalization was also its encounter with moderni? ty.1 ln the midto late-19th century, Western imperialism in Asia plunged Japan into a new system of international relations, generating an unprecedented vol? ume of interactions with other parts of the world. Most consequential for Japan were those interactions with the United States and Europe, for they brought to Japan, through a process of hegemony, the constellation of ideas and institu? tions central to the experience of modernity. Of interest here are three closely related points in this constellation: the political formation of the nation-state, the institution of the school, and a concept of childhood as distinct stage of life worthy of public discussion.2 Japanese leaders during the early decades of Meiji period (1868-1912) believed that the source of Western power?and the key to Japan's national survival in the face of Western imperialism?lay in the nationstate's capacity for mobilizing human resources. When they set about creating institutions to accomplish this goal, they recognized the particular importance of the school, which extended the project of mobilization to Japanese children. ln turn, they opened up the child to public inquiry, generating within an emerg? ing mass society a new awareness of childhood?an awareness informed by an international discussion among social reformers in Europe and the United States about the problems facing urban, industrialized societies. The creation of mod? ern childhood in Japan thus provides a case study by which we can trace how pre-existing local conceptions of childhood were transformed by an engagement with the field of ideas and institutions that began to circulate globally during the 19 th century. Using Japan as a case study for examining global themes or processes is a timehonored endeavor. For the first few decades following World War Two, the pro? cess under scholarly consideration was not globalization, but a concept equally grand in scope: modernization. As the only non-Western country to have modernized, Japan was the focus of intense interest from scholars seeking to develop a universal model of the process by which societies become modern. The impli? cations of this scholarship were presumed to be global?after all, the context for this Cold War-era scholarship was the effort to present to unaligned develop? ing countries a non-Communist path to modernity. Yet because these scholars tended to see societies as organic, self-contained units and modernization as internally-generated (though manifested globally), they often studied Japan in isolation. They also tended to emphasize the role of Japan's cultural values in facilitating and shaping its modernization, thus contributing to assumptions of Japanese exceptionalism that remain dominant outside of academia.3 In the last decade or so, historians have contested this notion of uniqueness by

Teaching Rights and Responsibilities: Paradoxes of Globalization and Children's Citizenship in Lebanon

Abstract: Efforts to promote a more individualistic model of childhood, pressed on Leba- non from a variety of outside sources including the United Nations, have affected parents and children in Lebanon. At the same time, however, a more collective, family-centered identity continues to have great force. This essay, based on inquiries in two different local settings, discusses the resultant tensions and combinations over recent decades.

Kinship as a categorical concept: a case study of nineteenth century english siblings

Abstract: In the past few decades there has been a re-thinking about kinship and family relations across several disciplines. Kinship relations are now regarded more as active participation than static categories, always part of the cultural context of period and place. The Western emphasis on vertical relationships of parent and child has neglected the wider web of kinship, especially relations among siblings. Historians are increasingly aware of the greater saliency of wider kin in the 18th and 19th century shift to capitalist economic development, especially in an era of large families. These general issues are examined in the case of the upper middle class, Evangelical Gladstone family, particularly William Ewart's relationships with his older sister, Anne, and younger sister, Helen. Here the development of gender identity and the effect of age and birth order are highlighted within the intensely religious and moral culture of 19th century England.

A "Hard-Boiled Order": The Reeducation of Disabled WWI Veterans in New York City

Abstract: As a group, the disabled veterans of the First World War made unique demands upon the United States government. Veterans and policymakers alike believed that wounded soldiers were especially entitled to public assistance and, for the first time in United States history, expected those disabled by the war to contribute their labor power to the postwar economy. While veterans and public officials agreed that disabled soldiers could become economically self-sufficient after completing courses in vocational reeducation, federal policy was vague about whether veterans would be allowed to select their path of vocational rehabilitation. Using the New York City district of the Federal Board for Vocational Education (FBVE) as a case study, this article analyzes discrepancies between veteran and official visions of educational entitlement. In the process, the article illuminates the nation's conflicting commitments to democracy and social efficiency in the Progressive era. While the disabled veterans of WWI were often disappointed by the manner in which the U.S. government responded to their demands, their postwar activism foreshadowed the platform of the modern disability rights movement and contributed to the development of the GI Bill.

