The Supreme Court and the Social Conception of Abortion

Skeptics of Supreme Court power have pointed to abortion policy as an example of surprising limits on the justices' power to change society. I argue, however, that the Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade played a critical role in transforming how Americans think and talk about abortion. I develop an account of the development of the social conception of abortion from a critical reading of twentieth century American journalism and then test some predictions of that account through the use of quantitative content analyses. I conclude by discussing some implications for the study of judicial politics and public constitutionalism.     

Passive Observers or Active Participants? Jurors in Civil and Criminal Trials

What was the role played by jurors in civil and criminal trials from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century? This article establishes that during this period, juries in Ireland played a relatively active role. It examines individual reports of civil and criminal trials and considers the nature of juror participation during this period, establishing that jurors frequently questioned witnesses, berated counsel, interrupted judges, demanded better treatment and added their own observations to the proceedings. This article compares the nature and level of interaction from different categories of jury – civil and criminal, common and special. It asks why Irish jurors continued to be active participants until late in the nineteenth century, and how the bench and bar received their input. It also suggests that English jurors may have played a more active role during this period than previously thought. Finally, the article considers some possible reasons for the silencing of Irish jurors by the late nineteenth century.     

Family systems and the foundations of class in Ireland and England

The article examines the history and development of family systems in England and Ireland, with special attention to the role of moral constructions in establishing differential advantage among family members and to the consequences for society of such differentiation. It is argued that the English system of primogeniture contributed to the proliferation of bureaucracy and entrepreneurship, the growth of a middle class, and the creation of a landless and mobile laboring class. The Irish system of preferential inheritance with some partibility, on the other hand, deterred the rise of such class differentiation and concentration of wealth. Both societies developed a “bifocal morality” with respect to heirs and nonheirs or lesser heirs, a morality situated in economics and politics in England and nurtured within the family in Ireland.     

Family systems and the foundations of class in Ireland and England

The article examines the history and development of family systems in England and Ireland, with special attention to the role of moral constructions in establishing differential advantage among family members and to the consequences for society of such differentiation. It is argued that the English system of primogeniture contributed to the proliferation of bureaucracy and entrepreneurship, the growth of a middle class, and the creation of a landless and mobile laboring class. The Irish system of preferential inheritance with some partibility, on the other hand, deterred the rise of such class differentiation and concentration of wealth. Both societies developed a “bifocal morality” with respect to heirs and nonheirs or lesser heirs, a morality situated in economics and politics in England and nurtured within the family in Ireland.     

‘Alien family’: The impact of the Aliens Act 1935 and subsequent Orders on the family in Ireland, 1933–1945

This article examines the consequences of Irish ‘aliens’ policy on families fleeing Nazi Germany using case studies of Irish German-speaking families and German-speaking families to ascertain the difficulties they faced. Analysis of the applications process undergone by families in order to secure a safe-haven from the reaches of the Third Reich reveals the main concerns of the Irish establishment and how these matters affected the potential safety of some individuals above others because of how they were officially categorised. Juxtaposing those who were considered an asset to Irish society against those who were not granted refuge this study traces the process both endured. While this article outlines the Irish government policy on refugees it focuses more particularly on how civil servants and government agencies implemented such policies and the subsequent impact on refugee family units affected by the Nazi regime.1 1?My doctoral research forms part of the German-speaking exiles in Ireland Project an initiative led by Dr Gisela Holfter in the Centre for Irish-German Studies at the University of Limerick. The overall project is attempting to fill a previous void in international exile studies, from an Irish perspective see Holfter, Gisela (Ed.). (2006 Holfter, Gisela, ed. 2006. German-speaking Exiles in Ireland 1933-1945, Amsterdam: Rodopi. New York [Google Scholar]). German-speaking Exiles in Ireland 1933-1945 Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. This article attempts to reconcile internal policy, international relations and the effect these had on the lives of ordinary people both German-speaking and Irish. It will conclude by recognising the importance to the Irish authorities of the former two elements while acknowledging that despite them there were some successes for refugees although they were of least consequence in the priorities of the day.     

