Title: Customers and patrons of the mad-trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London: with the complete text of John Monro's 1766 case book
Author: Andrews, Jonathan 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | History of Science | Psychology | Social Problems | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.   [brief]
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Title: The worth of a child
Author: Murray, Thomas H 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Medicine | Social Problems | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Thomas Murray's graceful and humane book illuminates one of the most morally complex areas of everyday life: the relationship between parents and children. What do children mean to their parents, and how far do parental obligations go? What, from the beginning of life to its end, is the worth of a child?Ethicist Murray leaves the rarefied air of abstract moral philosophy in order to reflect on the moral perplexities of ordinary life and ordinary people. Observing that abstract moral terms such as altruism and selfishness can be buried in the everyday doings of families, he maintains that ethical theory needs a richer description than it now has of the moral life of parents and children. How far should adults go in their quest for children? What options are available to women who do not want to bear a child now? Should couples be allowed to reject a child because of genetic disability or "wrong" gender? How can we weigh the competing claims of the genetic and the rearing parents to a particular child? The Worth of a Child couples impressive learning with a conversational style. Only by getting down to cases, Murray insists, can we reach moral conclusions that are unsentimental, farsighted, and just. In an era of intense public and private acrimony about the place and meaning of "family values," his practical wisdom about extraordinary difficult moral issues offers compelling reading for both experienced and prospective parents, as well as for ethicists, social and behavioral scientists, and legal theorists.   [brief]
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Title: Searching for life: the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the disappeared children of Argentina
Author: Arditti, Rita 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: FROM THE BOOK :"I want to touch you and kiss you.""You are my mother's sister and only one year older; you must have something of my mother in you." - A found child after being returned to her family Searching for Life traces the courageous plight of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who challenged the ruthless dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Acting as both detectives and human rights advocates in an effort to find and recover their grandchildren, the Grandmothers identified fifty-seven of an estimated 500 children who had been kidnapped or born in detention centers. The Grandmothers' work also led to the creation of the National Genetic Data Bank, the only bank of its kind in the world, and to Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the "right to identity," that is now incorporated in the new adoption legislation in Argentina. Rita Arditti has conducted extensive interviews with twenty Grandmothers and twenty-five others connected with their work; her book is a testament to the courage, persistence, and strength of these "traditional" older women.The importance of the Grandmothers' work has effectively transcended the Argentine situation. Their tenacious pursuit of justice defies the culture of impunity and the historical amnesia that pervades Argentina and much of the rest of the world today. In addition to reconciling the "living disappeared" with their families of origin, these Grandmothers restored a chapter of history that, too, had been abducted and concealed from its rightful heirs.   [brief]
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Title: Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life
Author: Lareau, Annette
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Anthropology | Education
Publisher's Description: Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously - as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.   [brief]
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Title: Perfectly Japanese: making families in an era of upheaval
Author: White, Merry I 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Social Science | Japan | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History | Gender Studies | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Are Japanese families in crisis? In this dynamic and substantive study, Merry Isaacs White looks back at two key moments of "family making" in the past hundred years - the Meiji era and postwar period - to see how models for the Japanese family have been constructed. The models had little to do with families of their eras and even less to do with families today, she finds. She vividly portrays the everyday reality of a range of families: young married couples who experience fleeting togetherness until the first child is born; a family separated by job shifts; a family with a grandmother as babysitter; a marriage without children.   [brief]
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Title: Working families: the transformation of the American home
Author: Hertz, Rosanna
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Anthropology | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Politics | Politics
