Female volunteers: An asset to the reproductive health sector in rural Cambodia

The results of a field study examined in this article show the remarkable success of a reproductive health education and community outreach project in Cambodia that has been implemented by the Ministry of Women's and Veterans' Affairs since 1995, both in terms of levels of volunteer activity and in terms of the impact of the project on increased knowledge and practice in reproductive health issues among the target population. A key to the project's success appears to be its adherence to principles identified, but seldom practised, such as a strong commitment to capacity building at all levels.     

Bullies, Gangs, Drugs, and School: Understanding the Overlap and the Role of Ethnicity and Urbanicity

Recent media attention has increased interest in behavioral, mental health, and academic correlates of involvement in bullying. Yet, there has not been much interest in investigating the co-occurrence of other health-risk behaviors, such as gang membership, weapon carrying, and substance use. The potential influence of contextual factors, such as youth ethnicity, urbanicity, and school characteristics, also has been overlooked in previous research. The current study examined different subtypes of involvement in bullying—as primarily a victim, as primarily a bully, as both a victim and bully, and no involvement—and the association with significant health-risk behaviors, including engaging in violence and substance use, as well as academic problems. The analyses use self-report data from 16,302 adolescents (50.3 % female, 62.2 % Caucasian, 37.8 % African American) enrolled in 52 high schools. A series of three-level HLM analyses revealed that bullies and bully/victims were generally at greatest of risk of being involved in violence, engaging in multiple types of substance use, and having academic problems. These findings extend prior research by emphasizing a potential link between involvement in bullying and multiple health-risk behaviors, particularly among urban and African American high school youth.     

Examining Associations Between Race, Urbanicity, and Patterns of Bullying Involvement

Research on the role of race and urbanicity in bullying involvement has been limited. The present study examined bullying involvement subgroups that relate to race, urbanicity, and the perceived reason for the bullying. Self-report data were collected from 10,254 middle school youth (49.8 % female; 62.4 % Caucasian, 19.0 % African American, and 5.6 % Hispanic) and latent class analyses were used to identify three subtypes of bullying involvement: low involvement (50 %), victim (31.3 %), and bully-victim (18.7 %). Irrespective of urbanicity (urban vs. non-urban), African American youth were more likely to be members of either the victim or bully-victim classes than the low involvement class. Further exploration of the community context suggested that urbanicity was associated with the increased likelihood of having been racially bullied. Urban bully-victims were also more likely to have been bullied about money than non-urban bully-victims. Findings underscore the importance of addressing both race and urbanicity for culturally sensitive prevention programming.     

‘red tips for hot lips’: advertising cigarettes for young women in Britain, 1920-70

The girl or woman smoker is a twentieth-century phenomenon. In 1900, smoking was invariably associated with sexually deviant womanhood. Today, smoking is firmly, if contentiously, established as a feminine practice in British society. This article examines one aspect of the twentieth-century feminisation of smoking in Britain, namely, the ways in which smoking practices have been presented as appropriate for young women in the period 1920-70. Advertisements featured in magazines for young women aged 15-29 years have been chosen as a particularly apt medium through which to explore some of the ways in which cigarettes and smoking practices have been delineated and infused with meaning. These advertisements constituted a discourse for the circulation of messages about the relationship of women to cigarettes. Findings reveal a number of shifts in cigarette advertisements featured in Women's magazines from 1920 to 1970. Firstly, during the 1930s and early 1940s, advertisements were, in contrast to later counterparts, preoccupied with establishing smoking as a feminine practice. Key to processes by which smoking was feminised were various mechanisms whereby the cigarette was depicted as part of the presentation of a heterosexual identity and where smoking practices were embedded in heterosexual relations and rituals. Secondly, there was a discernible shift in the way women were addressed by advertisements, from potential women smokers in the 1930s to more general consumers in the 1960s. Thirdly and relatedly, the significance attached to women smoking changed between 1920 and 1970. In the 1930s, smoking was utilised to signify that women were ‘modern’; in the period 1960-70, smoking served to indicate that women were recognised, and accorded status, as consumers     

Parental choice of primary school: the legal implications and parental perceptions

This article gives an overview of the rules that apply to school admissions and the operation of parental preference in particular. It reports on a piece of empirical research into parental perceptions of their ‘rights’ and comments upon the legal implications of the limitations of parental choice     

Literary feminism

Susan Sheridan, Christina Stead, Key Women Writers, (Harvester Wheatsheaf). Hemel Hempstead, 1988; Janet Todd, Feminist Literary History, (Routledge), New York, 1988; Jane Heath, Simone de Beauvoir, Key Women Writers, (Harvester Wheatsheaf), Hemel Hempstead, 1989; Linda Kauffman, (ed.), Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, (Basil Blackwell), New York, 1989; Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern, (Routledge), London, 1989.