What Gets Measured,Gets Done: Understanding and Addressing Middle‐Class Challenges

Middle‐class families face a range of challenges, including uneven income growth, imposing child care costs, and affordability gaps for higher education. The ideal policies by which policy makers and public administrators can aid the middle class are far from obvious. Policy solutions are likely to mirror our government and population, meaning that they will be decentralized and varied. Achieving a “growing and thriving middle class” requires understanding the composition of the middle class across the country. Benchmarking and measuring the middle‐class condition at the state and substate levels is critical to crafting and adopting effective policy solutions. This Viewpoint essay highlights the Colorado context to demonstrate the measurement of the middle class and tracking of its lived experiences.     

Physical purity feminism and state medicine in late nineteenth-century england

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century England saw the development of a number of campaigns and social movements which were connected by both a hostility towards the medical profession and by the use of discourses of purity and sanitary reform. This article explores the involvement of women within these movements, analysing their activism as an aspect of social purity feminism. It argues that many of these movements drew on widespread female anxiety regarding male violence – both physical and sexual – towards women. The anti-medical feminists claimed that some pieces of ‘sanitary’ legislation represented a state-sanctioned violation of the bodies of women and children. Finally, this article analyses the use made, by some of these activists, of the discourses of sanitary reform to challenge the gender ordering associated with the reason/nature dualism in Victorian society.     

Continuities in marital violence

Marital violence studies of clinical populations of battered women indicate that, over time, violence becomes an habitual strategy for resolving conflicts resulting in escalation in frequency and severity of violence. This study examines the issue of continuity of marital violence among a national probability sample of female victims and male offenders. Findings indicate that among the general population, approximately one-half of all marital violence is suspended over a three-year period. Predictors of marital violence continuity were also investigated in an exploratory way.     

Book reviews

Ephraim Maisel, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1991-1926 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press 1994), £35. ISBN 1-898723-04-4.

Timothy P. Maga, The World of Jimmy Carter: U.S. Foreign Policy 1977-1981 (West Haven, CT: University of New Haven Press, 1994). 189 pp. ISBN 0-936385-23-0.

Michael Leifer, Dictionary of the Modern Politics of South-East Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), xii + 271pp. £45. ISBN 0-415-04219-4.

Christopher C. Harmon and David Tucker (eds.), Statecraft and Power: Essays in Honor of Harold W. Rood (Lanham and London: University Press of America with the National Institute for Public Policy, 1994), 284pp ISBN 0-8191-8718-6.     

Relationship Between Two Types of Help Seeking Behavior in Domestic Violence Victims

A coordinated community response system to the help-seeking behaviors of domestic violence victims is critical to minimize the impact of violent events and to educate the public, so that safe and effective conflict management skills may replace violent responses. The focus for the present study is to identify and analyze victims’ choices of law enforcement assistance in stopping the violence and/or aid through the services of the regional family violence center. Some victims select legal channels of support; others rely exclusively on social service support, and others seek assistance from both sources. Characteristics of victims whose cases followed two types of help-seeking behavior patterns—legal support or social support–were determined through archived data from both the records of a regional family violence center (FVC) (n=258) and domestic violence incident reports of a police department serving a city of approximately 200,000 citizens (n=127). Findings indicate that African American victims more frequently sought protection through law enforcement sources than they did through family violence center services, and the reverse was true for Euro-Americans.