The Wilson administration and the wartime mobilization of black Americans, 1917–18

Knights of The Golden Rule: The Intellectual as Christian Social Reformer in the 1890s. By Peter J. Frederick. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976. xvi, 323 pp. $18.75.

Socialism and the Cities. Edited by Bruce M. Stave. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1975. ix, 212 pp. $13.50.

The Economics of Affirmative Action. By James V. Koch and John F. Chiz‐mar, Jr. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1976. xiii, 158 pp. $12.00.

For God And Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Ethnic Consciousness in America, 1860–1910. By Victor Greene. Madison, Wisconsin: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1975. 202 pp. $17.50.

Pursuing the American Dream: White Ethnics and the New Populism. By Richard Krickus. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976. xv, 424 pp. $3.9.5.

Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony. By Joseph Boskin. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1976. xi, 115 pp. $6.95.

Populist Vanguard, A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. By Robert C. McMath, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. xiii, 221 pp. $13.95.

“ ‘ Here Come a Wind’: Labor on the Move.”; Southern Exposure, Vol. IV, No 1–2, 1976, 225 pp. $3.50.

The Brothers Reuther, and the Story of the UA W: A Memoir. By Victor G. Reuther. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976. 450 pp. $16.95.

The Origins of British Industrial Relations: The Nineteenth Century Experience. By Keith Burgess. London: Croom Helm, 1975. 331 pp. £ 8.95.

Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia. By Jeremiah Schneiderman. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976. 401 pp. $18.50.

Labor and the Ambivalent Revolutionaries: Mexico, 1911–1923. By Ramon Eduardo Ruiz. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 145 pp. $10.50.     

How much insecurity does security need? The discrepancy in assessing the sense of security of children,adolescents, and caregivers in institutions

When developing concepts for protecting children and youth who live in institutions, the perspective of the addressees has so far been insufficiently taken into account. This study aims to compare the assessment of children, youth, and caregivers in institutions with regard to group atmosphere, participation, and sense of safety. A combined quantitative and qualitative approach compares the assessment of children or youth and caregivers in child and youth welfare institutions, boarding schools, and clinics through the use of an online questionnaire and group discussions that address the topics safety, group atmosphere, and participation. The quantitative questionnaire included 233 youth age 14 years and up and 490 caregivers; 87 children or youth between the ages of 11 and 18 years and 73 caregivers were part of the qualitative group discussion. The questionnaire showed that youth and caregivers assessed the sense of security in principle as positive. With regard to group atmosphere and participation, youth tended to see these aspects in a positive light, but almost all youth-aged participants viewed these specific categories more critically than did the adult caregivers. The results from the group discussions make clear that children, adolescents, and caregivers often underestimate the real dangers. The existing sense of security in institutions may be the result of underestimating real dangers. Implications for the implementation of protection concepts are drawn.     

Gender,Nationalism and Colonial Policy: prostitution in the Jewish settlement of Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948

The aim of this article is to discuss the way prostitution was perceived during the British rule in Palestine (1918–48), analyzing the differing perspectives of the British colonial authorities and the Jewish national community. The major concerns of the civil and military colonial authorities were focused on issues of ‘social hygiene’ and the trafficking in women and children. This often involved the transfer of both legislation and discourse from the metropolis. The Jewish community, on the other hand, was concerned mainly with the evolving national project. Prostitution was seen as a ‘mixing ground’ of Jewish women and British and Arab men, thus threatening the boundaries of the national collective. Whilst the article is attentive to the importance of studying prostitution in its historical specificity, it also considers the many ways in which this case study illuminates the complex series of relationships between both colonialism and prostitution, and gender and nationalism. Women were important to the imagining of the nation not only for their symbolic power—as ‘mothers of the nation’, for example; the construction of nationalist discourses also involved focusing on ‘negative’ gendered phenomena, such as prostitution. In these ways, the article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the multiple significance of gendered categories in the process of nation-building.     

‘Upon this (foundering) rock’: Minneapolis Teamsters and the transformation of US business unionism, 1934–1941

This article examines an understudied consequence of the labor upsurge of the 1930s – namely, the way in which the conflict between conservative business unionism and more radical alternatives of the period fundamentally transformed business unionism itself. The author illustrates this through a case study of the struggle within the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) between the business unionist leadership and an insurgent movement spearheaded by the Trotskyist leaders of Minneapolis Local 544. In order to defeat the insurgents, the IBT leadership violated their commitment to anti-statist voluntarism, using newly enacted labor policies to mobilize coercive state power in their favor. This episode foreshadowed expanded state intervention in union affairs in the post-war period and marked the ascendancy of a new model of industrial business unionism. The latter blended innovative tactics borrowed from radical challengers with the narrow economism and political conservatism of its craft business unionist forebears.     

Union voucher at the sickbed of French unionism? The CFDT union confederation and the AXA experiment, 1981–1993

In the 1980s, to address financial difficulties, the CFDT (a French reformist union) proposed an original solution – the union voucher – aimed at broadening its membership base and generating new resources. It affords unions with funding from a company, which annually distributes vouchers to employees, who can remit the voucher (or not) to unions of their choice. This mechanism is based both on company financing and the individual choices of employees. In the early 1990s, the insurance company AXA experimented with and then adopted this solution. This article traces the history of the union voucher and assesses the union’s experience.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

‘If I strive not after my own salvation,who shall strive for me,and if not now,when?’ The Role of Religion in the West Central Jewish Working Girls' Club, 1893–1939

This article looks at the inclusion of religion within the West Central Jewish Working Girls' Club in London through newspapers, club histories and oral testimonies. Previous scholarship has downplayed the religious element in Jewish youth clubs; however, this article will demonstrate that religion was a factor within the activities of the West Central Club. Drawing on reports from the club leaders, this article will show that religion was present through prayers and services held on the Sabbath, and, where possible, this religion promoted domesticity for young women.