Act Natural: Dubious Proposals in The Mill on the Floss,The Pastor’s Wife,Vera and Rebecca

Abstract

Following George Eliot, Elizabeth von Arnim showcases a male rhetoric of naturalness. Her men cultivate and punish their women when they resist naturalizing. Without denigrating the intelligence of women, von Arnim shows their unwitting complicity in their subjection. In The Pastor’s Wife (1914) and in Vera (1921), the highly literate women have read the wrong books or missed the unfriendly truths about relationships in those they have read. The husbands and lovers make shallow use of philosophical and scientific reasoning to justify their control and enforce female uniformity deemed ‘natural’. Darwin is misappropriated by the tyrannical Wemyss: evolutionary theories support his imperious dismissal of Lucy’s aunt and friends. Wemyss’s most monstrous actions suggest an atavistic patriarchal dominance like the hereditary reversion theorized by Samuel Butler as unconscious memory. Wemyss brings up the issue of England’s inheritance, and a disturbing vision dawns as the philistine and self-appointed natural man subdues Lucy. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) follows Vera’s plot, but it does not interrogate naturalness in the same way. Entrapped in her husband’s vision of a natural woman, the narrator registers Rebecca’s wild transgressiveness as more powerful and universal than her own tamed naturalness.     

Culture,Biology, and Evolution: The Mead–Freeman Controversy Revisited

Derek Freeman argues that the central issue in the Mead–Freeman controversy is evolution. He views Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa as not only misleading about Samoa but as a sacred text that promoted an antievolutionary paradigm among American cultural anthropologists. A review of Mead's writing on culture, biology, and evolution demonstrates that contrary to Freeman's claim, Mead favored an evolutionary approach throughout her career. Moreover, while Mead's book was a popular text and a bestseller, it was not a sacred text among anthropologists. Freeman's misrepresentation of the historical record concerning Mead's views and the place of Coming of Age in anthropology raises major questions about his scholarship.     

The CPGB,the Connolly Association and Irish communism, 1945–1962

This article examines the relationship between the Communist Party of Great Britain and Irish communists in both Ireland and Britain in the post-war era. It argues that the British party’s strategic interest in Ireland gradually waned as it became apparent that Irish communism would remain divided by the border. The article also argues how, in Britain, competition between the nationalist Anti-Partition League and the communist dominated Connolly Association led the latter to abandon cold war sectarianism and to adopt a ‘broad strategy’ championing civil rights in Northern Ireland. The article draws out the key role played by Charles Desmond Greaves in this process, whilst noting the importance of factionalism and external factors, notably the Irish Republican Army’s Border Campaign.     

‘The Rape Joke’: censorship,affective activisms,and feeling subjects

Abstract

This paper follows the affective impact of a story on rape culture in a school magazine in a US high school. Immediately following its publication, the school administrative enacted a policy of prior review on all future publications. The event made waves in US national news and online media and was denounced as an act of censorship and infringement on students’ freedom of expression. In concert with other students and faculty at the school, the author of the piece engaged in various forms of protest and on- and off-line activism. This piece tracks the multiple political affects and effects activated by the article through a notion of affectivisms. This case study further explores notions of ‘positive’ school climate and the increasingly imbricated textures of schooling experiences with online media.     

The manifesto of the North American anti‐fascist alliance,New York,august 26, 1926

Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, By Ira Berlin. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. xxi, 423 pp. $15.00.

Rights of Union Members and the Government. By Philip Taft. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975. xv, 348 pp. $14.95.

The Hundred Million Dollar Pay Off. By Douglas Caddy. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974. $8.75.

Mother Jones—The Miners’ Angel: A Portrait. By Dale Fetherling. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. 263 pp. $11.85

A Guide to the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Compiled and edited by Warner W. Pflug. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974. 195 pp. $8.95.

MAN!: An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries. Edited by Marcus Graham. London: Genfuegos Press, 1974. 638 pp. £7.00 ($17.00), paperback £ 3.25p ($8.00).

Confrontation at Winnipeg: Labour, Industrial Relations, and the General Strike. By David Jay Bercuson. Montreal and London: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1974. pp. x, 227.

