Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, (Vancouver: UBC Press 1997)

BRINGING TOGETHER a collection of essays highlighting the lives and works of women engaged in the writing and teaching of history over the century spanning the 1870s to the 1970s, Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice address the creation of historical memory both inside and outside the academy. Through these portraits of the individual and collective efforts of "amateur" and "professional" historians, the editors suggest that because of the responsibilities and constraints associated with gender, women viewed history from a different perspective than male historians, addressed topics overlooked by men, and initiated social, cultural, and regional studies well before these became acceptable within the academy.

      Divided into four thematic sections, the book traces what might be viewed as the "evolution" of historical writing by women of Anglo-Celt background as they moved from outside to inside the academy. The first section, "Community Building," looks at the individual and collective efforts of women engaged in writing nation-building history from a social rather than political perspective; an approach that allowed them to incorporate women into the story. Included are profiles of two Victorian women, Agnes Maule Machar and Sarah Anne Curzon, whose writings were influenced by their religious and social convictions, and a study of the Ontario Women’s Institutes’ involvement in writing local histories. Despite differences, they shared a common interest in creating a history that would inspire Canadians to greater feeling for their country.

      The second section, "Transitions," profiles historians who, through study and adoption of professional historical research methods, bridged the gap between "amateur" and "professional" history, still working outside the academy but gradually building links to the inside. Women living within Catholic religious communities engaged in historical writing in the course of their contemplative and record-keeping practices. Like the Women’s Institutes, their work was collaborative. Individual women may have been prime movers; however, individual authorship was rarely acknowledged in publications. Cloistered women initially wrote to preserve historical memory within their own communities. It was in their work as educators that they began to expand their mandate. As their educational institutions strove to gain standing and recognition in the broader community, these women were required to go beyond the convent walls for training in academic disciplines. This process inevitably helped to professionalize their approaches to history, and also encouraged them to write for a wider audience.

      Also operating outside of the academy, Constance Lindsay Skinner and Isabel Murphy Skelton gained a degree of professional respect and support from some male academics through their personal affiliations and innovative combination of "scientific" history research methods, combining cultural and social history. Self-made and earning her precarious living by the pen, Skinner scorned much about the academic world, yet depended upon and valued her connections with those academics who recognized her talents. Married to Oscar D. Skelton, well-known political economist and senior public servant, Isabel Skelton was less financially strapped. However, her desire to engage in research and writing was often thwarted by family responsibilities. In spite of obstacles, Skinner and Skelton produced works of originality in content and approach.

      The third section, titled "The Academy," looks at women either within or on the edges of the academy, articulating the challenges they faced in being accepted into the history profession, regardless of training and talents. Often receiving encouragement in undergraduate study or even at the Master’s level, women found that few professors encouraged them to go further. The few Canadian women who did obtain doctorates were almost always passed over for permanent faculty appointments. Their options were to leave the country for better prospects or stay for poorly paid sessional work. Others taught in public schools or worked in archives. Not surprisingly, independent means and freedom from family demands often determined whether and when a woman historian could practice her craft.

      The last section, "New Departures," looks at the development of women’s history as a category of study within universities during the 1970s. The chapter suggests that while some of the interest in women’s history grew out of the feminist movement, the relationship between women historians and feminist activism is not a given, nor is it always a comfortable one. The essay further suggests that in spite of gains women historians need to be proactive to both maintain and improve the status of women in their profession.

      In this collection of historiographical essays, a number of themes emerge. The authors argue that women have been involved in historical work for a long time, but that the professionalization that occurred around the turn of the century excluded women both from history and the writing of history. Because gender shaped so much in their lives – finances, responsibilities to family, and restrictions in mobility, for example – they tended to write about events, people, and places within their local areas whose experiences bore similarities to their work.

