From Career Girl to Sexy Stewardess: Popular Culture and Women’s Work in the Canadian and American Airline Industries

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canada and the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts from the 1940s to the 1970s. Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentation of the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants, but the legacy of earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.     

Exporting suffrage: British influences on the Canadian suffrage movement

While the Canadian suffrage movement followed its own distinct pathway to full voting rights for women, it was deeply influenced by British ideas which were transplanted, translated and reinterpreted to fit Canadian social conditions. The Canadian media assumed WSPU speaking tours were most significant, and these did generate publicity for the Canadian movement. However, British influences were far more diverse. The transfer of ideas associated with British labourism, the flow of British immigrants to Canada, and the influence of British and Commonwealth organizations in the interwar years were also important influences on the Canadian movement.     

‘Equal Laws Based upon an Equal Standard’: the Garrett Sisters,the Contagious Diseases Acts,and the sexual politics of Victorian and Edwardian feminism revisited

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), co-founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), leader of the constitutional suffrage movement, were centrally involved in the Victorian and Edwardian campaign for women's equality. Both women attempted to maintain a separation between the suffrage movement and the sexualized realm of the female body, which was subject to state intrusion during the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and again during the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes some forty years later. But the Garretts had to negotiate the intersection of gender, class, and sexual politics in order to advance the cause of feminist social reform.     

The Impact of Political Debate on Government Trust: Reminding the Public What the Federal Government Does

Americans' confidence in government is low by historical standards. We fielded a national telephone survey to examine influences on government confidence and whether public discontent was affected by altering the salience of specific government operations. We used a question order experiment where we alternated between first asking a general question about confidence in government and first asking about confidence in specific government operations. We found that posing the specific policy questions first elevated general confidence more than the reverse. The largest and most noticeable effects were observed for Republicans and those most knowledgeable and attentive to politics. Findings of context effects and the partisan subgroup differences are consistent with existing theories on public opinion change as well as with previous question order experiments. But, evidence that the cognitive elite was especially influenced by question order challenges previous theories that presumed that its sophistication made it immune to influence. We suggest that education and political knowledge expand rather than contract the opportunities for priming.     

Opening the Door to Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Self–Regulation in Ontario

This paper examines the steps that three complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) groups – naturopaths, acupuncturists/traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, and homeopaths – are taking to achieve statutory self–regulation in the province of Ontario. The regulatory framework created by the Regulated Health Professions Act of 1991 is outlined, and the differing approaches taken by each of the three groups to gain inclusion under its umbrella are compared and contrasted. The paper assesses the influence of current regulatory and socio–political environments, and queries the extent to which the paradigms of health and health care of these different groups can be accommodated in a regulatory regime heavily reliant on the conventional medical model.     

Domestic Violence, Character, And Social Change In The Welfare Reform Debate

This article addresses the recently discovered connection between domestic violence and welfare dependency." Empirical research among welfare populations shows that over 50% of women receiving welfare are or have recently been battered, and that partner abuse is a major reason for the continuing poverty of many women.
The question the author asks and begins to answer is why this connection has not previously been identified or publicized by either the battered women's movement or the anti‐poverty movement, and what the challenge may be to both movements as they attempt to address it in the context of welfare reform. The author argues that the connection has not been previously addressed because of the somewhat conflicting ideologies underlying both movements. The battered women's movement is defined in part by its strong moral denunciation of male abusers and assertion of the victimization of women by men. The anti‐poverty movement is reluctant to demonize half of the poor population, particularly in light of the conservative welfare reformers' emphasis on "character" as the main cause of poverty. The article argues that we must – and can – find a way to synthesize the feminist emphasis on interpersonal justice and morality with the anti‐poverty movement's recognition of the larger social causes of poverty. The perspectives of both movements must be enlarged to recognize the multiple layers of victimization which poor women and men endure; and both movements will be revitalized by this cross‐fertilization.