Striking fictions: Women writers and the making of a proletarian realism

The development of proletarian realism in the United States was part of a political strategy, although it was distinct from the Communist Party programme, which sought to portray a united, revolutionary working class. However, four of the earliest and most influential proletarian novels show that when writers focussed on women as both labouring and sexual subjects, the literary format was compelled to recognise a pattern of difference which conflicted with that goal of unity. Written in response to a 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike! (1930). Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (1932), Olive Tilford Dargan's Call Home the Heart (1932) and Dorothy Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932) all conflict with the very literary and political conventions in which they aim to operate and, in so doing, add a significant dimension to what has been generally regarded as a formulaic and predictable genre.     

Striking hard rock veins. Multinational Corporations and Miners’ Unions in Mexico and the United States, 1906-1952

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes simultaneous strikes during the first half of the 20th century in North America. The transformation of production in copper, lead, zinc, and silver mining districts determined the formation of a working class that operated between Mexico and the United States. Therefore, the labor conflicts combined market circumstances and management-imposed homologation of work structures across firm divisions with the international coordination of miners. The paper describes the emergence, growth, and demise of a regional industrial system.     

Caroline Phillips: balancing life as a journalist and a suffragette in a Scottish city

ABSTRACT

Aberdeen Art Gallery holds a unique collection in the history of the Scottish women’s suffrage movement: the correspondence of Caroline Phillips, journalist and honorary secretary of the Aberdeen branch of the WSPU, 1907-09. Through her correspondence, Phillips wrestled with the demands of London headquarters for more militant action, was tempted to join the Women’s Freedom League, and finally saw herself and her friend Helen Fraser replaced by the Pankhursts. Because of her involvement in the suffrage movement, Phillips found it difficult to gain entrance to some political events in the city, making it impossible to complete her work as a reporter, and was threatened with dismissal by her employer. She was also torn between the demands for militant action of the WSPU leadership and her own instinct for a more conciliatory approach. Her correspondence reveals the emotional and personal costs of working for ‘the cause’ in a city far away from the heart of the suffrage movement, but also the fulfilling friendships that sustained and supported her.     

From a mimetic to a holographic paradigm in fiction: Toward a definition of feminist writing

This paper outlines a theory of fiction by examining the shift from the basically mimetic nineteenth century to be essentially non‐mimetic twentieth century. It further argues that the contemporary novel, as herein interpreted, constitutes a bona fide expression of feminist writing.

The paper contends thatthe transformation undergone by the novel as it moved from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century bears witness to the wide ranging transformation affecting the western world today. A number of inter‐related shifts have occurred ostensibly leading the western mind into a radically new world view, or new paradigm. Indeed, our culture is steadily moving from the absolutes of traditional physics to the relativity of the new physics and quantum theory; from a “logocentric”¹ to a “deconstructive”² universe; from a fragmentary (basically static and non‐creative) to a holistic (essentially dynamic and creative) realm; from representation to holography. Inasmuch as “representation” relates to “mimesis”, this paper ultimately redefines its aim by proposing to explore a shift from a mimetic to a holographic paradigm in fiction.

The notion of the holograph is therefore essential to the paper. As herein interpreted, holography not only challenges representation, but it also devalues the linear view of time (which is central to western culture) by focusing on the “now” and thereby delving into the depths of reality — the realm of the underlying, creative forces which the western world is presently releasing. It is precisely the release of long‐repressed forces that is drastically transforming western culture. This sheds new light on the problematics of western alienation which can now be reassessed in terms of “alienation from the creative source”.

In the final analysis, the paper contends that the emerging forces are essentially feminine. This posits an ultimate, all‐encompassing shift which may be said to be leading us from a male‐oriented to a holistically‐oriented culture: a culture that celebrates the essential oneness and fundamental dynamics of Life. Since the twentieth century novel has superbly explored and expressed the emergence of these forces, the paper regards it as the epitome of feminist writing. This writing is to be viewed as practice in the sense that it expresses the very process of change it has helped foster and in which it participates: the process of integration of the creative depths of being.     

a feminist menagerie

This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments—the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic—to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures—ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea creatures and bugs—reflect productive traffic between longstanding concerns in feminist theory and the environmental humanities, and generate new insights related to situated knowledges, feminist care-ethics and the politics of everyday sensory encounters. We also argue, however, that certain figures have tested the limits of theoretical approaches which have emerged as the product of dialogue between feminist theory and environmental studies. In particular, we explore how particular figures have complicated ethical questions of how to intervene in broad environmental threats borne of anthropogenic activities, and of who or what to include in relational ethical frameworks.     

