Search Results

ABSTRACTQuebec historians' interest in urban health is a recent phenomenon, originating in the 1970s. Since then, researchers drawing on the methods and concerns of social history have asked new questions bearing on the health of the city's population and on its relevant institutions and services. The following article reviews this recent literature, delineating its findings, approaches, and perspectives, and outlines various areas that have as yet been neglected.

ABSTRACTIn the light of recent developments in feminist historiography, this article presents a new interpretation of the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste. This reinterpretation is based on a fairly new concept: maternalism, which is used to describe some women's movements for whom maternity constituted the central point of their ideology and argumentation. We first look at the feminine model conveyed by the FNSJB and then note its equivalence with the traditionnal model of "woman", which identified "woman" as "mother". Nonetheless, for the FNSJB maternity was not conceived as a limitative function but rather as an opening onto society. Thus, the FNSJB had to redefine the frontiers between public and private spheres, so that society could benefit from women's maternal influence. The framework of analysis developed in the first part is then applied to a case: the struggle for women's suffage.

SummaryThe Women's Movement, created in post-communist Poland, was the Polish activist's response to the problems that either arose as a result of recent systematic changes or had accumulated during the Socialist Period. Formed at a time of strong Polish internationalization, due to international cooperation programs, the progress of globalization in the region and the process of integration into the European Union, this movement maintains financial and ideological links with occidental actors. The absence of national support for the women's mobilization, a strong opposition form conservative forces to any change of gender contract as well as weak activism in the heart of civil society reinforced this tendency.

Youth unemployment in Quebec increased from 6% in 1966 to 23% in 1982, in pace with a similar deterioration of youth employment prospects in the rest of Canada, the U.S. and other industrial countries. There are two dominant causes of the youth labour market problem: 1) rising job shortage in the aggregate following generally contractionary macropolicy after 1974 — and most conspicuously in 1979-82 — and 2) the very sharp sensitivity of youth unemployment to the inferior aggregate job prospects. Demographic factors, generous amendments to the Unemployment Insurance Act (1971), and overindexation of the minimum wage also contributed to the higher youth unemployment figures. However, the retreat of the demographic tide and the recent trend toward more realistic labour market policies have since worked to ease youth joblessness somewhat. Youth unemployment is not only high, it is also sharply concentrated. The typical unemployment spell is short (e.g. 3 months), but most of the unemployment consists of a relatively small number of young people who will be out of work for quite a long time because they cannot find jobs. These youth have very often dropped out of school early, and corne from disadvantaged families or from lagging industrial regions. The increase in unemployment for young university graduates is real, but considerably less important than for other young people. A university degree still pays off. It follows that there is no more efficient youth employment policy than a full employment macropolicy aimed at ail workers. Such a policy would do its best to keep interest rates low and stable and would let federal deficits swell in the short run so as to offset deficient private aggregate demand. A microeconomic policy for youth employment recovery however, must also support the expansionary aggregate demand policies. Six central ingredients are considered: 1) Cautious and selective public employment programs. 2) Stabilization of the minimum wage as a fraction of the average wage. 3) Selective wage subsidies for employment in the private sector. 4) A reduction of payroll taxes, which discriminate against employment at average or lower wages. 5) Suppression of the most conspicuous discriminatory practices used by unions, trades and professions against the entry of young people in specific jobs. 6) Support for the continuing progress of the quantity and quality of education.

This article presents a political history of the words “masculinisme” and “masculinism” from the late 19th century until today. Through a comparative analysis of usage in English and French, during different periods, and from feminist and anti-feminist positions, the discussion shows that the meaning of words remains plural and subject to political struggle. In English, the word usually refers to patriarchal ideology or an androcentric male perspective. In French, as of the 1990s, the word has been used more and more often to designate an anti-feminist trend. As for the anti-feminists, they cannot agree on how best to identify themselves, wavering among “masculinist,” “masculist,” “hominist,” “humanist,” or expressions such as “activist for the rights of men” or “of fathers.” This study of language usage highlights certain battle lines between feminists and anti-feminists.

AbstractEven a cursory reading of the eleventh chapter of Judges suggests obvious parallels between the Jephthah story and Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion; however, Blake's six illustrations of Judges (including two of Jephthah and his daughter) irrefutably document his appropriation of the story. No critic has connected the Jephthah story of virgin sacrifice to Oothoon's fate, nor have Blake's illustrations of the Judges narrative received much attention. My argument is that Blake's contrary reading of the book of Judges should inform our critical reading of Visions. This intertextual analysis emphasizes the poem's representation of the female body as a site of sacrifice and how both Blake's illustrations and the poem position readers for this spectacle of virginity and violence. Reading Blake's illustrations of the Jephthah narrative—visual revelations of issues of sexual power—amplifies the poem's cultural power, its iconic representation of a patriarchal obsession with virginity, demonstrable in late eighteenth-century British culture but with ties to biblical, Hebraic representations of virginity and violence. Blake's culturally-targeted revision of Jephthah's daughter defies eighteenth-century British cultural strictures about female purity and marital customs by transforming the daughter virgin's lament at not being able to marry into Oothoon's redefinition of sexual purity. Further, my reading refutes the widespread critical opinion that in the ending of the poem, the heroine Oothoon offers free love that is, in Mellor's words, a “male fantasy,” serving the interests of the “male libertine, ”and underscores the poem's critique of mandated female virginity and culturally-endorsed violence. Finally, Finally, the illustrations and the poem document Blake's engagement with this biblical book where Israel's destiny unfolds through accounts of judges who again and again misjudge, who enact sexual violence and fail to see its connection with their own violent ends. Blake's Visions begins and ends with a chorus of daughters—in between it chronicles the horrors of exploitation, rape, slavery, cultural imperialism and links those to individual sexual repression, like Theotormon's troubled image of Oothoon, like Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter, truly a “sick man's dream.”