      Of the individuals highlighted in this text, all had some parental encouragement and support for their intellectual pursuits. These women initially engaged in collective community history without constraints on their lines of inquiry or methods. But when faced with the prospect of outside critical attention to their work, the standards of male scholarship imposed new rules. In the case of Women’s Institutes, there were internal differences as to how "professional" they ought to be. In the case of the nuns, as members of their community gained in academic training, their desire to shape their community histories for an outside critical audience grew.

      While one of the express purposes of the book is to "call into question the legitimacy of the amateur/professional dichotomy as applied to the term ‘historian,’" the implicit message is that progress is measured by women’s attainment of professional status. Contemporary tensions among women making history inside and outside the academy are only briefly addressed. This account does not go beyond the 1970s, however. With the professionalization of women’s history, one wonders whether there is a danger of creating a new canon that excludes "amateurs": minority women, feminist activists, and those exploring family and community stories in non-academic ways.

      Nevertheless, this eclectic collection of essays illustrates how women, because of their lived experience, recorded history differently from men . In some cases, they initiated new ways of approaching history through interdisciplinary methods and erased the false boundaries of public and private worlds. Without addressing the overtly political topics of male historians, their act of writing women into history was sometimes political. This collection does not pretend to be definitive. However, it does point to the existence of a vibrant alternative stream of Canadian historiography that grew alongside the professional male-stream historiography and has yet to be fully explored.

Gerald Friesen, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)

I HAVE BEEN accused by western Canadian friends of revealing my eastern Canadian sensibilities in my measurement of distance. When asked the distance between Montreal and Toronto, I answer five hours, a measure of time linked to my experience with a specific form of technology, the automobile. The translation of space into an experiential unit of the time required to drive the distance gives vast space concrete meaning for me. A given technology, in this case a car, orders my understanding of time and space. This link between time, space, technology, and experience is the focus of Gerald Friesen’s Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication and Canada.

      Gerald Friesen has written a brave and important book. It is a modern – or perhaps more accurately – a postmodern and contemporary project in the older tradition of national syntheses of W.L. Morton’s The Canadian Identity (1961) or Arthur Lower’s From Colony to Nation: A History of Canada (1946). The book addresses the question of why Canada is a "public identity" and presents a version of history emphasizing continuity with the expressed intent of being meaningful to contemporary society. In Citizens and Nation, Friesen, a University of Manitoba historian, proposes a radically different thematic focus and periodization of Canadian history based on the dominant mode of communication and culture. His chronology introduces four overlapping periods bridging "time immemorial" to the present. It begins with an era Friesen refers to as "oral-traditional," proceeds to a "textual-settler" period, continues onto "print capitalism," and concludes with our contemporary experience of "screen capitalism." The author is especially interested in how these particular regimes of communication shape the experience of space and time. Within each of these communication and technological eras, Friesen focuses on an "ordinary" individual or a group of ordinary individuals to explore his argument. One of the attractive qualities of this temporal division is its geographic flexibility, as these different communication systems occur concurrently in diverse parts of Canada. This method of periodization permits chronological overlapping to recognize the variance of place. The dominant mode of communication for Elizabeth Goudie’s Labrador of the 1930s is therefore very different from the urban Vancouver experience of Phyllis Knight during the exact same years. In addition to proposing a new narrative framework, Citizens and Nations is also a study of Canadian historiography itself. As the narrative of national history proceeds, Friesen explores the ways in which English-speaking, Canadian historians have attempted to create a synthesized national history from this vast and diverse geographic space.

      Friesen begins his study with the examination of a northern aboriginal family through Graydon McCrea’s 1983 National Film Board documentary Summer of the Loucheux: Portrait of a Northern Indian Family. This unusual source is used to explore the "oral-traditional" mode of Aboriginal peoples to demonstrate how the oral story-telling tradition connects to historical and contemporary concerns, causing problems of cultural understanding for those ingrained with the notion of a clear differentiation between empirical fact and myth. In his efforts to emphasize continuity, Friesen recognizes Aboriginal people as one of the founding peoples of Canada but acknowledges that their stories have not been integrated into the myths of other Canadians.

