Kinship and friendship: quaker women's networks and the women's movement sandra stanley holton

Women Friends (or ‘Quakers’) were largely absent from the debates on the position of women in Britain in the 1830s-50s. But a significant group of women Quakers emerged at the forefront of organisations formed in the 1860s to campaign for Women's rights, participation in which was still by no means a norm among their co-religionists. A notable presence among them was a group of women Friends, identified here as the Bright circle, linked by kinship, religion and radical politics. This article analyses the relationship between public and private lives among the Bright circle, especially in terms of the strength of the political networks on which they were able to draw. It examines the church culture of Friends in general, the domestic culture of this circle in particular, and the basis of its networks in domestic life. It concludes that the values and activities on which this network was built illustrate the way in which personal and public lives may overlap, so that the women among this circle were able to sustain identities that were authoritative, and simultaneously family-centred, outward-looking and publiclyminded.     

Feminist forbears

Margaret Foster, Significant Sisters. The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939 (Penguin Books) Harmondsworth, 1986; David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes. Women's Emancipation in the 1890s (Harvester Press) Brighton, 1986.     

Industrial politics in France: Nationalisation under Mitterrand

The first part of this article looks at the reasons why nationalisation featured in the 1981 French Socialist programme, and concludes that while in the abstract it was an issue that encouraged left‐wing unity, the Socialists and the Communists expected very different things from it. The second and third parts look at the implementation of the policy, stressing the continuity with which the Socialists', rather than the Communists', aims have been pursued.     

Segregation,racism and white women reformers: a transnational analysis, 1840–1912

This article tracks continuities between early nineteenth-century female abolitionism and the role of white women reformers in Britain in the campaigns against segregation and lynch law in the USA, and on behalf of black rights in British colonies in the early twentieth century. It argues the value of a transnational perspective to these questions. More particularly, it explores the working out of the ‘maternalist’ legacy of female abolitionism, and the increasing problematising of ‘blackness’ and ‘Africanness’ in the perspectives of a circle of white women reformers in Britain.     

Healthy Families America: ruminations on implementing a home visitation program to prevent child maltreatment

Following a 1990 federal report forecasting a national child abuse and neglect epidemic, Prevent Child Abuse America (PCA America) promoted a home visitation program known as Healthy Families America (HFA). HFA achieved rapid adoption and implementation across the nation going from 25 sites in 1992 to 430 in a decade. In this article, the authors describe PCA America's approach to develop, promote, oversee, and evaluate a national home visitation program. Despite its promising growth, HFA has been criticized for failing to achieve the goal of preventing child maltreatment. HFA's past and present are critiqued based on theory and implementation practice of home visitation and its future projected from the perspective of insiders. Developing a better understanding of HFA's history will advance existing models of home visitation and add to the emerging knowledge base of child maltreatment prevention.