A vindication of the rights of girls: surviving girlhood in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

Between 2014 to 2016 we conducted mixed-methods research exploring girls’ experiences of growing up in the UK in the 21st century. We spoke to girls and young women between the ages of 10 and 24 in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to gain a qualitative snapshot of what matters to girls. We also conducted the first quantitative study of a range of quality of life indicators disaggregated by age and gender in the UK to garner a statistical view of geographically-based experiences of growing up girl. The study was commissioned by Plan International UK and The State of Girls’ Rights report was launched in September 2016. What struck us at the time of writing the report was the resonance between challenges girls raised in 2016 and those proclaimed by Wollstonecraft in her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published over 200 years earlier. Here we bring together these voices from the 18th and 21st centuries to consider the continuing legacy and resonance of Wollstonecraft’s ideas in thinking about growing up girl in Britain.     

IV: The Practice in Everyday Life

No abstract available for this article.     

Outside earnings in the Russian peasant farm: The case of Tula province 1900 to 1917

Employment in, and income earned from, crafts and trades (promysly) played an important role in the peasant budget in Tula province before the revolution. This income was earned in both domestic and migratory occupations of various types—many directly related to the urban industries of the town of Tula. Overall, these side earnings played a reciprocal role to farming proper—a point which is demonstrated within the province geographically, according to the size and ‘scale’ of the farm and according to its organisation and layout. This income was therefore primarily supplementary, so that rather than weakening the peasant household farm as an economic unit, industrial or other ‘off‐farm’ work served to maintain the peasant farm at a time of economic change and industrial growth.     

The Psychic Life of Money: Rethinking the Relation Between Ecology and Economy

ABSTRACT

This article takes up the recent debate on whether ecology and economy should be understood as entangled or analytically distinct entities. Instead of continuing to place these two strands of thought against each other, this article suggests another route into the problematic. This route is offered by thinking through the psychic life of money. In mobilising Jacques Derrida's theorisation of hauntology, it rethinks the spatiality and temporality of money in terms of dis/continuity. It argues that rather than opting on the one hand for a generous inclusive notion of the economic-ecological, or on the other for keeping money and energy apart as two separate realms, it is more productive to envision a modality of radical complicity structured by originary lack and excess of interest and survival.     

浅析俄罗斯社会保障制度改革的原因及具体体现

俄罗斯在经济改革实践中,虽经历了政治和经济转轨的剧烈震荡和巨大阵痛,但社会却保持了相对稳定,究其原因,原有的社会保障体系功不可没。俄罗斯社会保障制度改革的利弊得失,对我国社会保障制度向纵深改革具有一定的借鉴意义。     

The Sense of a Life: Re-assessing Simone de Beauvoir

Violently differing views on Simone de Beauvoir clash—how not? Our own obsessional reading of and about her is all the more enhanced by her look and manner(s) of dressing, and her affairs, but, above all, by her towering intelligence and pioneering spirit. This piece tries to deal with as many aspects of her being and seeming and appearance to others, as critics and as readers, as behoves such a vital spirit.     

The Long Arm of Community: The Influence of Childhood Community Contexts Across the Early Life Course

This study examines the longitudinal effects of childhood community contexts on young adult outcomes. The study uses a sample of 14,000 adolescents (52% female) derived from the 1990 US Census and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Addhealth). The study examines whether community and family environments exert separate and/or joint long-term influences on young adult achievement and depression. We found both direct and indirect long-term influences of childhood community adversity on young adult educational attainment. The indirect influences of childhood community adversity operated through family and individual-level factors. The long-term influence of childhood community adversity on young adult depression was only indirect. Overall, community influences on young adult achievement outcomes were mediated by family context and by the adolescents’ adjustments and transitions, including adolescent depression, school adjustment, and disruptive transitional events. The moderating effect of childhood community adversity suggests that the protective effects of family resources on young adult outcomes dissipate significantly in extremely adverse neighborhoods. The findings demonstrate the importance of integrating multiple theoretical perspectives for longitudinal research to capture pathways of community influence on adolescent developmental and young adulthood outcomes.     

Queer Individualization: The Transformation of Personal Life in the Early 21st Century

This article explores what happens to understandings of social change in the realm of personal life when an empirical investigation is carried out that begins from rather different ontological and epistemological premises from those that have underpinned recent debates. It draws on UK‐based research that was framed by an engagement with sociological theories of individualization, psychoanalytically informed psycho‐social studies and queer theory, and that was designed to explore the psychic and affective dimensions, and the unconventional, counter‐heteronormative practices, of contemporary personal life. The study used the free association narrative interview method to examine the practices and ethics of personal life of people living outside conventional couples. It found considerable levels of psychic conflict and emotional distress, and some mental illness, amongst the people interviewed. Many interviewees told stories of experiencing a fracturing of self as they faced lives in which they felt alone and in which they were expected to be self‐responsible. These experiences, it is suggested, can be understood as tied up with losses contingent upon processes of individualization. However, the research also found evidence of a set of interrelated, counter‐heteronormative relationship practices that served reparatively to suture the selves undone by these processes of individualization: the prioritizing of friendship, the decentring of sexual/love relationships, and the forming of non‐conventional partnerships. The article proposes the notion of queer individualization to capture this set of transformations in the organization and experience of personal life, and suggests the necessity of understanding contemporary personal life as involving both the pain of loss, and new, reparative non‐conventional connections.     