      The second section, characterized by what Friesen refers to as the "textual-settler" move from an oral to a literate society, was marked by the arrival of European immigrants and spanned the period from European contact to the 20th century. Friesen uses the example of Elizabeth Goudie, born in 1902 in Labrador, to represent the last generation of "pioneers" which stretched according to place from the 17th to the mid-20th century. For this group of people, written texts supplemented oral communication and Friesen makes an effort to stress the many social, familial, and economic attributes this group shared with Aboriginal peoples. While Aboriginals and settlers shared a common experience of "natural" time and space, Friesen acknowledges that important differences also emerged in terms of the role of church, law, and government.

      The third section of the book, organized under the rubric of "Print-Capitalist National Societies," will likely be of greatest interest and the source of greatest contention to readers of this journal. Here, through the life of Phyllis Knight, a German immigrant whose memoir was published as A Very Ordinary Life (1974), Friesen turns his attention to themes such as the alienation of labour, waged employment, gender, and ethnicity. Friesen also wants his readers to see this period as a time when ordinary people responded to new manifestations of time and space, such as waged work and technology, and adopted strategies and tools to shape their economic, political, and social worlds. In other words, common people learned to respond through participation in the institutions of the state and shaped society through associations such as political parties, unions, and education. Friesen uses this period to present a historiographical discussion counterposing "progressive social" and "conservative political" streams of Canadian history. In a juxtaposition of the former’s emphasis on the transition "from feudalism to capitalism" and the latter’s emphasis on the "convergence of technological and political factors in the creation of the modern Canadian state," he concludes that they are both "too narrowly economic, and insufficiently cultural, to convey the distinctiveness of the Canadian experience." (122) He closes this argument with the assertion that both these historical traditions are less relevant today and holds up the cultural turn as a potential direction which would keep a history of Canada meaningful.

      The final section, entitled "Screen Capitalism," allows Friesen to bring this story up to the present. Expanding from oral interviews, Ken Dryden’s The Moved and the Shaken: The Story of One Man’s Life (1993) and the memoirs of Simonne Monet-Chartrand, Friesen sees the recent past coinciding with unprecedented technological changes in the experience of time as space and the coexistence of "insecurity and plenty." (168) In this section, Friesen emphases how ordinary people face globalization, and cast doubt on both their government and their own agency as citizens, expressing skepticism about the capacity of any state to govern well.

      This is undoubtedly a clever and thought-provoking study. It is a case where the enthusiastic reviewers’ quotes on the back of the book do not exaggerate. Not surprising for such an innovative book, I came away with unease. In the first place, I remain uncertain about the intended audience. Although it is written in an engaging style, it is not a volume likely to displace popular (and traditional) general histories such as Craig Brown et al’s An Illustrated History of Canada or Desmond Morton’s A Short History of Canada. The context and narrative of this volume are not sufficiently filled out or developed to be easily accessible for those unfamiliar with the general narrative, debates, and themes of English Canadian history. This book, which Friesen modestly refers to as an essay, is more creative, more challenging, and for those grounded in its debates, more interesting. I suspect that Citizens and Nations with its origins in international communications theory, economics, and politics will find its greatest, and perhaps most influential audience in graduate courses.

      The book has other tensions. Friesen adopts an intimacy with his historical subjects and refers to them by their first name – an easy familiarity I did not share. The result was some ahistorical discomfort for me as women such as Phyllis Knight and Simonne Monet-Chartrand became "Phyllis" and "Simonne." The narrative strategy of focusing on individuals succeeds as an engaging approach for highlighting the "heroic" experience of ordinary Canadians, but this emphasis on individuals is in conflict with the importance of movements and communities to Friesen’s arguments and perhaps even with the notion of a common culture. At the level of culture, while the book is an important contribution to English-language Canadian history, despite a conscious and well-meaning attempt to include Francophone Québec, the bridge is uneasy. There is a failure to differentiate the great disparity in international power between the English and French languages in discussions of globalization and communication. This is perhaps a missed opportunity. Finally, and most significantly, I was not convinced that economics and politics or class and gender are in any way less "relevant" today for understanding the dramatic pace of change in the present or the past. In the end, despite what he says, and based on what he actually does in the book, I do not believe that Friesen believes this either. While I concur with Friesen’s use of culture and technology as the means to make history more meaningful to the current generation of students of Canadian history, I maintain that it is important to defend the importance of economics, politics, class, and gender, especially as they were/ are shaped by culture and technology.