Reinforcing the family: The role of gender,morality and sexuality in Irish welfare policy, 1922–1944

Irish legislators had to negotiate rigidly defined gender roles, strict moral codes and contradictory sexual behaviour when implementing welfare policy in the early decades of the twentieth-century. Despite traditional and unforgiving attitudes to male and female sexuality, the debates surrounding welfare policy in Ireland reveal a more complex sexual landscape and an overriding concern regarding child protection and family welfare. Faced with real fears regarding the viability of the Irish family and the degree of child poverty, Irish legislators opted to use welfare policy to direct limited state resources towards the children of vulnerable and/or large families resulting in an apparently inconsistent approach to gender ideals.     

‘Done to death by father or relatives’: Irish families and infanticide cases, 1922–1950

In February 1929 the Bishop of Ossory commented on the fact that in Ireland illegitimate infants were often ‘done to death by father or relatives’ (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). There were many instances where family members of unmarried women who gave birth were the sole defendants or co-defendants in infanticide cases in post-independent Ireland. Although illegitimate infants were ‘done to death’ by their fathers in a number of cases that were tried at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin between 1922 and 1950, this article will focus on cases where infants were murdered or suspected of having been murdered by relatives of the birth mother both in the Twenty-Six Counties and in Northern Ireland (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). For the purposes of this article I have referred to the murder of illegitimate infants as ‘infanticide’ even though there was no separate charge of infanticide in the Irish Free State until 1949. The English infanticide acts of 1922 and 1938 also applied to Northern Ireland. This article discusses the motives of the relatives of single mothers who played a part in the deaths of illegitimate infants. Unmarried motherhood was severely frowned upon in Ireland and the relatives of single pregnant women assisted their female kin in destroying the evidence of extra-marital conception in order to protect the family's honour and moral reputation in the wider community. The records of infanticide trials provide a great deal of insight into the ways in which mainly working-class families dealt with the strain of pregnancy outside wedlock in Ireland between 1922 and 1950.     

Renegotiating Social Citizenship in the Age of Devolution

The period 2012 to 2016 saw important developments in the role of the United Kingdom's devolved legislatures in shaping the social rights of citizenship. Near‐uniformity in social security is being eroded, with competences devolved to Scotland and Northern Ireland proceeding with limited divergence from Great Britain. This turn to regionalism is linked with dissatisfaction with British government approaches. This article examines developments from a social citizenship perspective. Welfare state regionalism is a challenge to Marshall's perceived unitary view of citizenship. Yet, it is argued, moves towards divergence are driven by regional differences of perspective on citizens' social rights and reciprocal obligations in a way that emphasizes the continued relevance of Marshallian theory. The democratization of political rights gave birth to social rights in the early twentieth century; today, the regionalization of democratic citizenship enables alternative visions for social citizenship to be articulated and begin to shape welfare services at devolved level.     

From Programmatic Reform to Social Science Research: The National Tax Association and the Promise and Perils of Disciplinary Encounters

This article uses the history of the National Tax Association (NTA), the leading twentieth‐century organization of tax professionals, to strengthen our empirical understanding of the disciplinary encounter between law and the social sciences. Building on existing sociolegal scholarship, this article explores how the NTA embodied tax law's ambivalent historical interaction with public economics. Since its founding in 1907, the NTA has changed dramatically from an eclectic and catholic organization of tax professionals with a high public profile to an insular, scholarly association of mainly academic public finance economists. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence, we contend that the transformation in the NTA's mission and output can be explained by the increasing professionalization and specialization of tax knowledge, and by the dominant role that public economics has played in shaping that knowledge. This increasing specialization allowed the NTA to secure its position as a bastion of scholarly tax research. But that achievement came at a cost to the organization's broader civic mission. This article is thus a historical account of how two competing professional disciplines—tax law and public economics—have interacted within a particular organizational field, namely the research and analysis of tax law and policy.     