"Of Women, By Women, and For Women": The Day Nursery Movement in the Progressive-era United States

Abstract: Wage-earning mothers of the Progressive-era United States shared a very pressing concern: securing care for their young children during their working hours. While many relied upon relatives or friends, others turned to day nurseries, institutions created by reform-minded women to address changing family needs in the industrial cities of the United States. National in scope, with particular focus on several municipal day nursery associations and individual nurseries, this study investigates how these early day care centers were shaped by the women whose lives intersected there: the managers who founded the nurseries, the matrons hired to run them, and the mothers who sought their services. Women at various levels of the day nursery movement approached this reform work from different perspectives, as some of the local managers and matrons fashioned policies that responded to the needs of actual wage-earning mothers rather than the dictates of the national day nursery and charity establishments And wage-earning mothers, despite the vulnerability that came with their precarious economic situations, sometimes found ways to assert their rights as parents and their aspirations for their families.

Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (review)

Abstract: examination of Brazilian race relations that I have ever read. Further enriching the analysis are its frequent comparisons between the United States and Brazil. The book is a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of trying to base universalist theoretical propositions on one or two national cases, especially when they are as sui generis as these two. Of course no book is perfect, and this one has its requisite sprinkling of errors. Seven, not eleven, times as many Africans (4.0 million versus 560,000) came to Brazil as to the United States. (1) The 1991 census found Brazil to be 52 percent white (30), not 55 percent (90). Table 4.5 does not show that “low-educated blacks are more likely than their highly educated counterparts to be consistently classified [in color terms]”; rather, it shows that highly educated black men are more likely to be consistently classified, while highly educated black women are less likely. (97) Figure 8.1 shows browns, not blacks, increasing their presence in the Southeast between 1872 and 1890. (197) These are minor mistakes. More consequential, I believe, is the cover, which features a photograph of an Afro-Brazilian child sniffing glue from a plastic bag. We know not to judge a book by its cover; but in this case we can, and should, judge the cover by what we learn from the book. Telles identifies “racist culture” as one of the principal supports of racial inequality in Brazil, and devotes considerable attention to the role of negative images and stereotypes in sustaining such culture. (152–57, 220) One such image, he reports, was the photo of a black youth holding a handgun, plastered on billboards in 1999 as part of an anti-firearms campaign. Citing antiracist laws, a judge ordered the ads removed on the grounds that they “reinforced racial prejudice by showing a poor black youth as a bandit.” (247) How is this photo of a young black drug-user different from that of the black street criminal? Is this the representative face of the Afro-Brazilian population? Memo to Princeton University Press: when you do the paperback edition, please find a cover more in keeping with the content of this path-breaking book.

Incarnations and Practices of Feminine Rectitude: Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics for U.S. Women

Abstract: Between 1830--1870, a number of influential texts promoting gymnastics deemed appropriate for U.S. women claimed that those exercise regimes would cultivate feminine rectitude along postural, moral, and procedural lines. In doing so, while promising at once to straighten women's spines, to increase their chest size as well as their lung capacities, and to foster beauty and grace, those discourses promoted a female figure that stood in direct opposition to contemporary representations of incapable housekeepers and useless invalids. Many gymnastics regimens thus functioned as disciplinary mechanisms that sought to forge docile bodies, to infuse those bodies with (disciplinary) temporality, to encourage habits of precision, system, and order, and to cultivate postures and sensibilities of feminine rectitude that would reconcile (true) women with conceptions of domesticity that required them to conceal the strains of their duties. Those gymnastics systems, then, encouraged U.S. women and girls to refigure their physiques and their identities as social subjects: to materially constitute themselves in clearly identifiable ways as healthy, pious, and thus authentically true women who had inherited crucial traits of Republican Motherhood.

