Remembering the Indonesian Peasants’ Front and Plantation Workers’ Union (1945–1966)

The absence of a strong national peasant and agricultural workers’ movement in Indonesia can be traced back to the violent destruction of the Indonesian Peasants’ Front (BTI) and Plantation Workers’ Union (SARBUPRI) in 1965–1966. This contribution reflects on their role in building a progressive movement of peasants and workers in the face of continual attempts to squash them by the Indonesian state and military. How did the cadres learn about the situation and problems in rural areas, and what were their priorities in working with the peasants? Unpublished reports from the last round of the BTI's local-level ‘participatory action research’ conducted in 1965 provide some answers to these questions.     

Books received 2000–2001

Publications Received

Books received 2000–2001     

The Attlee government and welfare state reforms in post-war Italian Socialism (1945–51): Between universalism and class policies

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the Italian socialist movement viewed the social reforms of the Attlee Labour government introduced just after the Second World War. The intention is to study the extent and limits of the labour influence on Italian socialism. The Labour Party made the re-founding of a new interclass social pact, a universal matter intending to meet the needs of both the working and middle classes. The Italian socialist movement monitored the Labour government’s changes with interest, assessing them from two different perspectives. The reformist wing had a better grasp of the political–ideological implications of Labour’s approach to the welfare state. Vice versa, the majority of the Italian socialists pursued a class socialism and a strong alliance with the Communist Party, rejecting the Labour social policy model. After the split of 1947, however, the two views of Italian socialism failed to develop and implement a political programme for a welfare state based on the British universalistic tendency model. The political weaknesses of Italian socialist organizations in the field of social policy contributed to the characterization of the Italian welfare state in the post-war period and fundamentally delayed its universalistic implementation, at least until the 1960s.     

Remembering Jo Cox (1974–2016)

This appreciation remembers the life of Jo Cox, a British Member of Parliament (MP), who was brutally murdered on 16 June 2016. A Labour Party feminist, Jo campaigned for women’s rights around the world. After graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1995, she became a political adviser for various MPs and then worked for Oxfam, the Maternity Mortality Campaign, Save the Children and the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children. Jo Cox wanted to make the world a better place, a place of justice and peace.     

Remembering Leonore Davidoff (1932–2014)

This appreciation looks at the life of Leonore Davidoff (1932–2014), an influential figure in the development of gender and women's history in Britain, from the 1970s.     

Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913)

This editorial reflects on the life of Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913), a suffragette in Edwardian Britain, who died on 8 June 1913 after running on to the race course at the Derby, four days earlier, and trying to grab the reins of the King's horse, Anmer. Rather than seeing her as a suicidal fanatic, it is suggested that she was a sensible, level-headed, religious woman, a risk-taker who probably did not intend to die.     

The Law and Politics of Marital Rape in England, 1945–1994

This article examines the ending of the marital rape exemption in England. It describes the unresponsiveness of the political and legal establishment on the issue from the war to the mid-1970s. The arguments and campaigns that feminists and others advanced against the rule from the 1970s onwards are analysed, together with the political and legal reaction to this campaign. Next, the Parliamentary and legal debates over the rule in the 1980s are discussed: a story of inertia, even hostility, towards such campaigning. Finally, the article considers the demise of the exemption in the 1990s. The article presents a nuanced account of this change, which was both vigorously contested and highly contingent. It also suggests that legal protection from ‘the rapist who pays the rent’, and the campaign to achieve this, deserve appropriate recognition within the story of feminist activism in the late twentieth century.     

The culture of skilled work in a Norwegian shipyard, 1945–90

We anatomise the culture of skilled work in the Solheimsviken shipyard in Bergen, Norway, from 1945 to 1990, linking it to democratic impulses within the workforce. This independent culture had strong if bounded democratic elements that were ultimately reflected in the institutions of a worker’s cooperative which operated from 1985. However, a shift away from shipbuilding immediately preceded the cooperative’s foundation and eroded the position of the older skilled workers who had carried the culture, undermining it even before the cooperative’s collapse.