Women in campaigns 1550–1850 household and homosociality in the Swedish army

The article presents the main results from my study of social conditions in the Swedish Army between 1550 and 1850. The focus is on women's involvement and importance in the military. The most strikingly result is that women for a long time played a more crucial role in the Army than many people are unaware of. As a consequence, the unisexual, masculine, compulsory, military service which existed during most of the 20th century can be treated as an historical parenthesis. Nowadays women are permitted to serve in the military as soldiers, in older times women fulfilled their military duties as soldiers' wives. In a long-time perspective, the military role of women has shifted from wife to professional: the article explores this process. Soldiers on campaigns in the 17th century built households and had families, regardless of wartime or peacetime, and their households were also a natural part of the military, simultaneous with a strong male bonding principle, homosociality. Although conflicts existed between the two principles of organization, household and homosociality, they operated together at any rate until the beginning of the 19th century. The article illustrates how this cooperation worked, but also how the rise and fall of the household system in the military may be explained. Military thought, growth of state authority, a professionalization process and changed cultural norms were crucial. However, I want to emphasize the social practice of gender relations as a promoter of change: how norms and measures connected with marriage affected the military.     

Women,the Home and Resistance in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This paper provides a perspective on women's resistance in Northern Ireland by focussing on their experiences of house raids. In light of a growing literature on women in conflict with the state, it argues that women have become increasingly politicised and organised in their resistance to repeated incursions into the home by the security forces which have ruptured traditional boundaries around relations of motherhood, home maker and sexual privacy. Based on a qualitative study of one hundred women in Northern Ireland, this paper suggests the coercive agents of the state have played a significant role in both the individual and collective resistance of women. Paradoxically, it seems, the security forces have become agents of change whereby the exposition and violation of the home has been one of the forces which has nurtured and defined women's political consciousness.     

Paying the levy: Taxable wealth in Bridgetown,Barbados, 1680–1715

Differential fertility can be attributed to economic and cultural factors, but the family also plays an important role. Fertility behavior may be transmitted from parents to children through heritable dispositions or via socialization. Previous research has shown, however, that the expression of genetic effects depends on the interplay with the environment. In this article we take a long-term view and examine how the different mechanisms shifted over time and across social and local contexts on the basis of a large-scale database containing 100 thousand sibling pairs born between 1810 and 1870 in the Dutch province of Zeeland, a society undergoing demographic transition and industrialization. Corroborating earlier research, we find a significant increase in the expression of heritabilities and a fading of social influence for women born after the 1840s, who started their reproductive careers during the historical fertility decline in this region. Our study points out that the ‘social control’ of fertility was particularly reduced for women born in towns, women originating from the urban or rural laboring classes, and women from communities with a relatively liberal religious climate. Our findings are in line with research emphasizing the important role played by women in decision-making processes around childbearing, and could indicate the conditions that enhanced women's position in household bargaining during the historical fertility decline.     

The contribution of Tamara Hareven to the understanding of carework

Tamara Hareven was widely recognized for her contribution to the study of the family in the context of economic activity, but she was also a pioneer in developing an understanding of carework, the unpaid work that families, usually women, do for the young, and the dependent elderly. This article reviews her insights from interviews in Manchester and in Kyoto, where she examined family strategies for combining paid work and carework among working class families. She described how women integrated child care and economic activity in the decades when women were expected to be at home and out of the labour force. The Manchester interviews also revealed the role of the adult child providing care for the elderly parent and how this role changed rapidly between early and later cohorts of adult children born in the early 20th century. From this she developed her insights on the importance of the historical context for understanding how transitions to parent care differed for different cohorts. In the early 21st century, carework has become integral to the study of the family and of women's roles in the family. Tamara Hareven's work provides early insights as to how these issues were managed in the context of more traditional family roles in the early 20th century.     

It’s a Man’s World,Try to Convince the Men Otherwise: The Role of Women in Irish Policing

Police organizations are historically and predominantly male organizations; as such, the purpose of this study is to examine the role of women in Irish policing. The literature review will analyze gender-specific organizational literature, focused on the United States. Theoretical components include biological determination and social constructivism in the policing context. The study is conducted through qualitative interviews and thematic analysis of 10 current and former Gardaí in Ireland. This study empirically contributes to how the organization views gender and how those differences are institutionalized in that Gardaí are treated differently based on their gender.     