The Internal Structure of the Child Depression Inventory in Russian and UK Schoolchildren

The internal structure of a self-report rating scale for depressed mood for schoolchildren—the Child Depression Inventory (CDI)—was examined in both a Russian and a UK sample. The internal reliability and consistency of the scale was high in both samples, and factor analysis revealed that the internal structure of depressed mood was similar in both samples, and further that it was also similar for boys and girls across the two countries. The results support the use of the CDI to measure depressed mood in research with non-Western samples.     

Chayanov and the economics of the Russian Peasantry

The years after 1900 saw the emergence of the “neo‐populist” tradition as a leading tendency of economic thought in the study of the Russian peasantry. By the 1920s Aleksandr Vasil'evich Chayanov had become one of the most influential spokesmen of this tradition. His school was dispersed in 1930. But in the Western study of modern peasantries, his work is once more increasingly influential. The article considers Chayanov's place in the development of economic thought and of political controversy, and tries to locate this in the context of the history of the Russian peasantry itself. Problems and theories in the allocation of labour supplies are particularly examined. Finally, we raise the question of ideology in economic thought.     

群众路线是党的生命线

群众路线是我党的生命线 ,是马克思主义历史唯物主义世界观和科学方法论的体现 ,只有始终不渝地坚持群众路线 ,才能成为广大人民群众根本利益的忠实代表。     

Struggling and surviving: The life style of European immigrant breadwinning mothers in American industrial cities, 1900–1930

Immigrant working mothers created strategies to meet increasingly competing demands of family and job. Despite their wage-earning capacity and rising expectations, ethnic mores, patriarchy, poverty and discrimination perpetuated a rigid family hierarchy which precluded freedom for these women to seek alternatives to their traditional life styles.     

转型时期的俄罗斯工会与社会危机

苏联解体后,俄罗斯工会正逐渐适应如何在市场环境下进行活动。在俄罗斯转轨初期,由于国内外政治经济发生巨变,俄罗斯工会组织不可避免地处于被弱化和矛盾冲突的地位,工会内部由于经济利益的原因发生了分裂,因而难以形成一致性意见来有效解决这些矛盾。本文结合俄罗斯民众对危机的评价,针对转型期的俄罗斯社会存在的不足和问题,探讨了俄罗斯工会存在问题的解决方式。     

What Do They Want in Life?: The Life Goals of a Multi-Ethnic, Multi-Generational Sample of High School Seniors

This study investigated ethnic as well as gender and generational similarities and differences in the life goals among graduating high-school seniors. Adolescents came from six ethnic groups: White, African, Mexican, Other Latino, Filipino, and East/Southeast Asian Americans. Their self-articulated medium-range life goals were grouped into 8 major categories such as occupational, educational, familial, and material goals. Group differences in various aspects of future plans, such as priorities given to different life goals, time frame of attainment, and perceived controllability over their attainment, were also examined. Hypothesized group differences based on current social realities and small-scale qualitative studies on ethnic minorities were not found; there were very few ethnic, gender, and generational differences in adolescents’ life goals. All groups reported a higher priority for, earlier expected attainment of, and more control over their medium-range educational and occupational goals than their family-related and material goals. Further, long-term educational and occupational aspirations were high across all groups. There were moderate ethnic differences in educational expectations and none for corresponding career expectations. Thus, current inequalities in educational and occupational attainments across ethnic groups were only partially reflected in the life goals of adolescents on the brink of graduating from high school.This study was supported by the School of Social Ecology and the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine; as well as the Max-Planck-Award for International Cooperation granted to Jutta Heckhausen and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We are indebted to Susan Farruggia, Ph.D. and Laura Gil-Trejo for their valuable contribution to data collection and help in the day-to-day management of the overall project. We also acknowledge with appreciation the assistance of numerous undergraduate research assistants in data collection and data entry.Developmental psychologist with current interests in the familial factors that affect motivation and disengagement with life goals in adolescence and young adulthoodDevelopmental psychologist with current interests in cross-cultural human development,and the neural bases of math and language learning.Developmental psychologist with clinical training. Her current interests are in the cross-cultural study of familial and peer factors in adolescents’ and young adults’ psychological well-beingClinical psychologist with research interests in the links between economic stress and behavioral disorderDevelopmental psychologist with a current focus on developmental regulation during major life-course transitions, in particular the transition from school to work and to college