Gender and Modernity in Post‐War British Cinema; a case study of Young Wives’ Tale (1951)

This article explores the interrelationship between gender and modernity within the context of post‐war Britain, focusing upon the representation of women in the popular film genre of the ‘marriage comedy’. It uses a case study of the 1951 film Young Wives’ Tale to explore post‐war ideas about the ‘companionate marriage’ and the emergence of a ‘modern’ British society. Critical examination of female performance style and the gendered negotiation of domestic space within the film suggests the ways in which anxieties about the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ are displaced onto the female protagonists. The article explores the ways in which ‘tradition’ is usurped in the film and concludes that it was a box office failure because it was out of step with the cultural consciousness of post‐war cinema audiences. The film’s lack of success demonstrates the extent and manner to which gender relations could be challenged in the early 1950s.     

Accommodating ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’: homemaking,home entertaining and domestic advice literature in post‐war Britain

This article analyses the effects of the ‘servant problem’, meaning the contraction of the domestic service industry in the twentieth century, as represented in domestic advice literature (etiquette, homemaking and home decoration books). Before World War II, domestic advisors assumed that readers employed staff, while by the 1970s no such assumption could be made. Managing a home unassisted, especially when entertaining guests in the role American etiquette expert Emily Post termed ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’ (hostess, cook and waitress at once), formed an enduring topic for British and North American domestic advice writers between 1920 and 1970. Rather than reapportioning parts of the homemaker’s labour to other family members, the solutions offered by domestic advisors revolved around reshaping domestic space and its uses in order to facilitate the simultaneous performance of multiple tasks. Multipurpose objects were promoted to act as ‘bridges’ between distinct domestic regions, while multifunctional spaces and open‐plan interiors collapsed distinctions between such regions. Thus changes in the roles of women within society and the family are shown in this analysis of domestic advice literature to affect the design and layout of the home, and domestic advice books are seen to have promoted ultimately conservative solutions.     

Raising Seoul's global competitiveness: developing key performance indicators

This paper develops a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for Seoul city administration, inaugurated in 2006. Proper establishment and application of the KPIs into its administration would not only help in accomplishing municipal leadership's strategic initiations but also enhance Seoul's global competitiveness. At the same time, the KPIs can be a good communication tool through which the leadership and city customers can communicate with each other.     

Peasants and labourers in Southern Spain,Cuba, and Highland Peru

This paper discusses some of the differences and similarities between a peasantry and an agricultural proletariat and considers the economic relations between peasants or labourers and landowners. The examples are drawn mainly from studies of Southern Spain, Cuba and Peru. The paper de‐emphasises the specificity of ‘peasant society’ as an object of study both from the economic and the socio‐political point of view.     

Subsistence production and extended reproduction. A contribution to the discussion about modes of production

The present paper deals with what is considered to be the basic contradiction within the capitalist mode of production: the separation of subsistence production from social production. In the following some theses concerning how this separation works for accumulation and the way it is reproduced together with capital are presented. The central argument is that the separation is fundamentally necessary for accumulation. Within our present capitalist world economy housewives on the one hand and peasants (both men and women) on the other are the main subsistence producers. In different concrete forms both reproduce labour power for capital but are not compensated by capital. The way in which these two groups are integrated into the capitalist mode of production is through their marginalization, i.e. they form the consolidated mass of the industrial reserve army. As such they are continuously reproduced together with the process of extended reproduction of capital. They are two basic forms of capitalist relations of production.     

In Praise of smallholders

In this review article, Robert Netting's book, Smallholders, Householders. Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive Sustainable Agriculture ‐ the product of a lifetime of study and fieldwork by an American anthropologist, schooled in cultural ecology ‐ is considered. The book, which is essentially about adaptations to population increase in different ecological contexts, is dedicated to the defence of smallholders against both Right and Left. It is seen as having some several excellent qualities, not least the relevance of its central stress on ecology. But it is criticised, inter alia, for its attempt to explain land tenure by land use rather than social struggle. The absence of any awareness of Narodnik ecological thought on the peasantry is noted.

Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture, by Robert McC. Netting. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Pp.xiv + 389. £37.50 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 804 721 025 (pbk)