The contribution of Tamara Hareven to the understanding of carework

Tamara Hareven was widely recognized for her contribution to the study of the family in the context of economic activity, but she was also a pioneer in developing an understanding of carework, the unpaid work that families, usually women, do for the young, and the dependent elderly. This article reviews her insights from interviews in Manchester and in Kyoto, where she examined family strategies for combining paid work and carework among working class families. She described how women integrated child care and economic activity in the decades when women were expected to be at home and out of the labour force. The Manchester interviews also revealed the role of the adult child providing care for the elderly parent and how this role changed rapidly between early and later cohorts of adult children born in the early 20th century. From this she developed her insights on the importance of the historical context for understanding how transitions to parent care differed for different cohorts. In the early 21st century, carework has become integral to the study of the family and of women's roles in the family. Tamara Hareven's work provides early insights as to how these issues were managed in the context of more traditional family roles in the early 20th century.     

Working women in France,nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Where,when, and which women were in work at marriage?

We look at women's labour force participation for the whole of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We study to what extent young women were working at the time of their marriage, in which occupations, and how differences in labour force participation might be explained. Using a sample of 53,451 marriage records from the TRA project, we identify regional and temporal differences in rates of female labour force participation and in types of work in France between 1860 and 1986.We observe rather stable levels of female labour force participation between 1860 and 1950 of about 60 per cent, but higher levels in the second half of the twentieth century. Over time, women started to work across virtually all occupational sectors. Regional differences declined over time but continued to exist in the late twentieth century. We formulate a set of hypotheses to explain which women worked, taking into account their resources, as well as their expectations, in a male-breadwinner-dominated society. The results of our hierarchical logistic analysis indicate that women with fewer parental resources were more likely to work.     

Race,Care Work,and the Private Law of Inheritance

Hartog, Hendrik. 2012 . Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 353. $29.95 cloth. In Someday All This Will Be Yours, Hendrik Hartog (2012) examines how private inheritance law structured the strategies people used at the turn of the twentieth century to induce relatives to care for them as they aged. Reading it as a book about social inequality and the family reveals how wealth, gender, and race not only worked to deny claims of marginalized caregivers but also to hide the way these social hierarchies affect family life. Although race does not figure in Hartog's analysis, highlighting its latent presence illustrates the often unspoken yet fundamental role race plays in legal regulation of families.     

Lilith in Myth,Melodrama, and Criminology

Abstract

This article illustrates how the social construction of both knowledge and popular culture has been influenced by mythic images of “fair and virginal” good women and “dark and sensual” evil women-what is commonly called the madonna/whore duality. The article examines the myth of Lilith, first wife of Adam, and the images of good and evil women that we can distill from creation myths. We then demonstrate how these images of good and evil women are illustrated in early twentieth century criminology and the 1920s melodrama Lilith.     

Crime in Ireland north and south: Feuding gangs and profiteering paramilitaries

This paper provides a systematic overview of the emergence of organized crime in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. It draws on two major studies of organized crime in the South (Hourigan 2011) and paramilitary activity in the North (Morrison 2014) to explore how conflict within and between organized criminal and paramilitary groups, shapes the distinctive dynamic of organized crime on the island of Ireland. The paper opens with an overview of the development of the drugs trade in the Republic of Ireland. The distinctive cultural characteristics of Irish organized crime groups are considered and the role played by paramilitary groups in criminal networks, North and South, is reviewed. As part of this analysis, the dynamic of inter-gang feuds and the spectrum of conflicts between organized criminal and paramilitary groups are analyzed. The competitive and mutually beneficial links between these organizations, North and South are explored as well as the tendency of paramilitaries to engage in vigilantism against criminals (mostly drugs dealers) as a means of building political capital within local communities.     

Economic status,religion, and demography in an Ulster town in the early twentieth century

The paper offers an analysis of the demography of the confessionally-divided and heavily industrialized northern Irish town of Lurgan in the early twentieth century. Its main source is the individual household forms of the Irish population census of 1911. This was the first Irish census to provide household-level data on the number of children born—and the number still surviving—to married couples co-resident at the time of the census. The paper begins by producing standard cross-tabulations of socio-economic status, as represented by literacy, numeracy, occupation, and the labour force participation of married women, by religion. It then presents econometric analyses of female labour force participation, marital fertility, and infant and child mortality. The greater poverty of Catholic households forced a higher proportion of mothers to work outside the home, mainly as unskilled workers in the town's linen mills. The analysis of the marital fertility suggests that confessional affiliation did not influence family size much at this juncture. The analysis of infant and child mortality suggests that religious affiliation was to a significant extent a cloak for living standards and socio-economic advantage.