Publisher's Description: The dynamics of work and parenthood are in the midst of a revolutionary shift in the United States. Focused around a major factor in this shift - the rise of dual-income families - this groundbreaking volume provides a highly informative snapshot of the intricate fabric of work and family in the United States. With selections written by leading scholars both inside and outside academia, Working Families offers intimate stories of how families manage and how children respond to the rigors of their parents' lives, as well as broad overviews developed from survey and census data. Taken together, these essays present an updated and integral view of the revolutionary changes in patterns of work and family life occurring today. Using a broad range of methodologies, the contributors reach across gender, age, and class differences. They discuss working-class as well as affluent dual-career couples and work sites ranging from factories to offices. Straddling racial divides, the essays range from studies of white day care providers to a close look at a Mexican maid's daughter. The collection as a whole refutes the assumption that there is one normal type of family or workplace. These readable essays capture our attention as they build, cumulatively, to an absorbing picture of today's families and workplaces.   [brief]
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Title: The family on trial in revolutionary France
Author: Desan, Suzanne 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | European Studies | French Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere, The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence. The family became a political arena, a practical terrain for creating the Republic in day-to-day life. From 1789, citizens across France - sons and daughters, unhappily married spouses and illegitimate children, pamphleteers and moralists, deputies and judges - all disputed how the family should be reformed to remake the new France. They debated how revolutionary ideals and institutions should transform the emotional bonds, gender dynamics, legal customs, and economic arrangements that structured the family. They asked how to bring the principles of liberty, equality, and regeneration into the home. And as French citizens confronted each other in the home, in court, and in print, they gradually negotiated new domestic practices that balanced Old Regime customs with revolutionary innovations in law and culture. In a narrative that combines national-level analysis with a case study of family contestation in Normandy, Desan explores these struggles to bring politics into households and to envision and put into practice a new set of familial relationships.   [brief]
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Title: Industrialization, family life, and class relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914 
Author: Accampo, Elinor Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative study, Elinor Accampo explores the interrelationship between the structure of work and strategies of family formation in Saint Chamond, a French city that underwent intensive industrialization during the nineteenth century. Through a detailed analysis of fertility, mortality, marriages, and migration, the author analyzes the ways in which the family responded to changes in the organization of work. In the first half of the nineteenth century work was in the home, and families tended to be large in order to meet the demand for workers. But by the 1860s the mechanization of labor had begun to separate family life and work life, fundamentally transforming the relationship between work and family and making the survival of the working-class family more difficult. Accampo argues that workers began to have smaller families much earlier than has previously been suggested, and she demonstrates that fertility declined for reasons unique to working-class conditions. This decline in family size, and the context in which it took place, provides fascinating new material for understanding the working class world and the dynamics of class relations.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese visions of family and state, 1915-1953
Author: Glosser, Susan L 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: At the dawn of the twentieth century, China's sovereignty was fragile at best. In the face of international pressure and domestic upheaval, young urban radicals - desperate for reforms that would save their nation - clamored for change, championing Western-inspired family reform and promoting free marriage choice and economic and emotional independence. But what came to be known as the New Culture Movement had the unwitting effect of fostering totalitarianism. In this wide-reaching, engrossing book, Susan Glosser examines how the link between family order and national salvation affected state-building and explores its lasting consequences. Glosser effectively argues that the replacement of the authoritarian, patriarchal, extended family structure with an egalitarian, conjugal family was a way for the nation to preserve crucial elements of its traditional culture. Her comprehensive research shows that in the end, family reform paved the way for the Chinese Communist Party to establish a deeply intrusive state that undermined the legitimacy of individual rights.   [brief]
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Title: And now my soul is hardened: abandoned children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Warfare, epidemics, and famine left millions of Soviet children homeless during the 1920s. Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: The middling sort: commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680-1780
Author: Hunt, Margaret R 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | Social Science
Publisher's Description: To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed.Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.   [brief]
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Title: Good with their hands: boxers, bluesmen, and other characters from the Rust Belt
