White Slavery and Social Purists’ Authority

2018 ◽  
pp. 106-124
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Forced Prostitution ◽  
Case Work ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

This chapter unpacks social purists’ commitment to the notion of ‘white slavery’ during the inter- and post-war years. Focusing on the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA), the chapter argues that this organisation used white slavery to construct their patrolling and moral surveillance of women as necessary to the maintenance of urban social order. By working with only a vague notion of white slavery, the LVA were able to imprecisely apply this term to their case work. Young women from marginalised communities, particularly Irish and working-class women, were presented by the organisation as being vulnerable to white slavery. Despite their records showing little engagement with women involved in forced prostitution, the LVA’s continual allusions to white slavery enabled their patrollers to further their image as experts in the moral protection of women and the organisation’s references to white slavery were used to try to generate donations from LVA supporters.

Coercion and Choice

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-507
Author(s):  
Elisa Camiscioli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Economic Vulnerability ◽  
Police Investigations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Working Class Women

Abstract This article employs police investigations of the “traffic in women” between France and Argentina in the first three decades of the twentieth century to highlight the multiple narratives in play when contemporaries talked about trafficking and relayed their experiences of it. While the dominant narrative of “white slavery” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized coercion, sexual exploitation, and victimization, many young working-class women described the journey to Argentina in terms of perceived opportunity, whether for money, travel, or freedom. This is not to downplay the social and economic vulnerability of these women and the precarious lives they led in French and Argentine cities. Instead, the article emphasizes the inadequacy of many existing frameworks for discussing sex trafficking, and prostitution more generally, as they rely too heavily on a stark division between coercion and choice. Cet article repose sur une analyse d'enquêtes de police portant sur la « traite des femmes » entre la France et l'Argentine durant le premier tiers du vingtième siècle. Il met l'accent sur la multiplicité des discours évoquant la traite, et l'expérience des femmes impliquées. Si, à la fin du dix-neuvième et au début du vingtième siècle, le discours dominant à propos de la « traite des blanches » souligne la coercition, l'exploitation sexuelle et la victimisation, de nombreuses femmes appartenant à la classe ouvrière décrivent leur périple en Argentine comme une opportunité de gagner plus d'argent, de voyager, ou de saisir leur liberté. Cet article ne vise cependant à minimiser ni le rôle de la vulnérabilité économique et sociale de ces femmes, ni leur vie précaire dans les villes de France et d'Argentine. Il cherche plutôt à mettre en évidence le caractère inadapté des différents paradigmes existants pour aborder le sujet du trafic sexuel, et plus généralement de la prostitution, ainsi que la manière dont ces paradigmes reposent sur une division trop marquée entre le choix et la contrainte.

Buying and Selling Breasts: Cosmetic Surgery, Beauty Treatments and Risk

2012 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 635-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Breast Augmentation ◽  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
Medical Surgery ◽  
Medical Professionals ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Risks And Benefits ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

This paper is concerned with the ways in which women are sold cosmetic surgery, and how they ‘make sense of’ their own participation in this market. It draws on ongoing ethnographic research to explore how a group of young women who have paid for breast augmentation surgery narrate their decision to undergo surgery, the choices they make as consumers of cosmetic surgery, and their experience of having surgery. These narratives are compared with the ways in which breast augmentation surgery is sold to them by the companies and medical professionals involved in the rapidly expanding market for breast augmentation surgery. The paper shows how this particular group of young white working-class women shift between imagining the breast augmentation operation as a simple beauty treatment and recognizing it as medical surgery, and explores how this shapes their perceptions of the risks and benefits of buying new breasts. It also shows how those who market such procedures manage and manipulate perceptions of the process of breast augmentation surgery and the risks that attend on it in an effort to encourage this form of consumption.

scholarly journals The Politics of Literature and Literacy: Popular Song Writing and Proletarian Poetry in Post-Revolutionary France

2008 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Steven E. Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Politics Of Literature ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Song Writing ◽  
Working Class Women

This essay examines the politics of song writing and singing in working-class singing societies in Paris, known as "goguettes," in the early nineteenth century. The practices of writing and singing songs in these societies defined the relationships among participants by equality and good feelings, resisting the hierarchy and domination of the laissez-faire social order. At the same time, these song-writing and singing practices also produced symbolic forms of masculine authority and domination – placing working-class women in positions of subordination. By analyzing this complex politics of writing in this particular case of the "goguettes," this essay argues for recovering working-class writings as significant sources for historians of literacy and for examining the historically specific social and political contexts for the production of specific forms of writing and reading as a way of studying the historical meanings of literacy.

scholarly journals The construct of masculinity in the culture of modern Russia’s new working class

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-44
Author(s):  
Tatiana V. Gavrilyuk
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Gender Communication ◽  
Family Based ◽  
Postindustrial Era ◽  
Traditional Pattern