      This is a book which must be read by anyone seriously interested in Canadian (however you define it) history. I do not think you have to adopt all of Friesen’s conclusions or assumptions to benefit greatly. This is a synthesis that manages to integrate the presence of Aboriginal peoples throughout the entire narrative. The incorporation of time and space as changing historical experiences and the way they connect to the experience of citizenship has altered the way I see the past. What more can you ask from a book?

Bob Russell, More with Less: Work Reorganization in the Canadian Mining Industry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999)

BOB RUSSELL, a well-respected sociologist whose earlier book was on employment issues, has produced an original study of Saskatchewan mining and the reorganization it has undergone. He interrogates his subject with a sophisticated understanding of labour process, theory, and methods. For the most part the book is accessible to a general audience but most suitable for graduate students or other researchers. Senior undergraduates would be challenged by the specificity of the debates and research techniques. As a contribution to the scholarly community on work, it is excellent. He uses novel evidence and intensive research to power his analysis.

      The mining industry has been transformed from a labour-intensive to capital-intensive production with the mechanization of underground and automation of surface operations (milling, smelting, and refining). This process has been underway for some time and much of the attention dedicated to this industry has focused on the political economy of equipment replacing people in direct production, and the weakness of linkages to equipment manufacture. The staples tradition has also focused on market fluctuations for resource products. Bob Russell has chosen to focus on work re-organization, including developments in managerial strategies associated with new production systems. That is not to say he has totally neglected the traditional issues. He notes that the mines he examines are on the edge of underground robotics since potash production lends itself to this, and rich uranium deposits in highly risky areas provide enormous inducement. Computerization certainly has a key role in the mills he examines. In common with earlier work, he notes what he graphically calls "job hemorrhaging," indicating workers’ concerns about seniority and bumping-rights in light of these forces.

      Russell organizes his analysis around the paradigms of the transformations contained in the abstractions of Fordism to post-Fordism and industrial to post-industrial work as forms of industrial governance. His main finding, and title for the book, is "More with Less," by which he means, the common theme regardless of the managerial "packaging" is more work for fewer workers who receive, relatively, less pay for more work expected. His focus is on four mining companies with five mine sites in Saskatchewan, four producing potash and one uranium. These companies and mines provide a natural experiment made messy by rapid corporate restructuring, including extensive privatization of crown corporations. His mode of analysis is not case studies but comparisons of sites and occupations. Russell claims the comparisons come from variations in the cultures of employment each provides with respect to the post-Fordist and post-industrial trajectories.

      This mode of analysis is related to the practices and implications for workers’ experiences as derived from extensive questionnaire-based interviewing. The unit of analysis is the workplace, not the community (as with Meg Luxton’s More than a Labour of Love, 1980).

      Russell analyzes the extent of post-Fordism, characterized by competitive flexibility, leading to an intensification of work effort whereby multi-skilling of workers is at the expense of the de-skilling of jobs. Given the range of cases in his comparison and rapid changes they undergo over time, at best there is a hybridization of Fordist models in use, as revealed by his comparison of five sites. Job reassignments and job expansions are common experiences for the reduced workforces at all sites.

      Post-industrialism Russell associates with two processes: "the social division of labour (what is produced) and changes in the technical division of labour (how items are produced)." (10) His study allows him to investigate only the second of these, which he equates to changing occupations and their requirements (operationalized as operator versus maintenance occupations in either mines or mills).

