‘We who strive for the foundation of a principle’: feminism and suffrage in the biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc

ABSTRACT

Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc, 1829–1925) was a central figure in British women’s rights activism during the 1850s and 1860s. She was founding editor of the feminist English Woman’s Journal and one of the organisers of the pioneering 1866 petition for women’s suffrage. She lived long enough to witness some women gaining the vote in 1918, by which time her children, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Hilaire Belloc, were themselves public figures who had taken up opposing positions on women’s suffrage. This article takes as its starting point 1866, a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century agitation for women’s suffrage and in Parkes Belloc’s individual biography, before moving to a longer view of her feminist life before and after this date. It demonstrates the value of a biographical approach to exploring the diversity of perspectives and experiences of women within first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement.     

Social inequalities without class cleavages in Latin America’s neoliberal era

Social inequalities have deepened in Latin America over the past several decades, yet an erosion of class cleavages has occurred in the political arena. During the era of import-substitution industrialization (ISI), “stratified” cleavage structures based on class distinctions emerged in a subset of Latin American countries where party systems were reconfigured by the rise of a mass-based, labor-mobilizing party. These nations typically experienced more severe economic crises during the transition from ISI to neoliberalism than nations that retained elitist party systems with “segmented,” cross-class cleavage structures. They also experienced greater political upheaval, as neoliberal critical junctures produced an erosion of stratified cleavages along their structural, organizational, and cultural dimensions in the labor-mobilizing cases, while leaving the segmented cleavages of elitist systems relatively unscathed. The Latin American experience differs from that of Europe, where strong labor movements and labor-backed parties were associated with superior economic performance during periods of economic adjustment. It also challenges Duverger's notion of an organizational “contagion from the Left,” as the dramatic weakening of labor movements and the shift away from mass-based party organizations have caused party systems to converge on elitist organizational models during the neoliberal era.     

Explaining School Corporal Punishment: Evangelical Protestantism and Social Capital in a Path Model

School corporal punishment is associated with many negative outcomes. This research explores the antecedents to the practice and prevalence of school corporal punishment. A series of regression models indicated that two variables were significant predictors of a state’s practice of school corporal punishment: rate of evangelical Protestant adherents and social capital. A path analysis indicated that these two variables significantly predicted the rate of school corporal punishment in practicing states. The path analysis also revealed a significant and negative relationship between rate of evangelical Protestant adherents and social capital, but no relationship between rate of mainstream Protestant adherents and social capital. A mediation analysis indicated that social capital serves as a mediating variable between evangelical Protestantism and rate of school corporal punishment. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Sex Differences in Age Patterns of Delinquent/Criminal Careers: Results from Poisson Latent Class Analyses of the Philadelphia Cohort Study

Applications of latent class analyses to the study of criminal careers have yielded results with implications for criminological theory. Distinct latent classes of individuals within various samples have been identified based upon the similarity of individuals with respect to their rate of offending across the teen and adult years, net of the effects of other regressors. In previous research on samples of males taken from the cities of London and Philadelphia, four and five such categories have been identified respectively, ranging from a group of nonoffenders to a group of chronic offenders. However, the question of whether similar findings hold for females has not been adequately addressed, in part due to the scarcity of longitudinal samples with sizable female populations. Data from the Second Philadelphia Cohort are used to address this and related questions. First, are there latent classes of female offenders? Second, if such categories do exist, how do they compare? Third, how do classes of male and female offenders compare on key measures of criminal careers? Analyses of the samples yield differing numbers of classes for males and females. Gender invariances as well as differences in patterns of offending are also found and are discussed.     

THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF ACADEMIC SCIENCE: UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY RELATIONS IN BIOTECHNOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC POLICY IMPLICATIONS

The issue of university-industry relations in the field of biotechnology illustrates the changing context of academic science. Research has become an organizational enterprise and no longer can be seen as simply the accumulation of individual efforts. This development complicates the normative context of academic science and in so doing introduces important policy questions, especially regarding interaction between industry and universities. Funding, faculty conflict of Interest, and the ownership of intellectual property resulting from research are policy issues which are analyzed in the context of some of the recent organizational changes in the performance of academic research.