‘A sort of land debatable’: female influence,civic virtue and middle-class identity,c 1830-c 1860[1]

The recent emphasis on the bourgeois public sphere as a predominantly masculine space means that the wider meanings and interpretations of respectable women's presence at public occasions have been ignored or misunderstood. This article addresses the contribution of urban middle-class women to the public construction and expression of middle-class identity in the mid-nineteenth century, and examines the way in which women were written into civic narratives as champions of public virtue. It is argued that the notion of ‘female influence’ allowed women to expand their public roles, and even to participate in potentially subversive political activities. However, it also effectively contained such activities by distancing ‘respectable’ women from the potentially corrupting arena of political controversy.     

Shifting Foundations: women economists in the Weimar Republic

This article draws on a biographical case study of the first women to obtain doctorates in economics at the University of Berlin between 1900 and 1925. Their educational opportunities and experiences were linked to the networks that tied the women’s and social reform movements, as well as to the disciplinary differentiation of the German social sciences and the development of social work. These connections allowed them to exploit particular employment niches before and during the First World War, but the foundations of the expertise upon which women economists could call did not hold in the new political and institutional context of the Weimar Republic. What these early graduates patched together in response reveals a complex of opportunities and limitations presented by their simultaneous exploitation of essentialist and expertise‐based arguments.     

Diversity in the American States: Updating the Sullivan Index

The index of socioeconomic and cultural diversity among theAmerican states formulated by John L. Sullivan for 1960 is recreatedfor 1980. Comparisons are made between the index for the twotime periods, and changes among the states are examined overtime. Significant differences continue to exist between northernand southern states, mainly because of cultural rather thansocioeconomic factors. The diversity index remains a relativelypowerful predictor of policy variation among the states and,as such, might be considered as a substitute for geographicregion in comparative state policy research.     

Interweaving Aboriginal/Indigenous Rights with Urban Citizenship: A View from the Winnipeg Low-Cost Housing Sector,Canada

State-society relations around low-cost housing in Canada changed from a period of strong federal leadership centred on social rights to a period of state retrenchment. A coalition of housing stakeholders from the public, private, and voluntary sectors self-organized in Winnipeg to create new low-cost housing following the 1993 discontinuation of federal social housing programs. This move toward urban citizenship was not received in the same way by Aboriginal peoples pursuing a distinctive set of rights centred on self-determination alongside common social (housing) goals. While Aboriginal rights are given regard at the federal level, they were not embedded in localized citizenship processes. Expanding the theorization of urban citizenship, the empirical results in this article reveal that discourses of democratic racism and cultural neutrality permeate mainstream views, running counter to Aboriginal citizenship pursuits.     

Compensating Plaintiffs and Punishing Defendants: Is Bifurcation Necessary?

Critics of the civil jury have proposed several procedural reforms to address the concern that damage awards are capricious and unpredictable. One such reform is the bifurcation or separation of various phases of a trial that involves multiple claims for damages. The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of bifurcating the compensatory and punitive damages phases of a civil tort trial. We manipulated the wealth of the defendant and the reprehensibility of the defendant's conduct (both sets of evidence theoretically related to punitive but not to compensatory damages) across three cases in a jury analog study. We wondered whether jurors would misuse the punitive damages evidence in fixing compensatory damages and whether bifurcation would effectively undo this practice. Our findings indicated that mock jurors did not improperly consider punitive damages evidence in their decisions about compensation. Moreover, bifurcation had the unexpected effect of augmenting punitive damage awards. These findings raise questions about the merits of bifurcation in cases that involve multiple claims for damages.