      He concludes: "The post-Fordist firms and the post-industrial occupations in our study show no more consistent propensity to adopt those practices that have been singled out as being responsible for the reskilling of labour than their counterparts. What then is behind the common trend pertaining to skill that runs across both occupational categories and employers’ managerial strategies?" (158) The common answer is job expansion as expressed in multitasking. With this insight, he casts new light on the complex concept of skill and the labour process debates surrounding it. He also addresses implications for production politics in the form of grievances, disciplining workers, union activism, sabotage, and job harassment. One of the most novel features is the remote mine at Key Lake which is characterized by "radically spacialized industrial relations" as workers shuffled in and out on two crews who work twelve-hours shifts for a week at a time.

      More with Less is recommended as a key reference work for those interested in post-Fordist and post-industrial debates about labour processes, skill, and managerial practices. It provides a strong base for these discussions and reveals the complexity of theoretically-informed empirical research, especially when the ground beneath our feet shifts so rapidly.

Gordon Hak, Turning Trees into Dollars: The British Columbia Coastal Lumber Industry 1858-1913 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)

GORDON HAK’S BOOK is a welcome study about British Columbia’s forest industry during the 19th and early-20th centuries. The work begins with the impetus for substantial lumbering in British Columbia – the 1858 gold strike. It concludes in 1913 with the United States lowering its tariff barriers to wood from Canada, thereby opening a new era for provincial timbering. Largely an economic and political history, Professor Hak corrects popular misconceptions, refines the staples interpretive paradigm, and addresses the inadequacies of previous provincial forest industry studies. Framed within a capitalist paradigm, Hak weaves his history around the interrelated relationships of market exchange, government and lumber company policies, timber technologies, workers, and conservation impulses.

      Turning Trees into Dollars opens with a sound introductory overview. Chapters 1 to 3 look at the lumber industry from the perspective of mill owners. Chapter 1 shows the unfolding significance of local, continental prairie West, and international markets in framing the province’s timber industry until World War I, and the government’s role in shaping those three markets. The following two chapters focus on the structure of the lumber industry. Hak finds that coastal timber production was not so much characterized by monopoly capital as by entrepreneurial capital, ownership instability, and a wide variety in the sizes of mill companies. In terms of mill ownership, Hak discovers a significant pattern of British control until the 1880s, after which central Canadian entrepreneurial and local ownership became more pronounced. Paralleling the varieties and decentralized nature of mill ownership was the volatile, competitive nature of the industry that neither state aid nor trade associations were ever able to surmount.

      The next three chapters examine more closely the relationship between business and government in framing commercial lumbering. Chapter 4 looks at the limited role the Dominion government played in British Columbia forestry, but the importance the provincial government exercised over the province’s forest lands and industry. Retaining forest land ownership, except for the railway belts, meant the provincial government set the framework for the timber industry most directly through timber leases and licenses. Hak shows how the government also shaped the industry through such means as fire regulations and log-scaling policies.

      Chapter 5 discusses early social and political critics of forest use and practices in the province, as well as how and why those voices gave way to a scientific conservation movement in the 1890s. Here, as elsewhere in North America, the conservation movement grew from utilitarian fears about a timber famine, climate changes, streamflow, and the need to safeguard urban watersheds. To turn-of-the-century forest conservationists, waste created by timber theft, fire, and inappropriate cutting practices would be replaced by wise, rational, scientific management for sustained use. It was a position that the progressive wing of the lumber industry could and did support in their pursuit of stabilized markets.

      Chapter 6 largely explores the maturation of the scientific conservation perspective and its embodiment in the Forest Act of 1912. Rather than viewing the Forest Act as a reform measure, however, Hak argues that the act, and conservation measures in general, remained securely within a dominant cultural paradigm where market imperatives and business interests trumped biological considerations and where scientific, technological, and political decision-making followed suit. Still, Hak makes clear that although government and industrial lumbermen allied by the early 20th century to increasingly structure a more integrated and consolidated lumber industry in corporate hands, independent logging companies continued to be a viable and significant economic and political presence. Not until the 1930s would corporate capitalism exercise hegemony over the British Columbia timber industry.