English Hunger &; Industrial Disorders: A Study of Social Conflict During the First Decade of George III's Reign. By Walter James Shelton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. ix, 226 pp. $15.00.

Edwardian Radicalism, 1900–1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism. Edited by A.J.A. Morris. Boston: Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1974. x, 277 pp. $18.00.

Les Ouvriers en grève. By Michelle Perrot. Paris: Mouton, 1974. 2 volumes. 900 pp.

The Import of Labor: The case of the Netherlands. By Adriana Marshall. Rotterdam: Rotterdam University Press, 1973. 177 pp.

The Chinese Worker. By Charles Hoffmann. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1974. xi, 252 pp. $15.00.     

The Seattle Teamsters and the procedural state, 1935–1942

The Teamsters Union often clashed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Seattle between 1935 and 1942. At times the Seattle Teamsters resisted the NLRB, yet in other cases the union worked within the agency's procedures to expand. In the years after the Wagner Act, the Teamsters exploited the NLRB to block employees from choosing their own union. This article uses archival records to explore cases where the Seattle Teamsters successfully adapted to federal regulation of collective bargaining between 1935 and 1942. Seattle workers opposed to the Teamsters bravely fought to protect their right to organize, yet these employees faced a union skilled at working with the procedural state. These cases show the increasing ability of the Seattle Teamsters to enroll workers wary of the union by complying with NLRB rules.     

The Korean ‘Examination Hell’: Long Hours of Studying,Distress, and Depression

The goal of this study was to investigate whether the higher rates of clinical depression found among Korean than American adolescents was related to Korean's daily ordeal of studying and schoolwork in preparation for the competitive college entrance examination. A sample of 56 high school seniors in Korea and 62 seniors in the United States provided time-sampling data on the amount of time they spent in daily activities and their affect states during these activities. The Korean adolescents were found to spend much more time in schoolwork and less time in discretionary activities than their American counterparts. Korean adolescents' affect states across daily activities were more negative relative to American adolescents. In the combined sample of Korean and American adolescents spending less time in active leisure activities and experiencing more negative affect states during schoolwork, socializing, and passive leisure activities were related to higher depression. These findings suggest that the effect of the college exam in generating depression in Korean adolescents may be partly mediated through its effect on their daily experience.     

Value,price, and simple commodity production: The case of the Zapotec stoneworkers∗

The concepts of ‘commodity’ and of ‘simple commodity production’ in the work of Marx and his interpreters are examined as a necessary departure point for the analysis of value and price in a Mexican peasant‐artisan stoneworking industry. The labour theory of value, which posits a close relationship between market price and average embodied labour cost of commodities in a peasant‐artisan economy, is applied to the stone‐working industry and is shown to have explanatory power in both the qualitative and quantitative sense. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the labour theory is a necessary tool for discerning and approximating the fundamental role of the labour process, as well as the structure of production relations, in determining the nature and conduct of exchange activities in a peasant‐artisan commodity/market economy.     

The women’s liberation movement,activism and therapy at the grassroots, 1968–1985

The women’s liberation movement was the impetus for the founding of new institutions of psychological and mental health care for women in the late 1970s and 1980s. This article draws upon the archive of one such site, based in Islington, North London, to explore the ways that members of the movement interacted with local politics and were attentive to racial and economic oppression. It demonstrates that consciousness-raising groups and feminist magazines made women’s distress visible and that this visibility led to the development of feminist critiques of mainstream psychiatric care. The critiques of mainstream provision laid the ground for grassroots interventions into women’s mental healthcare in the community.     

Internal union conflict: The flat glass workers, 1936–1937

From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers: The Social Ecology of an Industrial Union, 1869–1897. By Harold W. Aurand. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1971. 168 pp. $10.00

Strike! By Jeremy Brecher. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books. 1972. 329 pp. $3.95.

Self‐Reliance and Social Security 1870–1917. By Hace Sorel Tishler. Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press. 1971. 214 pp. $10.95.

American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957. By Joseph R. Starobin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. 331 pp. $12.95.

