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.     

Measuring Street Cleanliness: A Comparison of New York City's Scorecard and Results from a Citizen Survey

Public administrators at the local level often rely on citizen surveys to measure the outcomes or accomplishments of their service delivery efforts. However, many remain skeptical about the value of survey-based measures of local government performance, in large part because of the low empirical correlation between objective and subjective performance measures reported in the literature. Using data from New York City's street cleanliness scorecard, a well-established outcome measure, combined with responses from more than 4,000 respondents to a citizen survey, the authors find a clear and consistent correlation between the scorecard and citizen ratings of street cleanliness in their neighborhoods. Moreover, the street cleanliness scorecard is a much stronger predictor of citizen ratings than demographic factors, trust in government, or contextual effects. These results demonstrate that citizen judgments about government performance can correspond closely with more objectively measured outcomes—and that citizen surveys can provide valid and useful performance measures, at least for some local government services.     

‘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     

Popular initiatives in Uruguay: confidence votes on government or political loyalties?

Among stable democracies, Uruguay is one of the most prodigious users of direct democratic devices at the national level. If we analyze the relationship between the share of “yes” votes received by any popular initiative and the share of votes received by politicians who politically supported it, we observe a strikingly high positive correlation of 0.9. Explaining this correlation is the central objective of this paper. Three alternative hypotheses are plausible: First, such a correlation could be a spurious association due to aggregation bias. Second, PI results could be reflections of economic conditions. Third, Uruguayans are extremely consistent in following their political parties' advice. This paper finds that when Uruguayans go to the polls to vote on a popular initiative, their vote choice is primarily the result of their party loyalty, rather than their reaction to economic conditions. In testing my hypotheses I rely on the following statistical methods: King's “Ecological Inference,” multivariate regression, and path analysis. The data come from seven popular initiatives in Uruguay since 1985 (133 observations).     

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.