The Church of England Votes for Women Bishops, 14th July 2014

This brief Editorial reflects on 14th July 2014, the day when at long last the General Synod of the Church of England voted to allow women to become bishops. It has taken at least a century of campaigning, particularly by determined women, for this to happen.     

Remembering Jo Cox (1974–2016)

This appreciation remembers the life of Jo Cox, a British Member of Parliament (MP), who was brutally murdered on 16 June 2016. A Labour Party feminist, Jo campaigned for women’s rights around the world. After graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1995, she became a political adviser for various MPs and then worked for Oxfam, the Maternity Mortality Campaign, Save the Children and the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children. Jo Cox wanted to make the world a better place, a place of justice and peace.     

Diana,Princess of Wales

Abstract

Ben Shaw, mechanic of Preston, Lancashire, began to write his family history in 1826. It describes the disruptions caused by industrialization and migration to Ben and Betty Shaw and their extended families. This article reflects upon the domestic economies Shaw describes and sees these households as key institutions for mutually organised survival and betterment and as the focus for the diverse activities of women's work. Households were linked into wider support networks between kin and neighbours. Reciprocity was rarely calculative. Gendered power relations could also be close affective relations, despite conflict. Women were vital to this bargain between care and resources which, for this family at least, helped negotiate the contradictions in social identities shaped by both gender and class across the public/private divide     

TEACHING CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS

This essay, based on a presentation at the 2009 Future of Family Law Education conference at the William Mitchell School of Law, discusses strategies for teaching controversial topics, focused on reproductive rights and related gender issues.     

International Dimensions of Women's Suffrage: ‘at the crossroads of several interlocking identities’[1]

This article surveys recent suffrage histories in a range of countries across the world with a focus on the neglected period of the interwar years. It asks what the suffrage movement would look like if viewed through the eyes of women from outside Britain and North America and to what extent it was possible for women, despite their differences, to identify with other women both inside individual countries and across national boundaries. It is suggested here that a comparative approach encourages us to take a fresh look at key features of the suffrage movement and to question conventional wisdoms.     

Assessing Jail Inmates' Proneness to Shame and Guilt: Feeling Bad About the Behavior or the Self?

This study of 550 jail inmates (379 male and 171 female) held on felony charges examines the reliability and validity of the Test of Self Conscious Affect -Socially Deviant Version (TOSCA-SD; Hanson & Tangney, 1996) as a measure of offenders' proneness to shame and proneness to guilt. Discriminant validity (e.g., vis-à-vis self-esteem, negative affect, social desirability/impression management) and convergent validity (e.g., vis-à-vis correlations with empathy, externalization of blame, anger, psychological symptoms, and substance use problems) was supported, paralleling results from community samples. Further, proneness to shame and guilt were differentially related to widely used risk measures from the field of criminal justice (e.g., criminal history, psychopathy, violence risk, antisocial personality). Guilt-proneness appears to be a protective factor, whereas there was no evidence that shame-proneness serves an inhibitory function. Subsequent analyses indicate these findings generalize quite well across gender and race. Implications for intervention and sentencing practices are discussed.     

The Recovery and Persistence of Salivary DNA on Human Skin

Abstract: Salivary DNA is encountered in many crimes, such as sexual assaults and murders. In this study, saliva from three male donors was deposited on the skin of three female recipients. The amount of male salivary DNA remaining on the female skin was measured over a 96‐h period using the Quantifiler? Y Human Male DNA Quantification Kit. In eight of the nine experiments, a full male DNA profile matching the donor was obtained even after 96 h. In addition, the study showed that the concentration of salivary DNA varied from donor to donor and from day to day. The efficiency of two recovery methods, wet and dry swabbing and minitaping, was compared. The results indicate the tapelift method gave higher DNA recovery. This study also examined the secondary transfer of salivary DNA from skin to fabrics. Cotton and polyester give higher DNA transfer than leather.