Female Employment in Lithuania: Testing Three Popular Explanations

This article compares three popular explanations for changes in female employment in post-socialist countries: retraditionalization, reserve army of labor, and revalued resources. Although these explanations are complementary in many ways, the retraditionalization thesis seems the most accurate explanation. In the early 1990s, gender-role attitudes were highly traditional, a tendency that might have contributed to the huge decrease in female labor force participation. Despite the changes, the comeback of the male-breadwinner family model is unlikely, since the acceptance of women's working roles is rapidly increasing.     

Little Swans with Luxette and Loved Boy Pudding: Changing Fashions in Cookery Books

Cookery books are far from simple things: alongside the recipes we may find narrative, memoir, science, history, politics, travelogue and anthropology. The cookery book also reveals in a profoundly naked form the anxieties and paranoias of its precise historical moment. So the glamorous cookery books of the years between the wars try to persuade the newly servantless middle-class woman that the cooking she must now do herself is a creative and fashionable activity. And the postwar British, sick of the limited stodge of their still-rationed diet, clutched Elizabeth David to their collective bosom, unable to taste her pungent dishes, but in thrall to the sun-strewn fantasy of the good life her books offered. From Mrs Beeton, offering the mid-Victorian mistress of the house the instructions and routines she needed to hide the mechanisms of the domestic machine, to the potent contemporary fantasy of the Mediterranean peasant and his fabulously healthy lifestyle, Humble interrogates the cookery books of the last 150 years, asking what they can tell us about how changing attitudes to class, gender and domesticity intersect with the culture of food.