The Bracero Program. By Richard Craig. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1971. xvii + 233 pp. $7.50.

Government as Employer. By Sterling D. Spero. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1972. 528 pp. $10.00.

Public Workers and Public Unions. Edited by Sam Zagoria for the American Assembly, Columbia University, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice‐Hall. 1972. $5.95 cloth, $2.45 paper. 182 pp.

Blue‐Collar Workers: A Symposium on Middle America. Edited by Sar A. Levitan. New York: McGraw Hill. 1971. 393 pp. $12.50.

Trade Unions and National Economic Policy. By Jack Barbash. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1972. 206 pp. $8.50.

El Socialhmo en Mexico; Siglo XIX. By Gaston García Cantú. Ediciones Era, Mexico D. F. 1969. 515 pp.

My Generation. By Will Paynter. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 1972. 172 pp. £3.00.

Education and Politics, 1900–1951: A Study of the Labour Party. By Rodney Barker. Oxford University Press. 1972. 173 pp. $10.25.

Ireland and the Irish Question. A Collection of Writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engles. Edited by R. Dixon. New York: International Publishers. 1972. 518 pp. $2.95.

The Life and Times of James Connolly. By C. Desmond Greaves. New York: International Publishers. 1972. 448 pp. $1.65.

The World of the Office Worker. By Michel Crozier. Translated by David Landau. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1971. 224 pp. $10.50.

Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870. By Reginald E. Zelnik. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1971. xii + 452 pp. $15.00.

Soviet Agricultural Trade Unions, 1917–1970. By Peter J. Potichnyi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1972. 258 pp. $12.50.

The Origins of Polish Socialism, The History and Ideas of the First Polish Socialist Party 1878–1886. By Lucjan Blit. Cambridge University Press. 1971. 160 pp. $10.

Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second International. By Georges Haupt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1972. 270 pp. £5.

Labor Organization in the United States and Mexico. By Harvey Levenstein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. 258 pp. $10.00.     

The development of capitalism in the Atlantic world: England,the Americas,and West Africa, 1450–1900

Abstract

The paper traces the development of capitalism in England, the Americas, and West Africa over a long time period, 1450–1900. The developments in these major regions of the Atlantic Basin during the period were strongly interconnected and ultimately gave rise to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy which integrated the major economies of the Atlantic world. The development of capitalism in the three specified geographical areas is analyzed in the context of the interconnected developments. Central to the historical analysis is a discussion of the contending conceptions of capitalism as a socioeconomic system. The paper shows that the original conception by Karl Marx, which identified free wage earners separated from their means of production and entrepreneurs who own those means of production as the defining elements, was generally accepted by supporters and critics for several decades; attempts to redefine began in the 1960s. The paper contends that, unlike the original Marxian conception, the new conceptions fail to capture precisely and accurately the dynamic elements which distinguish capitalism unambiguously from other forms of socioeconomic organization and do not facilitate a sharply focused historical investigation of its development over time. The employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas was critical to the development of capitalism in England and in the Americas, but the adverse effects on West Africa’s economies held back the development of markets and the market economy and, ultimately, the development of capitalism in the region.     

The World Development Report 2008: inconsistencies,silences, and the myth of ‘win-win’ scenarios

The World Development Report 2008 (WDR-2008) on agriculture and development has been received with much expectation and controversy. This paper welcomes some aspects of the WDR-2008 that help us reinvigorate some debates on agricultural development, so far marginalised in international development policy agendas. The paper, however, focuses on some critical problems in the report and the World Bank's stance on agriculture. First, there are tensions between advocacy and research and between the World Bank's rhetoric and operational realities. Secondly, the report suffers from the usual adherence to superficial win-win scenarios that mask conflict of interest and power relations. Thirdly, the WDR-2008 is caught in a tension between neo-populist pro-small farmer views and ‘modernist’ pro-agribusiness stances. Fourthly, the analysis of agricultural development in isolation from broader development processes and especially without a systematic analysis of industrialisation and agriculture–industry relations seriously limits the analytical and empirical value of the report.