Author: Rotella, Carlo 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | American Studies | Sociology | Literature | Labor Studies | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This eloquent, streetwise book is a paean to America's Rust Belt and a compelling exploration of four milieus caught up in a great transformation of city life. With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. Navigating through accrued layers of cultural, economic, and personal history, Rotella shows how stories of city life can be found in a boxing match, a guitar solo, a chase scene in a movie, or a landscape. The stories he tells dramatize the coming of the postindustrial era in places once defined by their factories, a sweeping set of changes that has remade the form and meaning of American urbanism. A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates with these stories, Rotella has gone to the home turfs of his characters, hanging out in boxing gyms and blues clubs, riding along with cops and moviemakers, discussing the future of Brockton with a visionary artist and a pitbull-fancying janitor who both plan to save the city's soul. These people make culture with their hands, and hands become an expressive metaphor for Rotella as he traces the links between their individual talents and the urban scenes in which they flourish. His writing elegantly connects what happens on the street to the larger story of urban transformation, especially the shift from a way of life that demanded individuals be "good with their hands" to one that depends on the intellectual and social skills fostered by formal education and service work. Strong feelings emerge in this book about what has been lost and gained in the long, slow aging-out of the industrial city. But Rotella's journey through the streets has its ultimate reward in discovering deep-rooted instances of what he calls "truth and beauty in the Rust Belt."   [brief]
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Title: Losing face: status politics in Japan 
Author: Pharr, Susan J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: How does a "homogeneous" society like Japan treat the problem of social inequality? Losing Face looks beyond conventional structural categories (race, class, ethnicity) to focus on conflicts based on differences in social status. Three rich and revealing case studies explore crucial asymmetries of a . . . [more]
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Title: The family romance of the French Revolution
Author: Hunt, Lynn Avery
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a multidisciplinary investigation of the foundations of modern politics. "Family Romance" was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and joining one of higher social standing. Lynn Hunt uses the term broadly to describe the images of the familial order underlying revolutionary politics. In a wide-ranging account using novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that politics were experienced through the grid of the family romance.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese families in the post-Mao era 
Author: Davis, Deborah 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven sociologists and anthropologists explore these and other questions in this path-breaking volume. The essays concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. They show that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies that must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.   [brief]
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Title: Setting safety standards: regulation in the public and private sectors 
Author: Cheit, Ross E
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: In this highly original and meticulously researched comparison of public and private standards-setting, Ross Cheit questions the old maxim that government-set safety standards are too severe while those set by the private sector are too lenient. Identifying the comparative institutional advantages of each arrangement through four paired case studies of grain elevators, woodstoves, aviation fire safety, and gas space heaters, he finds instead that some private standards are surprisingly strict, while government is better positioned to survey real-world experience and sponsor research likely to improve standards-setting. Setting Safety Standards challenges those political scientists who argue that only public institutions can advance the public interest in the controversial field of health and safety. Cheit draws attention to such little-known organizations as Underwriters Laboratories and the National Fire Protection Association, private-sector alternatives to the government regulation so frequently criticized as time-consuming, inflexible, and unreasonable. These organizations, he shows, play a far more significant role in regulation than most federal agencies, even though the standards they develop are widely - and often mistakenly - assumed to be less concerned with due process than government standards and often unduly lax.This study should be widely read by public policy and regulation experts in both the public and the private sectors as well as by academics in the field.   [brief]
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Title: Encountering Chinese networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese corporations in China, 1880-1937
Author: Cochran, Sherman 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Economics and Business | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Big businesses have faced a persistent dilemma in China since the nineteenth century: how to retain control over corporate hierarchies while adapting to local social networks. Sherman Cochran, in the first study to compare Western, Japanese, and Chinese businesses in Chinese history, shows how various businesses have struggled with this issue as they have adjusted to dramatic changes in Chinese society, politics, and foreign affairs. Cochran devotes a chapter each to six of the biggest business ventures in China before the Communist revolution: two Western-owned companies, Standard Oil and British-American Tobacco Company; two Japanese-owned companies, Mitsui Trading Company and Naigai Cotton Company; and two Chinese-owned firms, Shenxin Cotton Mills and China Match Company. In each