by Vivien Hart (1994)
"What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British." "Basing her analysis on primary research, Hart reconstructs legal strategies and policy decisions that revolved around the recognition of women as workers and the public definition of gender roles. Contrasting seismic shifts and expansion in American minimum wage policy with indifference and eventual abolition in Britain, she challenges pre-conceptions about the constraints of American constitutionalism versus British flexibility. Though constitutional requirements did block and frustrate women's attempts to gain fair wages, they also, as Hart demonstrates, created a terrain in the United States for principled debate about women, work, and the state - and a momentum for public policy - unparalleled in Britain. Hart's book should be of interest to policy, labor, women's, and legal historians, to political scientists, and to students of gender issues, law, and social policy."--BOOK JACKET.
Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus
A wide-ranging, thematic survey of women's history in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with chapters written by both well-established writers and new and dynamic scholars in a thorough and well-balanced selection.
Katherine Turk
"In 1964, as part of its landmark Civil Rights Act, Congress outlawed workplace discrimination on the basis of such personal attributes as sex, race, and religion. This provision, known as Title VII, laid a new legal foundation for women's rights at work. Though President Kennedy and other lawmakers expressed high hopes for Title VII, early attempts to enforce it were inconsistent. In the absence of a consensus definition of sex equality in the law or society, Title VII's practical meaning was far from certain. The first history to foreground Title VII's sex provision, Equality on Trial examines how the law's initial promise inspired a generation of Americans to dispatch expansive notions of sex equality. Imagining new solidarities and building a broad class politics, these workers and activists engaged Title VII to generate a pivotal battle over the terms of democracy and the role of the state in all labor relationships. But the law's ambiguity also allowed for narrow conceptions of sex equality to take hold. Conservatives found ways to bend Title VII's possible meanings to their benefit, discovering that a narrow definition of sex equality allowed businesses to comply with the law without transforming basic workplace structures or ceding power to workers. These contests to fix the meaning of sex equality ultimately laid the legal and cultural foundation for the neoliberal work regimes that enabled some women to break the glass ceiling as employers lowered the floor for everyone else. Synthesizing the histories of work, social movements, and civil rights in the postwar United States, Equality on Trial recovers the range of protagonists whose struggles forged the contemporary meanings of feminism, fairness, and labor rights"--Book jacket.
Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
This is the first study of puritan women's place in early modern intellectual culture. Puritan women have suffered a double prejudice: that women were excluded from male culture, and that puritanism was hostile to many forms of culture. This collection argues that early modern women's puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. The essays introduce recently discovered writers such as Elizabeth Isham and Elizabeth Melville and new analyses of well-known writers such as Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Locke, and also highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture. With a foreword by N. H. Keeble and afterword by David Norbrook and fifteen essays by leading scholars of early modern literature and history, this collection reveals an intellectual culture characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence. - Publisher.
Martin Samuels
Statistical analysis in the 1970s by Colonel Trevor Dupuy of battles in the First World War demonstrated that the German Army enjoyed a consistent 20 per cent superiority in combat effectiveness over the British Army during that war, a superiority that had been asserted in the 1930s by Captain Graeme Wynne. In attempting to explain that advantage, this book follows the theory that such combat superiority can be understood best by means of a comparative study of the armies concerned, proposing that the German Army's superiority was due as much to poor performance by the British Army as to its own high performance. The book also suggests that the key difference between the two armies at this time was one of philosophy. . The German Army saw combat as inherently chaotic: to achieve high combat effectiveness it was necessary to decentralise command, ensure a high standard of individual combat skill and adopt flexible tactical systems. The British Army, however, believed combat to be inherently structured: combat effectiveness was deemed to lie in the maintenance of order and symmetry, through centralised decision-making, training focused on developing unthinking obedience and the use of rigid tactics. An examination of the General Staff systems, the development of minor tactics and the evolution of defensive doctrines in both armies tests these hypotheses, while case studies of the battles of Thiepval and St Quentin reveal that both forces contained elements that supported the contrary philosophy to the majority. In the German Army, there was continual rear-guard action against flexibility, with the General Staff itself becoming increasingly narrow in outlook. In the British Army, several attempts were made to adopt German practices, but misunderstanding and opposition distorted these, as when the system of directive control itself was converted into that of umpiring.