"They're never here more than a year": Return Migration in the Southern Exodus, 1940-1970

Abstract: This article considers the incidence and meaning of return migration that took place during the twentieth-century "Great Migration" of southern whites and African-Americans to the U.S. North and West. Southern whites in particular had an unusually high rate of return, though this pattern varied significantly from one northern city to another. After presenting an overview of return movement in the Great Migration, this article compares migrants' experiences in two northern cities that had very different histories of return migration. Southern migrants to Indianapolis, Indiana, came mainly from a relatively prosperous southern region to which they returned with great frequency. Southern migrants to Cincinnati, Ohio, on the other hand, moved from one of the most impoverished subregions of the Appalachian South and were much more likely to choose life in the North over a questionable future at home. Ultimately, Cincinnati's migrants drew on their common sense of exile to build a vocal migrant community in the North, while Indianapolis's migrants showed no similar efforts. The two cases together demonstrate the importance of understanding the tight relationship between patterns in return migration and migrant community development.

Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (review)

Abstract: or not divorce was detrimental to women in early modern times, it clearly has that potential today. Yet the popular perception is that divorce today is most likely to be initiated by women, either old women unwilling to look after a retired spouse, or young women whose inept grooms fail to meet their exacting standards. Suitable for scholars interested in the comparative study of divorce, this book’s thorny prose and high price will probably limit its appeal to students and generalists. Even specialists should be warned that much literature on the topic of marriage and divorce, especially in early modern Japan, falls outside its purview,

Japan, the U.S. and the Globalization of Children's Consumer Culture

Abstract: This essay explores the linkage between modern children's consumer culture and the globalization of the design and manufacture of playthings. While toy production and innovation were centered in Germany from the 17th through 19th centuries, it shifted to the U.S. and Japan, recently to China in the 20th century. The authors chronicle why the U.S. and Japan drifted from production to product design and marketing and how China became the locus of manufacturing in the last 20 years. Playthings have long roots in local folk cultures and crafts, and regional and national traditions of toy and doll making have long reinforced ethnic and local identities in children. But the construction of modern childhood over the past century especially has paralleled the decline of these craft traditions and the emergence of a global children's commercial culture.

"Acting Out the Oedipal Wish": Father-Daughter Incest and the Sexuality of Adolescent Girls in the United States, 1941-1965

Abstract: The impact of Freudian psychoanalysis on the interpretation of father-daughter incest in courts of law, the social sciences and child-serving agencies during the postwar period was not, as has commonly been assumed, to uniformly silence discussion and prosecution. In fact, psychoanalysts themselves began to pursue case histories of incest between fathers and adolescent daughters in the 1940s. These case histories - couched as examinations of female adolescent Oedipal behavior - reinforced ideas about paternal power by focusing on girls' psychological need for paternal sexual attention. Court cases from Cook County, Illinois, dating from the same period reveal that judges often believed girls' claims of incest, even when contradicted by testimony from adult members of the family. While psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic social workers diminished and even dismissed the idea that father-daughter incest was damaging to adolescent girls, and concentrated instead on the importance of Oedipal desire, lawyers and judges viewed father-daughter incest as a particularly heinous crime. That psychoanalytic social workers and the legal community were so at odds with one another suggests that postwar society was conflicted about father-daughter incest, rather than uniformly invested in denial as a way to shore up paternal power and the ideological parameters of familialism.

‘These Brothers of Ours’: Poblete's Obreros and the Road to Baguio 1903–1905

Abstract: On July 21, 1903, some two hundred labourers recently recruited to construct the Benguet Road linking the Americans' erstwhile summer capital of the Philippines at Baguio with the railhead to Manila refused to report for work and peremptorily marched out of camp. While the incident is barely if at all remembered, it became something of a cause celebre at the time. The affair was made much of by a nationalist press owned by Manila-based literati deeply involved in non-military confrontation with the new colonial administration. The Americans were equally as anxious to prove they were different to other colonial regimes and that nothing was amiss. The workers, of course, the obreros simply disappear once again into the historical twilight but not before leaving behind them a glimpse at the changes that were taking place in the local labour market. While it may be premature to talk about the dawning of a distinctive worker consciousness as yet, there were significant socio-economic developments in Filipino society at this time that were just as significant as the much more contestable political ones. It is against these wider considerations that the events surrounding the recruitment of labour on the road are played out. Named after the chief recruitment agent, Pascual Poblete, the affair is one of those rare occasions when long term historical developments at work in the less visible strata of late colonial society come to the surface.