case, he notes the businesses' efforts to introduce corporate hierarchies for managing the distribution of goods and the organization of factory workers, and he describes their encounters with a variety of Chinese social networks: tenacious factions of English-speaking compradors and powerful trade associations of non-English-speaking merchants channeling goods into the marketplace; and small cliques of independent labor bosses and big gangs of underworld figures controlling workers in the factories. Drawing upon archival sources and individual interviews, Cochran describes the wide range of approaches that these businesses adopted to deal with Chinese social networks. Each business negotiated its own distinctive relationship with local networks, and as each business learned about marketing goods and managing factory workers in China, it adjusted this relationship. Sometimes it strengthened its hierarchical control over networks and sometimes it delegated authority to networks, but it could not afford to take networks for granted or regard them as static because they, in turn, took their own initiative and made their own adjustments. In this book Cochran calls into question the idea that the spread of capitalism has caused business organizations to converge over time. His cases bring to light numerous organizational forms used by Western, Japanese, and Chinese corporations in China's past, and his conclusions suggest that businesses have experimented with new forms on the basis of their historical experiences - especially their encounters with social networks.   [brief]
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Title: Revolutionizing the family: politics, love, and divorce in urban and rural China, 1949-1968
Author: Diamant, Neil Jeffrey 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Politics | China | Sociology | Asian History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1950, China's new Communist government enacted a Marriage Law to allow free choice in marriage and easier access to divorce. Prohibiting arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy, it was one of the most dramatic efforts ever by a state to change marital and family relationships. In this comprehensive study of the effects of that law, Neil J. Diamant draws on newly opened urban and rural archival sources to offer a detailed analysis of how the law was interpreted and implemented throughout the country. In sharp contrast to previous studies of the Marriage Law, which have argued that it had little effect in rural areas, Diamant argues that the law reshaped marriage and family relationships in significant--but often unintended--ways throughout the Maoist period. His evidence reveals a confused and often conflicted state apparatus, as well as cases of Chinese men and women taking advantage of the law to justify multiple sexual encounters, to marry for beauty, to demand expensive gifts for engagement, and to divorce on multiple occasions. Moreover, he finds, those who were best placed to use the law's more liberal provisions were not well-educated urbanites but rather illiterate peasant women who had never heard of sexual equality; and it was poor men, not women, who were those most betrayed by the peasant-based revolution.   [brief]
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Title: Family and frontier in colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580-1822 
Author: Metcalf, Alida C 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Colonial families in the Brazilian town of Santana de Parnaíba lived on the fringe of settlement in a vast and perilous continent. In her revealing community history, Metcalf tells how these settlers pursued family strategies that adapted European custom to the American environment. Turning to recorded events such as marriages, baptisms, and especially inheritances, she discovers that as the newcomers transformed the wilderness into a settled agricultural community, they laid the foundation for a class society of planters, peasants, and slaves. With an engaging description of family life at all three levels of society, the author shows how the families most successful in exploiting and controlling the resources of the wilderness gained wealth, power, and social dominance.Metcalf challenges accepted views by contending that not only external economic forces but also colonial family strategies paved the way for an inegalitarian society in Brazil. Her portrayal of frontier survival and coping, together with the heedless exploitation of wilderness resources, brings a historical perspective to the consideration of Brazil's last frontier, the Amazon.   [brief]
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Title: Refuge of the honored: social organization in a Japanese retirement community 
Author: Kinoshita, Yasuhito 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Japan
Publisher's Description: Faced with the decline of the traditional family and the explosive growth of the over-65 population, the Japanese are looking for new ways to care for their elders. This timely study documents the birth of a major social phenomenon in Japan - the planned retirement community.In the mid-1980s, Yasuhito Kinoshita spent a year living in Japan's first such community, Fuji-no-Sato. His collaboration with Christie W. Kiefer, a cultural gerontologist, is the first detailed study of a retirement community in a non-Western culture.Fuji-no-Sato is a social community with no visible traditions. Kinoshita and Kiefer show that its residents' preference for long-established relationships creates the need for the invention of relationships that have no precedent in Japanese society.This book reveals much about Japanese culture, and about the "graying of society" that plagues the newly industrialized countries of Asia. Its lessons about sensitivity to the elderly's values and the need for clear communication have important applications in other cultures as well.   [brief]
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