Volume 30 (Summer 1997) Issue 4
Article Abstracts

Abstract: Jesse Berrett, "Feeding the Organization Man: Diet and Masculinity in Postwar America"

Even as they extolled the success of the American economy, many postwar social observers worried that the abundance the United States enjoyed endangered the nation's future: it would become weak and flabby, a victim of its own successes, and easy pickings for enemies abroad. These pressures were understood to fall with particular force on middle-class men. Whereas critics like Barbara Ehrenreich have seen popular concern over the effects of abundance on men as a rebellion against normative masculine behavior, this article argues that these concerns spurred the rise of a discourse of consumerist masculinity that relocated rather than rewrote those norms. Examining the popularity of male dieting in the 1950s, the article shows that "diet narratives" describing men's weight-loss created (though only ambivalently endorsed) a new mode of masculinity in which new consumerist behaviors underwrote old modes of authority, identity, and control. Although these diet narratives repeatedly invoked traditional means of masculine self-definition (war, frontier exploration), their acceptance of the consumerist world-view continually moved their authors further away from the same preconsumerist traditions they intended to recapture.

Abstract: Beth Bailey, "Prescribing the Pill: Politics, Culture, and the Sexual Revolution in America's Heartland"

By analyzing the introduction and use of the birth control pill in one community (Lawrence, Kansas), this article explores notions of cultural authority and the relationship between national culture and institutions and local events in America's postwar "sexual revolution." The pill, which played an important role in the sexual revolution, had to be prescribed by physicians who, in the main, agreed with the majority of Americans that unmarried women had no right to sexual intercourse or to contraceptives. In Lawrence, struggles over the pill were structured by federal initiatives (programs addressing poverty and population growth) and national organizations such as Planned Parenthood, Inc. and the American Public Health Association. Local actors, including the Department of Public Health, university students and administrators, the local Planned Parenthood organization, and feminist groups, fought not only about sexual morality, but over the meaning of the pill. Did the pill belong to a paradigm of population control? Clinical medicine and reproductive health? Morality? Women's right to control their own bodies? This article attempts to detail the multiple sites of power, languages of negotiation, and critical structural changes that created the ground on which these struggles took place.

Abstract: Craig Buettinger, "Women and Antivivisection in Late Nineteenth-Century America"

The antivivisection movement in late nineteenth-century America was a predominantly female crusade, centering on the women of the American Anti-Vivisection Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1883, and growing to a nationwide network of women by the 1890s. The "AVs" were closely connected to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, but little involved in the other great women's cause of the day, suffrage. The AV position was grounded in the Victorian era's strong sense of female responsibility for the advance of Christianity and the molding of the young. Women championed antivivisection because they believed that animal experimentation threatened these sacred trusts.

Abstract: James M. Brophy, "Carnival and Citizenship: The Politics of Carnival Culture in the Prussian Rhineland, 1823-1848"

An understanding of the development and evolution of modern carnival in Cologne during the period 1823-48 both deepens and complicates an understanding of Germany's political public sphere. Jurgen Habermas's model neglects forms of bourgeois public representation in emerging modern political culture, and it thus must be enhanced to integrate hitherto neglected elements of the public sphere in post-Napoleonic Europe. The reformed Rhenish carnival, by politicizing public space and symbolically contesting the rule of the Prussian state, sheds light on the citizenship ideals and political attitudes of both liberals and democrats in the Vormarz period, the two decades prior to the 1848 Revolution. The carnival culture also offers an example of how bourgeois political life, usually associated with print culture, became externalized, distributed, and vernacularized for larger audiences. The evolving symbols and printed material of carnival provide a means to understand how traditional customs, popular culture, and the bourgeois public sphere melded in the early nineteenth century to produce the broader--and fragmented-publics of modern politics.

Abstract: Lorna F. Hurl and David J. Tucker, "The Michigan County Agents and the Development of Juvenile Probation, 1873-1900"

This article challenges conventional beliefs that little happened in the development of juvenile probation between 1869, when Massachusetts initiated a small project in juvenile probation, and 1899, when the first official Juvenile Court was founded in Chicago. Contradicting these beliefs, this paper describes the growth of the Michigan County Agency from its inception in 1873 to 1900, tracing its evolution into a well-organized, paid, public, and state-wide system of male juvenile probation officers. Documenting the agents' operating philosophy and practices, the paper shows that in Michigan, child offenders were treated differently from adult offenders prior to 1899, hence supporting arguments that the Juvenile Court was not a radical departure in the treatment of child offenders, but formalized already existing practices. It also confirms that children were treated differentially, based on gender and ethnicity. On the other hand, findings suggest that factors influencing the origin and operation of juvenile probation are more complex than anticipated by either the social control or benevolence hypotheses. They also point to the need to reconsider questions regarding the roles of private and public sectors, and of men and women, in explaining late nineteenth-century efforts in social reform.

Abstract: Susan L. Tananbaum, "Philanthropy and Identity: Gender and Ethnicity in London"

By analyzing Anglo Jewish charitable networks in London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper highlights the ways in which middle-class Jews created their own communally-sponsored sectarian social services. The Jewish community in England responded to the influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the 1880s with a combination of generous support and ambivalence about the newcomers' foreign habits. The paper argues that Jewish social service agencies reflected a commitment to Victorian ideology--its emphasis on self-help and assistance for the deserving poor only--a fear of antisemitism, and an attempt to participate in the public sphere. By assisting and anglicizing poor co-religionists, established Jews hoped to win approval from the host community, minimize need, discourage immigrant-sponsored endeavors, and keep Jews from making demands on the State.

Abstract: Michael Adas, "Review Essay: Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development"

Steven Sanderson's ambitious, and often informative, attempt to discern general causes for the major societal transformations in all of human history is seriously impaired by the constricted, decidedly materialist, and ultimately deterministic presuppositions from which he approaches these vast and complex processes. His neglect of key secondary studies by specialist scholars in a variety of geographical areas, and his adherence to the world-systems approach for the post-1500 era, render many of his generalizations contentious at best and often at odds with recent research. His evolutionary vision as a whole has no place for human agency, contingency or ideas, and thus is unable to account for the ambiguities and significant variations--much less the nuances--that are essential to understanding the global human experience.