Researching women's movements: An introduction to FEMCIT and Sisterhood and After

This article offers an overview of two research projects that are concerned with investigating the histories, social organisation and impacts of women's movements. It introduces FEMCIT (Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: the impact of contemporary women's movements), a transdisciplinary, cross-national European research project, and Sisterhood and After, a UK-based oral history project, outlining their specific research questions, foci and research designs. The article raises a number of key issues that arise in researching women's movements that are then taken up in the eight paired papers that follow: method and research design; difference and diversity; place, space and nation; and understanding impact.     

The industrial union bulletin: An introduction and appraisal

Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. By John Gaventa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. xi, 267 pp. $25.00.

History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume V: “The AFL In The Progressive Era, 1910–1915.”; By Philip S. Foner. New York: International Publishers, 1980. 293 pp. $4.95 paper.

Steelmasters and Labor Reform, 1886–1923. By Gerald G. Eggert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. xvii, 212 pp. $17.95.

Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: the Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. By David Alan Corbin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 294 pp. $24.95 cloth; $12.50 paper.

The Response of Social Work to the Depression. By Jacob Fisher. Boston: G.K. Hall &; Co., 1980. xxii, 266 pp. $23.95.

The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions. By Roger Keeran. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. 340 pp. $22.50.

Facing Mechanization: The West Coast Longshore Plan. By Lincoln Fairley. Los Angeles: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, 1979. xiv, 447 pp. $8.50 paper.

Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885–1917. By Carlos A. Schwantes. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. ix, 288 pp. $25.00.

Fit Work for Women. Edited by Sandra Burman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979. 201 pp. $18.00.

Poverty and Piety in an English Village, Terling: 1525–1700. By Keith Wrightson and David Levine. New York, San Francisco, London: Academic Press, 1979. 254 pp. $21.00.     

Female education and full-time employment in Guinea: an ambiguous relationship

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the direct and indirect effects of female education on full-time labour market employment using Guinean demographic and health surveys. It addresses potential endogeneity of female education, unobserved heterogeneity and sample selectivity concerns using the control function model and a non-self-cluster identification strategy. Results show that female education has a diminishing direct effect on full-time employment, with the inverted-U-shaped relationship portraying that women with seven-plus years of schooling are less likely to be regularly employed than their counterparts with less years of schooling. Interacting female education and its square with the corresponding reduced form residuals increase the probability of full-time labour market employment – an indication that female education and unobserved correlates are complementary. Thus, highly educated Guinea women do not increase their full-time market engagements – a pointer of the importance they may be attributing to home-produced goods and services that push them to perhaps prefer flexi-work arrangements such as occasional or seasonal market engagements.     

Editors' introduction

The following is drawn from the editor's remarks at a roundtable session on "State-of-the-Art: Labor and Working-Class History" of the Organization of American Historians, April 12, 2002, in Washington, DC. Also contributing to the panel were Joshua Freeman, editor of ILWCH and Bryan Palmer, editor of Labor/Le Travail . Particularly noteworthy among their remarks was Freeman's paradoxical assertion that " 'Whiteness' is the greatest imperial triumph within labor history since E. P. Thompson's definition of class, even though labor historians may not like how it is used." I also appreciated Palmer's declaration about a field where he sees "a lot of art, but no state. And that is probably a good thing." Intended to engender larger discussion, my words drew an immediate response from Andrew Arnold, published here as a comment. Should interest warrant, Labor History will publish further contributions on this theme.     

Classical Greek agriculture: Recent work and alternative views

When the economic basis of a great civilisation is at issue, historians are bound to disagree strongly, and controversy can only be intensified when the available primary evidence is inadequate in both quantity and quality. Such is the case with the recent study of agriculture in the ancient Greek world. The two very different general books under review here nicely complement each other both in scope and approach, and provide an excellent introduction to the many unresolved, and too often irresolvable, questions concerning the ideology and practice, political, economic, social and religious, of ancient Greek agriculture.

Ancient Greek Agriculture: An Introduction, by Signe Isager and Jens Erik Skydsgaard. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Pp.x + 234. £40 (hardback). ISBN 0 415 00164 1

Land and Labour in the Greek World, by Alison Burford. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp.x + 290. £28.50 (hardback). ISBN 0 8018 4463 0