Volume 30 (Spring 1997) Issue 3
Article Abstracts

Abstract: Lisa Jacobson, "Revitalizing the American Home: Children's Leisure and the Revolution of Play, 1920-1940"

During the 1920s and 1930s, middle-class parents and progressive reformers interpreted children's attraction to the movies and other commercial playworlds as a threat to family values, parental authority, and the future of home recreation. Child experts promoted a new vision of children's play that promised to restore the primacy of family ties and combat the allures of mass recreation. Extolling the virtues of active play over passive spectatorship, child experts urged parents to transform frumpy homes into enticing play sites equipped with playrooms, educational toys, and backyard swing sets, convinced that such revitalized play environments would elevate children's taste and inoculate them against the attractions of mass culture. Far from hostile to commercial culture, child experts sought to contain its threat by urging parents to adapt its language of salesmanship and to forsake harsh discipline for understanding companionship. Play thus acquired a vital role in reclaiming the authority of the companion-ate family, promising not only to remake the complacent "movie-mad" child into a respectable middle-class consumer, but also to reinvigorate parent-child relationships.

Abstract: Owen Davies, "Urbanization and the Decline of Witchcraft: An Examination of London"

The impact of urbanization on the belief in witchcraft has received little consideration by historians of either witchcraft or urbanization. Anthropological research, particularly on the experience of witchcraft in urbanizing Africa, indicates that significant insights can be gained into the nature of witchcraft by studying the impact of changing community structures on witchcraft accusations. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of witchcraft data from English urban contexts, particularly from the eighteenth century onwards. However, enough relevant material is available relating to London to draw some conclusions. As an urban centre spanning both pre-industrial and industrial ages, London also provides a sense of continuity over a considerable period of time. This examination of witchcraft in urbanizing London suggests that, in various ways, the profound socio-economic changes brought about by urbanization did affect the nature of witchcraft accusations, but did not necessarily affect other expressions of magical belief m the same way.

Abstract: Marco H. D. Van Leeuwen and Ineke Maas, "Social Mobility in a Dutch Province, Utrecht 1850-1940"

The article scrutinizes the claim of a universal movement towards a free society as reflected in social mobility. Data on intergenerational, career and connubial mobility in the Dutch province of Utrecht from 1850-1940 are taken from the nationwide Historical Sample of the Netherlands. Total mobility did increase, for all three types of mobility, and both for the cities and the countryside. This was due to changes in the occupational structure. Relative mobility-or "openness of society" did not increase. This is demonstrated by the use of two types of log-Iinear models, those of constant social fluidity on the one hand and the scaled association models on the other hand. The observed increase in openness in the Netherlands between 1954 and 1992 is thus not the tail of long movement. The article is an example of the recent merger of historical and the sociological research traditions on mobility and stratification, allowing for further progress in describing the long sweeps in the openness of the Western world.

Abstract: Michael O. West, "Liquor and Libido: 'Joint Drinking' and the Politics of Sexual Control in Colonial Zimbabwe 1920's-1950's"

Elite African men in the principal urban centers of Southern Rhodesia waged a campaign from the 1920s to the 1950s against "joint drinking," that is, women and men drinking together at the municipal beerhalls. While claiming to oppose joint drinking because it was contrary to "native custom," their real objective was to control the sexuality of women, notably their wives. Elite men wanted to prevent their wives from mixing socially with the male workers who frequented the beerhalls. Unlike the male workers, the great bulk of whom were bachelors or men who had left their families in the rural areas, the members of the African elite were more likely to maintain nuclear households in the cities, sharing the same segregated townships with the workers. However the municipalities, which operated the beerhalls, refused to abolish joint drinking, fearing a reduction of the revenues that financed urban segregation. Abolition would have driven many male workers, the beerhalls' principal clientele, into the illicit shebeens or pubs, which were operated by women beer brewers. It was thus only in the 1950s, when upwardly-mobile Africans began fleeing to newly-established communities, that the concerns of elite African men about joint drinking receded.

Abstract: Patrick J. Ryan, "Unnatural Selection: Intelligence Testing, Eugenics, and American Political Cultures"

This essay examines how Henry H. Goddard's eugenic interpretation of intelligence testing became part of Ohio's public policy, measures his political troubles, and explains the failure of his program to endure in terms of competing political cultures. It finds that the policy agenda of Goddard and his followers was so uncompromisingly hierarchical that it failed to make the concessions to individualism needed to thrive in early twentieth-century American politics. Moreover, eugenic reformers in Ohio ran afoul of a competing hierarchical political institution-the maternalist family. Whereas the hierarchical order of the maternalist family was cloaked in such a way both to avoid value conflicts with and bolster individualism by adult men in economy and polity, Goddard and his followers attempted to exercise hierarchical control of society through children by the instrument of state power. This made the ideological tensions between hierarchy and individualism visible with poor results for Goddard, his policies, and his ideas.

Abstract: Henriette Donner, "Under the Cross-Why V.A.D.s Performed the Filthiest Task in the Dirtiest War: Red Cross Women Volunteers, 1914-1918"

The history of V.A.D.s sheds a new light on the question of women's subsumption into the general mobilization for the Great War. It leads us to question the emancipating effect of the Great War. It shows that gains such as "women's suffrage" or "professional equity" have little to do with the kind of emancipation, rich in emotional yields, which V.A.D.s sought and found in wartime service. The British Red Cross Society operated within a mixed economy. As a modem voluntary organization, it cooperated in the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers on the large scale. But the society's appeal for volunteers drew from a symbolic moral realm in which self-sacrifice was a significant element. Similarly, most V.A.D.s were young and imagined themselves as New Women. However, a moral predisposition to service allowed the V.A.D.s to accommodate routinized work into their own priorities. The work itself contained many affective elements. The erotic nature of caring for the wounded men, the liberating effect of being under a matriarchy, are just some of the aspects which allowed the V.A.D.s to reap positive compensations for their sacrifice.

Abstract: Robert E. Johnson, "Family Life-Cycles and Economic Stratification: A Case-Study in Rural Russia"

Using budget evidence from one micro-region in rural Russia (1909), the paper assesses the degree of economic differentiation among peasant households, and the relevance of demographic factors to the socio-economic divisions among peasants. Disaggregated data on the composition of individual households is evaluated in the light of two contrasting models: the Leninist, which presents stratification as a cumulative or "centrifugal" process leading to the formation of antagonistic classes, and the Chayanovist, which suggests that social divisions were often unstable and impermanent. In the present data set, prosperity is found to be associated with household size and organization in ways that support the Chayanovist view.