      The final three chapters detail the growing industrialization of the timber industry, and the interplay between technology and labour in the production process for both milling and logging operations. Hak shows that industrialization not only increased production but speeded up labour exploitation as well as job-related accidents. In addition, he delineates the structure of the industry’s job hierarchies, including its ethnic and racial make-up; the marital status and the lifestyle of workers; why there was a notable lack of union and political activism among loggers and millworkers before 1913; and how and why the scientific management of people and machinery proceeded hand-in-hand.

      Like any study, Turning Trees Into Dollars cannot be all things to all people. Some readers will probably wish that Hak had been more attentive to environmental history. To have more thoroughly discussed environment attitudes, practices, policies, and consequences, and to have linked up more concretely resource and labor exploitation would have significantly strengthened the work. In addition, Hak could have done more with railroads, which seemed here, as in the Pacific Northwest United States, to be fitting symbols and agents of changes in the 1880s. Although he does discuss government subsidization for the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Esquimault and Nanaimo Railway, and the role both played in timber holdings and regulations, railroads did even more. The rails brought people, capital investment, new technologies, and business forms of organization, increased market access, and integrated British Columbia ever more tightly into structures of power beyond the province’s borders. Finally, other readers may be disappointed that although Professor Hak claims that the United States Pacific Northwest offers parallels to the British Columbia forest industry, his monograph does not seriously pursue a comparative perspective.

      Nonetheless, Turning Trees Into Dollars has achieved a great deal. Professor Hak set out to provide a history of the timber industry in British Columbia from the 19th to the early-20th centuries. He has done that, and in the process has offered interesting revisionist interpretations. Readers now have a sound preliminary work to Richard A. Rajala’s Clearcutting the Pacific Rainforest: Production, Science, and Regulation (UBC Press, 1998), which focuses on the post-World War I to 1965 era when corporate capitalists used changing technologies, management structures, harvesting practices, and influence over government forest policies to impose a factory management system on regional forests and the lives of workers. What Dr. Hak has accomplished will allow others to build on his work, and hopefully begin to construct comparative histories not only for the Greater Pacific Northwest but also between Canada and the United States.

Robert Bunting
Fort Lewis College

Kerry Badgley, "Ringing in the Common Love of Good": The United Farmers of Ontario, 1914-1926 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000)

IN SPRING 2001 thousands mobilized to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Québec City. Following the "battle in Seattle" in 1999 and protests in Europe, a new anti-capitalist current has arisen. It is a current that includes some inspired by democratic socialism, but mostly includes a new generation inspired by some form of populism, radical liberalism open to refinement as either anarchist or socialist.

      Kerry Badgley’s study of the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO) seems a long way away from Seattle or Québec, but his study of rank-and-file populism is clearly linked to the debates of the new activism. In particular, Badgley focuses on the radical experimentation of Ontario farm progressives in co-operation; the development of an autonomous farm women’s movement (the United Farm Women of Ontario-UFWO); and the rise and fall (due to the hegemony of traditional forces and a conservative UFO leadership) of an independent UFO politics through a brief provincial government (1919-1923); and the election of 24 federal MPs in 1921. To give force to his positive evaluation of the UFO experience, Badgley examines rank-and-file members in three counties: Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark.

      There are a number of positive features about this study. It is the first to seriously address the local dimension of the farm progressive challenge to Canada’s bourgeois elites – through co-operative enterprises, the church union movement, and moral debates about prohibition and betting; as well as from a spontaneous revolt against military conscription in 1917 to develop an independent politics breaking from the parliamentary clientelism of Conservatives and Liberals.

      This emphasis on the local has the merit of stressing how central self-activity and self-organization were in creating the energy and force to challenge bourgeois norms. By studying the UFWO and the many local farm co-operatives, Badgley also does a valuable service in stressing that farm progressives had a substantive radical practice that went beyond the more short-lived and contradictory politics of the UFO.

