‘Equal Laws Based upon an Equal Standard’: the Garrett Sisters,the Contagious Diseases Acts,and the sexual politics of Victorian and Edwardian feminism revisited

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), co-founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), leader of the constitutional suffrage movement, were centrally involved in the Victorian and Edwardian campaign for women's equality. Both women attempted to maintain a separation between the suffrage movement and the sexualized realm of the female body, which was subject to state intrusion during the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and again during the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes some forty years later. But the Garretts had to negotiate the intersection of gender, class, and sexual politics in order to advance the cause of feminist social reform.     

Efficiency differentials in peasant agriculture and their implications for development policies

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical work on allocative efficiency in traditional agriculture and presents a new study of technical efficiency among Tanzanian cotton farmers. The theoretical arguments are shown to apply primarily in a competitive context that differs significantly from that in which peasant farms operate. Re‐analysis of earlier empirical studies shows that, on average, the marginal value products of inputs differ by more than 40 per cent from the marginal factor costs to which they should be equated under allocative efficiency. Our own study among Tanzanian cotton farmers in Geita District reveals that output could be increased by 51 per cent if all farmers achieved those levels of technical efficiency that were in fact achieved by the best farmers in the sample using the same inputs and technologies that the less efficient used. These results indicate that the efficiency hypothesis may not be applicable to much of peasant agriculture and that development policies might fruitfully place more emphasis on raising large numbers of farmers closer to the relatively high efficiency levels achieved by some of their neighbors.     

WHEN MISSING DATA ARE NOT MISSING: A NEW APPROACH TO EVALUATING SUPPLEMENTAL HOMICIDE REPORT IMPUTATION STRATEGIES*

The Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) are widely used in criminological research and inform a broad range of research topics and subsequent policy applications. A serious issue with the SHR is missing information about the offender and incident in many recorded homicides. Although it is convenient to discard cases with missing data before analysis, such discarding is not theoretically justified and can lead to incorrect substantive conclusions. Recently, several techniques for imputing missing SHR data have been proposed, but it is difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. This research presents a new approach to testing and evaluating SHR imputation techniques. Offender data that are missing in the SHR are often found in police records available for individual cities. We examine similarities and differences among cases with known offender characteristics in the SHR, cases with such information missing in the SHR but available in police records, and cases with such information missing in both sources. We then use these data sets to evaluate four different imputation techniques suggested in the literature (Fox, 2004; Messner, Deane, and Beaulieu, 2002; Pampel and Williams, 2000; Regoeczi and Riedel, 2003). We apply each imputation technique to the SHR, and for cases with information missing in the SHR but known in the police records, we see how well the imputed values correspond both with the individual known values and with the overall distributions in the police records. We discuss the outcome of our assessment of these strategies, and we outline important implications this assessment has for research using SHR data.