Gender and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective

Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman

This chapter examines the historical link between gender and unionism by focusing on variations among labor unions in policies and practices affecting women from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. After reviewing the debate about women's participation, membership, and leadership within unions, the chapter discusses four major waves of unionization that have produced four distinct cohorts of labor organizations, each of which formed in a different era of labor movement growth: the craft unions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the industrial unions that took shape in the needle trades in the 1910s; the larger wave of industrial unions that emerged in the 1930s, and the public- and service-sector unions of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on sociological theories of organization, it then considers the conditions under which unions have been effective political vehicles for women workers. It shows that the political effectiveness of unions for women workers is correlated with the historical conditions under which each wave of unions first developed, as well as their age and maturity as organizations.

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.


Author(s):  
Alison Wylie

Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the possible exception of Collingwood, however, there was little systematic exploration of the bearing of philosophical literature on these questions until the advent, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the New Archaeology, a self-consciously positivist research programme. The New Archaeology originated in North America but has been widely influential, especially in giving prominence to philosophical and theoretical issues. The New Archaeologists’ advocacy of a positivist (Hempelian) conception of scientific goals and practice provoked intense debate which involved philosophers of science as well as archaeologists from the early 1970s. Although the positivist commitments of the programme were widely repudiated a decade later, philosophical exchange has continued and expanded to include consideration of a range of post-positivist models of scientific inference that emphasize the theory-ladeness of archaeological evidence, as well as hermeneutic and post-structuralist models of archaeological interpretation. The analysis of epistemological issues is also closely tied to foundational questions about how the cultural subject of archaeological inquiry should be conceptualized and has led, increasingly, to a consideration of normative questions about the values and interests that shape archaeological research and the ethical responsibilities of practitioners. In 1992 Embree argued that work in this area had achieved sufficient maturity to be recognized as a subfield which he designated ‘meta-archaeology’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Phillips ◽  
Valerie Wright ◽  
Jim Tomlinson

Abstract Scotland’s political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British history. Typically seen in terms of the post-1979 Thatcher effect, this in fact developed over a longer timeframe, rooted in industrial changes revealed by analysis of the Linwood car plant in Renfrewshire. Conservatism and Unionism was an eminent political force in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. But in all general elections from 1959 onwards the vote share of Conservative and Unionist candidates was lower in Scotland than in England. From the late 1960s onwards there were also ambitions for constitutional change. This article breaks new conceptual and empirical ground by relating these important markers of political divergence to popular understanding among Scottish workers of deindustrialization. A Thompsonian moral economy framework is deployed. Expectations were elevated by industrial restructuring from the 1950s, with workers exchanging jobs in the staples for a better future in assembly goods. Labour governments earned a reputation in Scotland as better managers of this process than Conservative governments. The 1979 general election showed that Labourism was growing in popularity in Scotland just as its appeal faded in England. At Linwood moral economy expectations were compromised, chiefly by intermittent redundancy and recurrent threat of closure, which was averted in 1975 by Labour government intervention. When the plant was shut in 1981 criticisms of UK political-constitutional structures and Conservativism were intensified.


Author(s):  
Jad Smith

Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934–1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. This book, an intensive review of Brunner's life and works, demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, the book approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including his uneasy association with the “New Wave” of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. This book shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and between hard and soft science fiction, and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri

When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height’s careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri’s work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Anna Delius

This article explores how repression and everyday conflicts at the workplace were connected with labor rights and trade unionism in two authoritarian regimes. It focuses on worker and labor activists’ media in Francoist Spain and in state socialist Poland during the years 1965–68 and 1977–79, respectively. Spanish and Polish workers both lacked the right to join and form independent trade unions, the right to free assembly and association, and the right to strike. At the same time, they faced comparable problems in their everyday working lives, including low salaries, excessive overtime, incompetent management, and deficits in safety and hygiene standards. In this context, (illegal) magazines for workers emerged. They provided new arenas for exchanging experiences, advertised strike actions all across the country, called for united action, and explained national legislation and global labor norms. Based on an analysis of Spanish and Polish workers’ publications, this contribution investigates how labor activists in these states addressed day-to-day problems and the constant violations of internationally binding labor norms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Loss

AbstractIn the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Mari Almila

This article interrogates the transforming sartorial styles of the Christian Protestant revivalist körtti movement in Finland in and around two very specific historical moments: Finland’s independence from Russia in 1917, and the amendment of the Marriage Act in 2014 that saw the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2017. The analysis covers crucial periods before and after the independence: late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when Russia sought to tighten its control over autonomous Finland and the Finnish intelligentsia organized to resist such attempts; through the civil war of 1918, to the turbulent right-/left-divided years of the 1920s and 1930s. Then, the liberalization of the körtti movement from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, and the effect of this upon the debates and battles over the equal marriage law before and after the law came into effect is discussed. I show how, through changing histories, changing garments have the capacity to play key roles. By focusing on a particular movement through different times, the article will consider how groups that go by the same name may be fundamentally different from their historical predecessors; how they may yet recognize a similar kind of garment even if they attach different associations to it, and how new garments are sometimes required in order to communicate the new positions of those movements and individuals. In the context of analyses of garments and cultural positions, this underlines the necessity to think of certain ‘times’ as part of a continuum in which changes and continuities in dress play out and influence sociopolitical relations.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

This chapter offers a periodization of the literatures of the Americas from the late nineteenth century through the postwar period. After acknowledging the emergence of a brief “transamerican literary imagination” forged in the early nineteenth century, I chart the gradual breakdown of this shared literary imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century and the concomitant rise of two distinct modes of literary production in the hemisphere: the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of the reader. I track the emergence of these systems: in the United States, through the mid-nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” the late nineteenth-century “age of realism,” the interwar “modernist” period, and the “postmodern” era of the second half of the century; in Latin America, through the modernismo of the turn of the twentieth century, the vanguardia movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, and the boom decades of the 1960s and 1970s.


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