      What is also to be welcomed is Badgley’s sharp posing of the arguments about the meaning of the farm progressive movement then and now – the first mass break from bourgeois politics in Canada and the relevance of direct democracy to any radical project today. In Badgley’s opinion, the UFO movement was "unconsciously anarchist." For Badgley, what activists today can do is make the core political principles of the farm populist experiment a conscious challenge.

      As a Marxist, and as someone who has studied the UFO through the leadership of W.C. Good (one of three key figures in the movement along with E.C. Drury, farm premier, and J.J. Morrison, provincial co-operative secretary), I had a number of points for debate.

      First, Badgley’s account of the rise and fall of the UFO as a means to examine local organisations in Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark needs to be fleshed out. Where does it fit with C.M. Johnston’s account of the UFO government or the stories of the United Farmers’ Co-operative Company and the Ontario federal farm progressive caucus from the Good study? How did local UFO mobilization link with election results? (Appendix R) There is a powerful dialectical relationship between rank-and-file action and provincial leadership and structures; one cannot be examined without the other.

      Secondly, in rightly stressing the need for local studies of the farm progressive challenge, Badgley appears to have omitted arguments about context and how to make local choices to test that context. The central interpretive argument about UFO leadership from my Good study is that there were three (not two) currents: a reform from above argument by E.C. Drury about making the UFO a people’s party within existing market and parliamentary rules; a radical reform from below argument by W.C. Good to extend direct democracy methods in co-operation to politics through the single land tax, free trade, modest government economic intervention, and a transformed parliamentary system through a variety of direct democracy reforms like proportional representation and the single preferential ballot; and thirdly, a purely negative, sectional argument by J.J. Morrison for occupational self-defence through narrowly conceived co-operative action. Arguably, it was Morrison who triumphed as the sole leader remaining after 1926.

      Badgley’s accounts of local activist initiatives in co-operation and politics appear to illustrate all three of these tendencies as well as confirm how economically and socially representative UFO membership was. If anything, his local studies confirm anecdotal evidence in leadership studies about the importance of the single land tax to the most radical populists, the relative youthfulness of UFO activists, and the importance of pro-Union Presbyterians influenced by the Social Gospel.

      Another contextual question is: why choose Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark Counties? Badgley offers two reasons: their geographical representativeness and available evidence (the degree of local organization in Lambton, the only extant club records being for Simcoe, and the number of local papers in Lanark). However, as noted in the Good study, from a farm production system point of view, there were four regional farm economies in Ontario: the dairy belt (divided between eastern and western Ontario – Lanark being in the first); a mixed livestock system (Lambton and Simcoe); a few specialized areas such as the fruit farmers of Niagara or Prince Edward; and the agro-forestry system of Northern Ontario. The selection of local studies can be refined and tested further.

      Thirdly, what about interpretation? Badgley does a good job in summarizing how Ontario historiography has marginalized this mass, radical challenge to its dominant political culture. But he has to simplify the Marxist narrative and critique to deny there is a meaningful organizational and social context for local responses, which included all tendencies – from Simcoe County’s F.W. Webster and his explicit mention of anarchism to argue single land tax and radical electoral reforms, to the mainstream co-operative and political practice of most Simcoe UFO members who were led by E.C. Drury locally, to the negative sectionalism of Leslie Oke and the Lambton farm co-operative association.

      Despite these criticisms, this is a valuable book for two reasons. First, the Ontario farm progressive challenge was a radical, mass break from Canadian capitalist politics. The farmers’ achievement is well worth repeated, careful study from a variety of points of view.

      Secondly, the farm progressive challenge was more than a break from bourgeois politics. It also put forward a mass, democratic debate in practice on what will replace it. As a Marxist, I have argued that the nature of that break and alternative has to be class situated. A petit-bourgeois populist movement did challenge for power but it did not conquer it. Activists of the 21st century have to ask why.

