scholarly journals POVERTY AND RESPECTABILITY IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CAPE TOWN

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
WAYNE DOOLING
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Highly Porous

AbstractCape Town's black population of the early twentieth century actively pursued lifestyles that might be described as respectable. But respectability was expensive, and poverty —characterised by poor housing, ill health and shortened lifespans — stood in the way of some of its most essential elements: cleanliness, sexual restraint, sobriety, and the creation of nuclear and gendered households. Black respectability, therefore, could not simply replicate that of the dominant white bourgeoisie. Most challenging was the development of rampant black criminality, often seen by contemporary observers as the result of the failure of black women to realise respectable households. Even attempts on the part of the state to create respectable citizenries floundered, partly because these initiatives were incompatible with the policies of racial segregation. The state and the dominant bourgeoisie put their faith in the black elite as the standard-bearers of respectability, but the reality was that the respectability of the ‘superior’ class was frequently indistinguishable from those below, a consequence of the fact that the boundary between these classes was highly porous.

From “Motherhood in the Interest of the State” to Motherhood in the Interest of Mothers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hillary Maxson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
World Congress ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Creation

In the aftermath of World War II, many Japanese women felt impelled to exorcise “martial motherhood,” a stoic, tearless, child-sacrificing gender ideal constructed by the state throughout the early twentieth century. At the Mothers’ Congress of 1955, mothers from across the country gathered to reclaim motherhood from the state and began to redefine motherhood for themselves in the postwar era. This chapter argues that the Mothers’ Congress represented a moment of transition from the wartime concept of “motherhood in the interest of the state” to the postwar idea of motherhood in the interest of mothers. Furthermore, the influential power of the organizers of Japan’s Mothers’ Congress was fundamental in the creation of the 1955 World Congress of Mothers. This was the first instance in which Japanese women became international feminist leaders, and they did so through the language of matricentric feminism.

Incentivizing Safety and Discrimination: Employment Risks under Workmen’s Compensation in the Early Twentieth Century United States

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-67
Author(s):  
Nate Holdren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Employment Discrimination ◽  
Job Applicants ◽  
Insurance Companies ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Workplace Accidents ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Workmen's Compensation

This article takes criticisms of employment discrimination in the aftermath of the creation of workmen’s compensation legislation as a point of entry for arguing that compensation laws created new incentives for employment discrimination. Compensation laws turned the costs of employees’ workplace accidents into a risk that many employers sought to manage by screening job applicants in a manner analogous to how insurance companies screened policy applicants. While numerous critics blamed insurers for discrimination, I argue that the problem was lack of insurance. The less that companies pooled their compensation risks via insurance, the greater the incentives for employers to stop employing people they would have previously been willing to hire.

scholarly journals Discrimination? Protestantism and Jewish Christians in the State of Israel

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert J Van Klinken
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Jewish Christians

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish mission became an established branch of Protestant mission in general. As the Jewish converts to Protestantism remained fairly few in numbers, these converts were expected to engage in missionary efforts too, among their fellow Jews. One of the results of the ensuing polarization was the exclusion of baptized Jews from the citizenship of the State of Israel, where they were considered traitors by a majority of society. This article argues that programmes for Jewish-Christian dialogue in the State of Israel came under pressure to bar the Jewish Christians from taking part, and explores the question whether the ensuing policies can be ranked as examples of discrimination against this group.

The Discipline of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Education ◽  
The State ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Educational Theorist ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Mass Identification

This chapter looks closely at the rise of state-funded English education to uncover the disciplinary role that poetry played. It shows how the naturalization of English “meter” was a crucial part of the English literary curriculum. “Meter” is placed in quotation marks because the “meter” that emerges in the state-funded classroom has little to do with the prosody wars going on outside its walls. Educational theorist Matthew Arnold's cultural metrics, in which poetry by Shakespeare, for instance, will subtly and intimately transform a student into a good citizen, is replaced by a patriotic pedagogy wherein verses written in rousing rhythms are taught as a naturally felt English “beat.” It suggests that poet and educational theorist Henry Newbolt's figure of the “drum” performed a naturalized rhythm that brought England together as a collective. The collective mass identification with (and proliferation of) patriotic verses created an even sharper divide between the high and low, elite and mass, private and public cultures of poetry in the early twentieth century.

Landscape of Profits

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel St. John
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Boundary Line ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Rail Line ◽  
International Boundary ◽  
The Creation

This chapter describes how ranchers, miners, investors, laborers, railroad executives, and innumerable economic actors integrated the border into an emerging transnational economy and began to create binational communities on the boundary line. With the completion of the first transborder rail line—brought on by the joining of the Sonora Railway and the Arizona and New Mexico Railroad at the international boundary line—ranchers and miners secured an easy way to move stock and ore to markets. As more people realized this, the borderlands experienced nothing short of a capitalist revolution. The capitalist development of the borderlands would, in turn, spur the creation of an array of new transborder ties. By the early twentieth century, the border has become a point of connection and community in the midst of an emerging capitalist economy and the center of a transborder landscape of property and profits.

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