This article is dedicated to analyzing the construct of masculinity in the culture of modern Russia’s new working class. While leaning on an intersectional perspective, it considers practices of producing its plural forms in everyday interaction, as well as persistent structures of social inequality which secure gender order on an institutional level. The article conducts an analytical overview of relevant foreign studies on the working class’ modes of masculinity in the postindustrial era. An empirical study of young representatives of the new working class residing in the Ural federal district helped determine the most common structures of gender order in domestic life and in the workspace: standard male social roles, stereotypical everyday fulfillment of male gender roles, gender restrictions and privileges. It has been revealed that a persistent structural disproportion between various sectors of the economy, when it comes to wages and the gender composition of the workforce, determines the transmission of the standard tendency for reproducing the pattern of a “man-provider”, who possesses power in the family based on his control over economic resources. Young working class individuals are still interested in preserving and supporting a patriarchal model of distributing household labor. While women are assigned types of activity which require routine execution at a strictly defined time, men assume chores which can be done sporadically, and can be postponed, which provides them with more leisure time. While evaluating the importance of everyday communication rituals, it was established that young women seek to preserve a traditional pattern of gender interaction more so than young men. The results of the study show a distinction between the expectations of young men and women when it comes to standard everyday gender communication: for the most part, young men still lean towards a model of hegemonic masculinity within the working class, while young women, who support the idea of preserving a patriarchic social order, are prepared to assume their gender role within it provided that they receive financial support and protection on behalf of their men. Indirect signs of hegemonic masculinity are not considered by them to be relevant.

Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 196885

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Moss
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Industrial Disputes ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

This book draws upon original research into women’s workplace protest to deliver a new account of working-class women’s political identity and participation in post-war England. In doing so, the book contributes a fresh understanding of the relationship between feminism, workplace activism and trade unionism during the years 1968-1985. The study covers a period that has been identified with the ‘zenith’ of trade union militancy. The women’s liberation movement also emerged in this period, which produced a shift in public debates about gender roles and relations in the home and the workplace. Industrial disputes involving working-class women have been commonly understood as evidence of women’s growing participation in the labour movement, and as evidence of the influence of second-wave feminism upon working-class women’s political consciousness. However, the voices and experiences of female workers who engaged in workplace protest remain largely unexplored. The book addresses this space through detailed analysis of four industrial disputes that were instigated by working-class women. It shows that labour force participation was often experienced or viewed as claim to political citizenship in late modern England. A combination of oral history and written sources are used to illuminate how everyday experiences of gender and class antagonism shaped working-class women’s political identity and participation.

Book Reviews: Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, Three Sociological Traditions, Macro Sociological Theory: Perspectives on Sociological Theory Vol. I, Micro Sociological Theory: Perspectives on Sociological Theory Vol. II, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, Is Democracy Possible?, Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State, G.H. Mead. A Contemporary Re-Examination of His Thought, Language, Structure and Reproduction. An Introduction to the Sociology of Basil Bernstein, Measuring Culture: A Paradigm for the Analysis of Social Organisation, Food in the Social Order, Classes, Annals of the Labouring Poor, Beyond Employment: Household, Gender and Subsistence, Women's Working Lives: Patterns and Strategies, On Women, Sexuality and Love, A Woman's Place, An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890–1940, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography. Volume 1: 1790–1900, The Sociology of Law, Legal Systems and Social Systems, The Politics of the Police, European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life, The Need for Religious Certainty: A Sociological Study of Conventional Religion, No Pope of Rome: Militant Protestantism in Modern Scotland, American Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 1, No 1, 1984, Ancient Judaism, The Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, Islamic Sociology, Categories of Medieval Culture, Science for Social Scientists, The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences, Framing Science: The Making of a BBC Documentary

1986 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-729
Author(s):  
John Eldridge ◽  
Duncan Mitchell ◽  
Derek Layder ◽  
C.E. Ashworth ◽  
Paul Hirst ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Ancient Judaism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
European Immigration

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
The Law ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War ◽  
Moral Weakness ◽  
Safe Working

While historians have examined how prostitution and promiscuity were frequently conflated by social purists and philanthropists in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, this book examines the persistence of these ideas well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The notion that the respectable, young, working-class woman could be distinguished from the supposedly disreputable and corrupting prostitute produced a highly gendered understanding of urban space. Working-class women, and especially immigrant working-class women, were monitored for signs of apparent moral weakness. Moreover, even as social purity organisations went into decline in the post-war years, their ideas persisted in legislative efforts to control prostitution. Women who worked as prostitutes were increasingly regulated and pushed out of sight into less safe working spaces. As such, it is argued here that the law increasingly mirrored the sort of social purity thinking which considered prostitution to be a form of moral contagion which needed to be eradicated.

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

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