Doris Arnold: the making of a radio star, 1926–1939

ABSTRACT

Doris Arnold (1904–1967) was a BBC radio personality and the UK’s first female ‘Disc Jockey’. She produced and presented the gramophone record programme These you have Loved from 1938. Despite her fame, Arnold is oddly absent from broadcasting histories and little is known about her today. Hers was one of the best known ‘rags to riches’ narratives of the early BBC: a typist whose musical talent propelled her to stardom. This article explores Arnold’s rise to fame through a detailed evaluation of her personal staff files which expose a complexity of gendered issues including status, clothing and pay.     

Participation Denied: the Global Environment Facility,its universal blueprint,and the Mexico–Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in Chiapas

This article examines the implementation of the Global Environment Facility's (GEF) Mexico–Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in Chiapas, Mexico, in order to explore how stakeholder participation is increasingly employed as a tool of conservation's neoliberalisation. This requires an understanding of participation via the corridor as productive, in that it facilitates the production of new, albeit fictitious, kinds of biodiversity in the commodity form, and of new modes of social reproduction increasingly mediated by market relations, as access to common property resources and the necessities of life are progressively restricted to one's ability to pay. In this way the corridor produces the conditions under which a ‘market citizenship’ can flourish, with participation re-imagined as a means through which this end is achieved.     

“We weren't the sort that wanted intimacy every night”: Birth control and abstinence in England,c.1930–60

This article presents an exploration of qualitative evidence on the relationship between birth control and abstinence from an oral history project, which interviewed middle and working-class English men and women, who had married between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. Among the working classes the assumption that men were responsible for birth control choices and the disadvantages that contraceptive methods of all types posed, combined with the fear of pregnancy, acted as a disincentive to have sex and resulted in forms of partial abstinence. Among the middle classes, women had much more access to birth control information and as a consequence a greater range of methods was used, including more female methods. However, the reluctance of couples to discuss sexual matters, and some continued preference for male methods meant that while condoms were the most regularly used middle-class male method, both withdrawal and abstinence were also in evidence. Moreover, although partners were more likely to discuss birth control at the start of their marriages, they were less likely to agree that contraception was a male responsibility and there was greater potential for conflict over contraceptive methods, not infrequently resulting in abstinence. The evidence suggests that sexual and contraceptive practices in marriages in England at the end of the secular fertility decline do not present a picture which straightforwardly correlates with the assumptions represented by the popular thesis that this period of increased fertility control was closely associated with the rise of companionate marriage.     

Why social partnership matters: Irish policies for work – life balance

Since 1987 the Republic of Ireland has experimented with new forms of policy consultation and formulation that have been credited with turning the country into the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of the 1990s. One of the most important of these new forms is a series of social partnership agreements that have become increasingly broad in scope over the past decade and a half. This article illustrates how the process of social partnership pact-making is able to assist in steering a new policy direction, and investigates what makes these social partnership agreements able to be reproduced over time, by focusing on the development of policies for reconciling family and working life in Ireland. This is an important and pressing issue for many post-industrial economies, and, without claiming too much for the partnership process since problems of reconciling family and working life are far from ‘solved’ in Ireland, social partnership has helped turn this from being a marginal to a key issue in Irish politics.     

Climate Challenged Society

Climate Challenged Society. By J.S. Dryzek, R.B. Norgaard and D. Schlossberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), £16.34 (pb).