Book reviews

The following books are reviewed.

Men of letters, writing lives: masculinity and literary auto/biography in the late victorian period TREV LYNN BROUGHTON, 1999 London: Routledge. 213 pp., ISBN 0 415 08211 0 hardback, £60.00 0 415 08212 9 paperback, £19.99

Adapting to Capitalism: working women in the English economy, 1700–1850 PAMELA SHARPE, 1996, 2000 London: Macmillan. xi + 226 pp., ISBN 0 333 91901 7

Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700–1870 KATRINA HONEYMAN, 2000 London: Macmillan. vii + 204 pp., £15.50

Breadwinning: New Zealand women and the state MELANIE NOLAN, 2000 Christchurch: Canterbury University Press. 386 pp., ISBN 0 908812 97 3, NZ$39.95

Working-class Culture, Women and Britain, 1914–1921 CLAIRE A. CULLERTON, 2000 London: Macmillan. xii + 221 pp., ISBN 0 333 91290 X

Austerity in Britain: rationing, controls, and consumption 1939–1955 INA ZWEINIGER-BARGIELOWSKA, 2000 Oxford: Oxford University Press. xiii + 286 pp., ISBN 0 19 820453 1, £40.00

Seeing History: public history in Britain now HILDA KEAN, PAUL MARTIN, SALLY J. MORGAN (Eds), 2000 London: Francis Boutle. 193 pp., ISBN 0 9532388 9 X, paperback, £10.00

Migrant Daughter: coming of age as a Mexican American woman FRANCES ESQUIBEL TYWONIAK & MARIO T. GARCIA, 2000 Berkeley: University of California Press. 237 pp., ISBN 0 526 21915 5

The Matriarchs of England's Co-operative Movement: a study in gender politics and female leadership, 1883–1921 BARBARA J. BLASZAK, 2000 London, Greenwood Press. ix + 209 pp., ISBN 0 313 30995 7

Dirt and Desire: reconstructing Southern women's writing, 1930–1990 PAULINE YAEGER, 2000 Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xvii+324 pp., ISBN 0 226 94491 3 paperback, £12.53     

Cuba's Response to COVID-19: What Underlies its Apparent Success?

Over the last few months extremely positive accounts have been circulating of Cuba's role and approach in the COVID-19 response, both nationally and internationally. A universal healthcare system with family doctors and nurses providing door-to-door services, as well as the swift introduction of measures to control movement have been some of the factors underlying this relative success. However, this success hides the disadvantageous social reality facing the majority of Cubans, including differential access to services, a health system that is struggling and limited choice and freedoms.     

A Bridge Too Far? Examining Bridging Assumptions in Common-Space Estimations

While most common-space estimations rely upon members who served in both the House and Senate as “bridges” to scale the remaining members, this assumes that these “bridge members” do not change their preferences when they change chambers. Such an assumption conflicts with standard notions of representation, that is, that legislators’ votes reflect (at least to some degree) the wishes of their constituents. We examine the constancy of this common-space voting assumption by focusing on a subset of House members who move to the Senate: those who come from statewide House districts. Using these members as the bridge actors—and thus bridging by constituency explicitly—in a one-dimensional item response theory model, we find that the standard assumption of chamber switchers in common-space estimations is technically, but immaterially, false. While there are statistically distinguishable differences in House and Senate voting records for chamber switchers, they are not sufficiently large to meaningfully undermine bridging.     

Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History

This article takes stock of the state of women's political history in the twentieth century and suggests new lines of enquiry, drawing on the authors’ own work on the Labour Party. It identifies a number of key themes which have enriched histories of women and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and considers how these might be developed. Firstly, it examines the significance of the local, and more particularly, the neighbourhood, in women's political lives. Secondly, it asserts the value of focussing on the membership, including the economic, social and cultural shifts that shaped their lives, the intersection of gender with factors such as age or ethnicity, and their own political identities. Finally, it stresses the importance of interrogating masculine cultures to understand how gendered dynamics played out. It concludes with a reminder that inserting women into established political narratives is insufficient: the point is to transform those narratives.     

Advice about Life Plans from Mothers,Fathers, and Siblings in Always-Married and Divorced Families during Late Adolescence

The frequency of advice about life plans that older adolescents in always-married and divorced families received from mothers, fathers, and siblings was examined. Also, a pattern-analytic approach that grouped adolescents according to the amount of advice about life plans received from each parent and a sibling was employed to explore the connections between patterns of advice and adolescents' future occupational, educational, and family plans. The sample included 544 and 95 older adolescents in always-married and divorced families, respectively. Findings suggested that while adolescents relied on mothers for advice in both always-married and divorced families, adolescents in divorced families depended on fathers and siblings for advice less often than did adolescents in always-married families. Although there was some evidence of family context differences in the connections between patterns of advice and life plans, overall, adolescents in both family contexts who received more advice from a parent and, in some cases, a sibling compared to other adolescents were the most positive about their future life plans.     

Palpable insecurity and Sen’s comparative view of justice: anthropological considerations

Amartya Sen’s comparative approach to justice makes clear that notions of justice are shaped by human agency and experience, and both his focus on the ‘internal view’ of well-being that emphasizes suffering as a central feature of illness and his recognition that social and cultural factors shape perceived injustice are critical to this approach. However, Sen questionably depicts the contributions of anthropological research to this project as limited to ‘the sensory dimension of ill-health.’ Focusing on mental health in the context of global justice, I argue that Sen’s treatise on justice can be refined through an ethnographic method that synchronizes attention to (1) cultural knowledge and social relations in ecological settings; (2) fundamental human needs; and (3) levels of analytic specificity involving situations, categories, and events. This method integrates analysis of internal phenomenology and external constraints of political economy and ideology. To demonstrate I discuss three cases involving students and violence in Rio de Janeiro, women and witchcraft in Ghana, and historical migration and war trauma among Vietnamese immigrants in which external conditions of insecurity and inequality contributed to deteriorating mental health conditions including depression, trauma, and debilitating anxiety.     

Guest Editorial: Political geographies of children and young people

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the present Special Issue of Space & Polity tackling the political geographies of children and young people. Historically given scant attention by the sub-discipline, since children and young people appear to have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, geopolitics and the like, there are now small signs of how and why political geographers might look anew at the experiences and contribu tions of this population cohort. An empirical vignette, based on letters written by children and young people to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great De pression, is deployed to develop this claim. Contrasts are then drawn between political geographies of children and young people that are ‘adult-centred’ and those that are ‘child-centred’, as related to claims about the distinctions and connections between ‘macro-politics’ and ‘micro-politics’. It is suggested that, notwithstanding the exciting insights to be derived from child-centred approaches, the situation should not be a matter of privileging these over adult-centred approaches. Indeed, it is argued that there are dangers in going down such a route and of thereby collapsing ‘the political’ into ‘the personal’, thus missing what is distinctively political about the geographies needing to be researched and written. Following a brief excursion into debates about the supposed political apathy of (post)modern children and young people, the paper then introduces the other contributions to the Special Issue.     

csr,Tax and Development

This article explores and critically examines the connections between tax and development on the one hand and tax and corporate social responsibility (csr) on the other. It does so because, while there is increasing recognition of the importance of taxation to efforts to resource the state and to finance ways of tackling poverty, there is a surprising lack of attention to tax avoidance and evasion as a csr issue for transnational corporations operating in the South, even among those companies that pride themselves on being csr leaders. We review evidence of these trends, provide an empirical analysis of how leading firms deal with tax in their corporate reporting and make the case for including taxation as a new frontier in progressive csr.