Reviews

Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (Allen & Unwin) 1995.

Peta Tait, Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (Currency Press) Sydney, 1994.

Pauline Johnson, Feminism as Radical Humanism (Allen & Unwin) St Leonards, 1994.

Denise Russell, Women, Madness and Medicine (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1995.

R.W‐ Connell, Masculinities (Allen & Unwin) St Leonards, 1995.

Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge University Press) Melbourne, 1994.

Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia, 1890–1955 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1995.

Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women's Writing, 1880s—1930s (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1995.     

A report on gender discrimination in South Africa's 2002 Immigration Act: masculinizing the migrant

Changes in immigration policy and legislation have the power to shape and alter the gendering of migration in significant ways, and can have a dramatic effect on the lives and relationships of the men, women and families involved. In this paper, we examine the provisions of the new Immigration Act introduced in South Africa in 2002. The Act, which replaces the outdated Aliens Control Act of 1991, gives considerable cause for concern on gender grounds. Foremost, the Act entrenches a system of male-dominated regional labour migration that has its origins in the 19th-century discovery of gold and diamonds. The male bias in the work permit and other employment-based categories along with the limits to family reunification for those entering for work are likely in effect to discriminate against women to a greater extent than men. While similar gender concerns are common to most immigration policy regimes around the world, the particular circumstances of the South African case, where both skilled and unskilled migration streams are heavily male-dominated, makes them especially acute here. This paper contextualizes migration regimes in South Africa and examines in detail the likely implications of the new Immigration Act.     

International product life cycles,trade and development stages

The Journal of Technology Transfer - In this paper we first propose a proxy for early stage activity in a country’s exports based on product life cycle theory. Employing a conditional latent...     

From 'Political' to 'Human' Economy: The Visions of Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright

The marginalization or exclusion of women from economic theory has a long and distinguished pedigree. Michele A. Pujol, in her groundbreaking study Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought (1998), wryly observes that whilst Adam Smith devotes an entire page to the question of women's economic activity in his Wealth of Nations , women 'are nowhere mentioned in Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and in Malthus's Principles of Political Economy ' (Pujol 1992:17-23). In similar fashion Groenewegen, in Feminism and Political Economy in Victorian England (1994), notes that 'there have been few women contributors to … economic literature' (Groenewegen 1994:16). Indeed, as far as the first half of the nineteenth century is concerned, only two women - Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau - seem to have written on political economy. Both wrote as expositors and popularizers of existing theoretical knowledge, content to repeat rather than challenge established orthodoxies, and as a result neither has commanded much more than a footnote in the history of economic thought. Martineau enjoys somewhat more of an enhanced reputation in the field of literary studies but even here attention tends to focus on A Manchester Strike at the expense of her other economic fictions. The present discussion, then, attempts to expand the field of vision with regard to Martineau by examining four of her economic tales: The Rioters (1827), The Turn-Out (1829), The Hill and the Valley (1832) and A Manchester Strike (1832). The first two of these were written prior to Martineau's 'conversion' to political economy, whilst the latter two appeared as part of Illustrations of Political Economy (a series of twenty-three tales published in twenty-five monthly parts between 1832 and 1843). As a way of exploring the disjuncture between economic theory and narrative events within these tales, the narratives themselves are read as implicit commentaries on (as well as 'illustrations'of) aspects of political economy, thereby allowing Martineau to emerge as a much more complex and problematic writer than is usually acknowledged. Also under examination here are the economic ideas of Frances Wright, another early nineteenth-century woman writer, particularly her critique of the existing economic order (which sharply differentiates her from Martineau) and her proposals for a new 'feminine' economy. The intention is to show that women writers on economics were not confined to the role of 'dutiful intellectual daughter, repeating … the words of her intellectual fathers' (David 1987:35)--to borrow Deirdre David's characterization of Martineau in Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy --but were capable of articulating a thoroughgoing critique of existing theoretical models.     

RECONCILING PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY AND ABORIGINAL SELF-DETERMINATION/SELF-MANAGEMENT: IS ATSIC SUCCEEDING?

Abstract: Since the early 1970s commonwealth governments have been pursuing policies of self-determination/self-management in relation to Aborigines. In 1987, the Hawke government announced its intention to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) to further this policy goal. During the debates over ATSIC's formation, the issue of public accountability in the existing administration of Aboriginal affairs came to public prominence. The result was some extensive reworking of the ATSIC proposal, which in 1989 reemerged with a strengthened emphasis on public accountability. This article traces the events and arguments surrounding ATSIC's formation and then goes on to examine ATSIC in practice. It asks whether ATSIC is succeeding in reconciling the two imperatives of Aboriginal self-determination/self-management and public accountability.