Barriers to Gender Equality in the Canadian Legal Establishment

In this paper we trace the historical exclusion of women from the legal profession in Canada. We examine women’s efforts to gain entry to law practice and their progress through the last century. The battle to gain entry to this exclusive profession took place on many fronts: in the courts, government legislature, public debate and media, and behind the closed doors of the law societies. After formal barriers to entry were dismantled, women continued to confront formidable barriers through overt and subtler forms of discrimination and exclusion. Today’s legal profession in Canada is a contested one. Women have succeeded with large enrolments in law schools and growing representation in the profession. However, women remain on the margins of power and privilege in law practice. Our analysis of contemporary official data on the Canadian legal profession demonstrates that women are under-represented in private practice, have reduced chances for promotion, and are excluded from higher echelons of authority, remuneration, and status in the profession. Yet, the contemporary picture of the legal profession also reveals that women are having an important impact on the profession of law in Canada by introducing policy reforms aimed at creating a more humane legal profession. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

It’s Boom Time! (Again): Progress Narratives and Women’s Sport in Australia

ABSTRACT

Over the last three years (2015–2017), various media articles have pointed to an apparent “boom time” for women’s sport in Australia. Evidence for this boom is drawn from examples such as the introduction of the Women’s Australian Rules Football League, the television success of the Women’s Big Bash League (cricket), and the rise in interest in soccer due to the international achievement of the Matildas. Such media reports reflect and reinforce a narrative of progress that assumes that gender equality is becoming closer with every decade. This paper employs a critical historical method inspired by the work of Joan W. Scott to analyse articles that have declared or commented on a contemporary boom in women’s sport in Australia. The 120 contemporary articles are analysed alongside 400 historical articles that present similar arguments and themes. In identifying similarities between the historical and contemporary articles, this paper raises questions about the reality of the so-called moment of progress we are currently experiencing, and discusses the possible consequences for feminism and social change in sport.     

Mothers on Trial: Discourses of Cot Death and Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy

This article explores some of the issues raised by Munchausens Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP) and the relationship between medicine and law, specifically the discourses which feature in the courtroom portraying motherhood and expectations of parenting. These discourses are often hidden yet play a determining role in prosecutions for alleged maltreatment of children involving medically unexplained infant death syndrome. We offer a critique of MSbP and seek to unveil the assumptions about mothers, the parent predominantly affected by the diagnosis, and mothering that underlie the association of women accused of deliberating harming their children. We suggest such insights are valuable because although the syndrome has never acquired a clear medical or legal definition, it has had repeated appearances in the literature and courtroom over the last 25 years and has more recently attracted attention from government, health care practitioners, academics and the media. We explore these issues through an examination of two recent Court of Appeal decisions in England: those of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings.     

Europeans of the Peruvian Andes: A Family History, 1860s–1940s

Liberal elites in nineteenth-century Peru were eager to attract European immigrants to help modernise their country. The majority arrived independently bringing commercial skills, while a minority, contracted as colonists, settled in the tropical lowlands. This article focuses on two European communities established in the central Andean region, where immigrants from northern Italy excelled as merchants and families from the Austrian Tyrol became smallholders. Through a reconstruction of one family's history, which draws on personal letters and a photograph, the article explores the experiences, character and socio-economic transformation of these communities and the significance given to European-ness and whiteness.     

Political Brands: Can Parties Be Distinguished by Their Online Brand Personality?

This paper investigates whether five English political parties are differentiating themselves based on the brand personality they are communicating through their websites. The relative brand positions of five English political parties are analyzed using Aaker's brand personality scale. The text from each party website is analyzed using content analysis and a dictionary-based tool. The results are plotted in relation to one another on a correspondence analysis map. We find that the two main dimensions on which parties’ brand personalities differ relate to the trade-offs between communicating competence and communicating sincerity and between communicating sophistication and communicating ruggedness. We find that parties’ brand personalities are distinctive, with the exception of the Green Party, and that the position of one party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, is particularly distinctive. Our research uses Aaker's existing framework for thinking about brand personalities, rather than creating a new framework for politics. By using an existing framework, we are able to use tools developed in other disciplines and show their usefulness for the study of political marketing.     

Elizabeth’s Pious Pilgrimage; or the Ghost in the Garden

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the ‘Pious Pilgrimage’ section of Elizabeth and Her German Garden from a psychoanalytical perspective, focusing on the uncanny sense of the spectrality of the living and its connection to gender identity. It also offers an intertextual reading, placing the passage in the context of ‘the ghost in the garden’ as a recurring trope in the English novel. When ‘Elizabeth’ returns to the garden of her childhood, she experiences two spectral encounters: an imagined glimpse of her grandfather’s ghost and an encounter with a doppelgänger in the shape of a real child with her own name, who makes her feel as if, like Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster, she has met her ‘own image walking in the garden’. She is not the only figure in English literature to do so: behind the kitchen garden where Elizabeth has her encounter we can feel the presence of the kitchen garden in Great Expectations, where Pip sees a prophetic vision and encounters a double in the form of a ‘pale young gentleman’. This same encounter with ‘the ghost in the garden which is not a ghost’ resurfaces in a number of later texts, of which the author discusses two instances: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and David Profumo’s The Weather in Iceland. These can be taken as positive and negative conceptions of the spectrality of the living: von Arnim’s ‘ghost in the garden’ is balanced between the two in a passage treading the boundaries of comic realism and Gothic horror.     

Class,Politics and the Progressive Dilemma

This article considers contemporary class inequalities and how they might shape a progressive politics in the UK. Drawing on findings from the BBC Class Survey, it outlines changes in the class structure, class mobility and class identities. It is argued that the class structure is increasingly polarised and fragmented, with a wealthy elite, a vulnerable precariat and fragmented middle and working classes in between. Declining upward social mobility is a source of anxiety for middle‐class and working‐class parents alike. Class identification, especially working‐class identification, has weakened over time, although class snobbery is far from dead. Class has changed and the class basis of politics is changing now too. A progressive politics is possible if the political parties of the centre‐left appeal to the majority of the electorate rather than one class, acknowledge common concerns and worries and appeal to shared hopes and dreams that straddle class boundaries.