Context Matters: Links Between Neighborhood Discrimination, Neighborhood Cohesion and African American Adolescents’ Adjustment

Racial discrimination has serious negative consequences for the adjustment of African American adolescents. Taking an ecological approach, this study examined the linkages between perceived racial discrimination within and outside of the neighborhood and urban adolescents’ externalizing and internalizing behaviors, and tested whether neighborhood cohesion operated as a protective factor. Data came from 461 African American adolescents (mean age = 15.24 years, SD = 1.56; 50 % female) participating in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Multilevel models revealed that perceived discrimination within youth’s neighborhoods was positively related to externalizing, and discrimination both within and outside of youth’s neighborhoods predicted greater internalizing problems. Neighborhood cohesion moderated the association between within-neighborhood discrimination and externalizing. Specifically, high neighborhood cohesion attenuated the association between within-neighborhood discrimination and externalizing. The discussion centers on the implications of proximal stressors and neighborhood cohesion for African American adolescents’ adjustment.     

Book reviews

Understanding Gender in the Social Sciences and Women's Research Karin Widerberg and Arnhild Taksdal, eds, F?rståeker av kj?nn —i samfumsvitenskapenes fag og kvimeforskning (Understanding Gender in the Social Sciences and Women's Research). Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal, 1992.

A feminist literary study in romanticism Eva Borgström: "Om jag får be om öbst”: Kring kvinnliga författares kvimobilder i svensk romantik. ("If I may ask for ölost”: On the Images of Women Portrayed by Women Writers of the Swedish Romantic Age). 272 pp. Summary in English. Göteborg: Anamma förlag, 1991.     

Dress and Distinction in Nursing, 1860–1939: ‘A corporate (as well as corporeal) armour of probity and purity’ 1

This article considers the uniform and uniform rules which formed an important part of the ‘reformed nurse’ in the latter years of the nineteenth century and remained central to the concept of the nurse in the twentieth. It will be shown that the rules and regulations of nurses’ garb continued long after the rules for women’s dress in general had relaxed. These dress codes were used by the reformers of nursing to provide a ‘space’ between the ‘new or reformed nurse’ and her morally suspect predecessor, the Sairey Gamp figure in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. The nurses’ garb was created to provide a common identity for the profession at a time of rapid social change. But within this context it also represented its distinctiveness; uniform was a metaphor for the class divisions and symbolic fractures within the profession.     

‘Modernist Madonnas’: Dorothy Todd,Madge Garland and Virginia Woolf

During the 1920s Vogue magazine in the UK was transformed from a society paper into a magazine of high modernism and the avant‐garde. The editor was Dorothy Todd. Todd was assisted by her protégée and lover, the Australian‐born Madge Garland. During this period Garland and Todd developed friendships with Virginia Woolf, other members of Bloomsbury, writers such as Rebecca West and artists such as Marie Laurencin. Madge Garland also developed friendships with artists, couturiers and intellectuals in both Paris and London. Dorothy Todd was sacked from Vogue in 1926 because of what was perceived by Conde Nast as its rather too bohemian direction. Todd’s career never recovered from this blow. Garland, however, went on to become a leading fashion journalist, businesswoman and textile expert. In 1947 she was appointed to the Royal College of Art, London, as the first Professor of Fashion Design. In the last stage of her career Garland wrote a number of books about art, fashion history and gardening. This article considers the lives and achievements of Dorothy Todd and Marjorie Garland, and their involvement with Virginia Woolf as her fashion advisors, editors and acquaintances. The article also examines the way in which Vogue celebrated the work of non‐Bloomsbury members and explores Marjorie Garland’s major contribution to fashion journalism, history and teaching in the UK.     

Jean Batten and ‘the Accident of Sex’

Through the critical analysis of visual and verbal texts, this essay offers a sighting of New Zealand aviator Jean Batten—one of the greatest women solo flyers of the twentieth century to ‘disappear’. Unlike US flyer Amelia Earhart whose disappearance some miles off Howland Island in the South Pacific prompted endless search and research, Jean Batten’s disappearance from stage and page of flight history engendered no such interest until the late 1980s when a documentary film (1988) and the first book‐length biography (1990) were published by Ian Mackersey. Although important contributions to understanding Jean Batten’s place in aviation history of the twentieth century, Mackersey’s construction of Batten’s life relies heavily upon a psychological interpretation of character and action that is largely removed from and uninformed by gendered history. Hence, an important aim of this essay is to offer an analysis of the impact ‘the accident of sex’ (a phrase coined by Earhart) and the performance of gender had and continues to have upon ‘the life’ of Jean Batten.     

‘Bless the Gods for my pencils and paper’: Katie Gliddon's prison diary,Percy Bysshe Shelley and the suffragettes at Holloway

This article discusses the life and imprisonment of the largely unknown middle-class artist and British suffrage activist Katie Gliddon and analyzes her extensive prison diary, secretly written and drawn in her copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley at London's Holloway Prison in March and April 1912. By creating a platform for the voices of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and by opening up a space for a transgressive gaze between suffragettes, ‘ordinary’ prisoners and female officers, Gliddon's writings allow us to complicate our understanding of cross-class relations within the women's suffrage campaign and in women's prisons more generally speaking.     

Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of women's suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Fry's career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.     

Beyond Boom and Bust: External Rents,Durable Authoritarianism,and Institutional Adaptation in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Drawing on recent critiques and advances in theories of the rentier state, this paper uses an in-depth case study of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to posit a new “supply and demand” approach to the study of external rents and authoritarian durability. The Jordanian rentier state is not exclusively a product of external rents, particularly foreign aid, but also of the demands of a coalition encompassing groups with highly disparate economic policy preferences. The breadth of the Hashemite coalition requires that the regime dispense rent-fueled side payments to coalition members through constructing distributive institutions. Yet neither rent supply nor coalition demands are static. Assisted by geopolitically motivated donors, the Hashemites have adapted institutions over time to tap a diverse supply of rents that range from economic and military aid to protocol trade, allowing them to retain power through periods of late development, domestic political crisis, and neoliberal conditionality.