Like a tree

The contemporary mediascape has been marked by a proliferation of popular TV genres in which the public appear as central protagonists. These genres are part of a broader shift in the relationship between media and audiences which challenges traditional conceptions of public service broadcasting and appear to represent a shift from media as public knowledge to media as constituting a space for diffuse popular engagement. A central feature of this shift has been the growing role of popular forms of expertise on television. This paper maps the main critical debates around participatory television and the role of the expert, from earlier work on talk shows to more recent discussions of reality and makeover TV. It notes a transition within the critical media and cultural studies literature from a focus on public sphere theory and questions of democratization to a growing concern with the role played by popular media culture in supporting new modes of governance based on the expert mediation of normative self-control. In this paper we analyze the role of experts on Oprah Winfrey's popular website Oprah.com, noting both the utility and limitations of a governmental perspective. Extending upon Foucault's notion of the productive nature of liberal subjecthood, the paper suggests the more positive role played by popular expertise in contributing to a media–civic culture articulated to a politics of recognition.     

The Development of a Parent Support Group as a Means of Initiating Family Involvement in a Residential Program

SUMMARY

Working with the families of children in residential care is critical to the success of the placement. For a variety of reasons, parents of adolescents in one residential setting were not receiving adequate services during placement. A parent support and education group was designed and implemented to provide opportunities for parents to access support, learn new parenting skills and, ultimately, optimize their relationships with their children. The responses of both parents and staff to this program were favorable. The group is now a regular component of the organization's range of services, and served as a springboard to enhance family involvement in other program areas.     

Ukraine's ancient matriarch as a topos in constructing a feminine identity

In 1991, Ukrainian independence opened an important theoretical channel for debating the status of its women. The people's collective memory of an ancient matriarchy generated a neo-matriarchal mythology which has been transformed into a delusional ideology that legitimizes female subordination, in the name of her alleged empowerment. Fieldwork in Ukraine – annual visits, including travel from one end of the country to another in official capacities, and many extended stays in Ukraine, as a scholar, researcher, educator and participant in key events, provided opportunities for exchanging views with countless people from many walks of life throughout the country. Participation in a host of programs – television ‘specials’ on gender, seminars, retreats, workshops and conferences, designed to raise the consciousness of women and men alike – provided an array of opportunities to observe at first hand the way that today's women construct individual identity. Extensive research in the press (many runs of daily newspapers, including Den’, in Kyiv, and Vysoky Zamok in Lviv, and women's journals such as the widely read Zhinka, among others) added further insights. Television viewing, popular publications collected habitually during my numerous visits to Ukraine, copies of documents contributed by my Ukrainian friends and colleagues, outdoor advertising, posters and intimate gatherings at the homes of likeminded women, all played a part in the formation of my impressions of Ukrainian women's inferior status. In this paper I use my findings to explore the conflicting discourses on women's alleged empowerment, and the essentialist constraints on their self-realization, together with measures adopted to date on changing gender stereotypes and promoting equal rights and opportunities.     

工会美育初探

工会美育是工会工作创新必须高度关注的领域。工会美育是以美学基本原理为指导,以工会组织和工会干部为研究对象,探索工会美在何处和如何更美的规律的科学。     

关于在国有企业建立系统化激励制度的思考

国有企业内部员工激励存在着各种问题 ,鉴于这些问题 ,应从员工激励的制度入手 ,充实完善员工激励制度 ,力争实现制度激励和文化激励。     

构建和谐劳动关系 促进社会和谐发展

社会和谐是社会政治经济文化发展的基础.劳动关系是人们在社会关系中最基础、最广泛、最重要的关系.劳动关系是否和谐,对社会是否和谐起着重要的决定作用.和谐的劳动关系是广大人民群众所期盼的,是广大人民群众的发展要求.所以,要促进社会和谐发展,就必须构建和谐的劳动关系.     

论全面人才观与整体人才开发机制

人才是指各方面的高层次人员。人才包括管理型人才、研究型人才、技术型人才和操作型人才。人才是最重要的战略资源,是国际竞争的焦点。人才开发胜于人才管理。人才开发机制包括社会舆论机制、人才发现机制、人才培养机制、人才监督机制和人才淘汰机制。     

Becoming a Woman: self-fashioning and emotion in a nineteenth-century family correspondence

This article explores the self-fashioning of a bourgeois woman in nineteenth-century France by analysing Geneviève Laurent-Pichat's letters to her father. Geneviève's illegitimacy compounded the emotional difficulties of her path to womanhood, but it also illuminates the processes by which bourgeois girls learned emotional self-management and shaped a self that fitted their assigned social position. Geneviève's letters also enable a reassessment of the role of letter-writing in women's self-fashioning. Engaging in family correspondence was central to the upbringing of middle-class girls, but its protocols reinforced the norms of conventional femininity. Family correspondence thus directed opportunities to explore and constitute the self into acceptable channels, creating a paradoxical feminine self whose fulfilment lay in self-denial.