Peter Campbell, Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third Way (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999)

PETER CAMPBELL invites us to reconsider the legacy of Canadian Marxists active in the first decades of the 20th century. He asserts that these Marxists "comprised one of the most important groups of thinkers and activists in Canadian history." (4) Campbell is particularly interested in those Marxists of this era whom he views as having defined themselves through their rejection of both the revolutionary politics of the Communist International and the gradualism of Canadian social democracy. The defining feature of Campbell’s "Marxists of the third way" was their commitment "to the heart and soul of Karl Marx’s historical materialism, his belief that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself." (4) He believes that the important "theoretical contributions" of these Marxists, especially their analysis of the "relationship between worker self-emancipation and the leadership question..." has been unfairly ignored by historians of the left. (9)

      The perspective of Campbell’s Marxists of the third way was rooted in British Non-conformism and the gradualist, positivist mechanical Marxism of the Second International. This was a Marxism that constructed revolution as an inevitable product of the internal contradictions of the capitalist order. Its adherents came to Marx through the classical texts: Darwin, and Spencer, rather than Lenin. Campbell adds the Hegelian Marxism of Italian Antonio Labriola, to this lineage. Through Labriola Marxists of the third way were drawn to a theoretical concern with ideas and consciousness as dynamics in the historical process. A close study of the Marxism of members of the Socialist Party of Canada reveals "a marked Hegelian and idealist influence." (21) Campbell links the Hegelian Marxism of Labriola (and the long shadow of Gramsci) with book notices contained in Cotton’s Weekly and Hank Bartholomew’s columns in the Western Clarion. Campbell’s claim that Marxists of the third way bequeathed a distinct body of Marxist theory poses a number of questions. What prompted them, rather than others in the Canadian Marxist tradition, to theorize the logic of worker self-emancipation and to evolve a voluntarist Marxism against the grain of existing determinist accounts? How did they apply the classical texts to their time? What evidence exists that the Hegelian legacy of Labriola liberated these Canadian Marxists from the thrall of a doctrine that posed few superstructural questions? How did their account of proletarian revolution differ from that embraced by militants who stood with the Communist International? Finally, did Campbell’s Marxists evolve an idiom and inflection of their own making?

      Campbell advances his argument through biographical accounts of the public careers and private lives of Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) activist William Pritchard, One Big Union (OBU), and Winnipeg General Strike leader R.B. Russell, west coast labour activist Ernest Winch, and Ontario’s Arthur Mould. Campbell’s selection of subjects turned on the question of whether their "political practice" was "derived from theoretical formulations in a conscious manner" and whether the activist left a "significant body of personal correspondence or writings in labour papers." (10) Such considerations were important because Campbell intended to treat "consciousness as an historical agent" and "to deal directly with Canada’s Marxists of the third way and their ideas, to take them seriously as thinkers." (10) Despite Campbell’s claims, readers expecting a book of close textual exegesis will be disappointed. This is not a book preoccupied with theory. Campbell’s emphasis is on practice.

      In the case of Ernest Winch, for example, Campbell explains that an account of Winch’s life provides an opportunity to "assess more thoroughly how effective Marxists of the third way were at involving rank and file workers in the process of creating a broad-based socialist movement, thereby putting their theory into practice." (31) We learn a good deal about Winch’s career in west coast labour and labour political organizations from 1910 to 1940. Yet the voice of Winch is largely absent from this narrative. Rather than textual analysis, Campbell offers speculation. On the fundamental question of the utility of the general strike, for example, Campbell asserts that Winch and other "Marxists of the third way supported industrial unionism and the general strike as a response to the repression of the capitalist state and the mobilization of the rank-and-file workers, but they were skeptical about its long-term benefits." (41) This finding is not disclosed and amplified through a consideration of texts containing the theory of Winch and others on this question.

      William Pritchard is credited with exercising great influence through "his ability to interpret and critique capitalist society, present the case for socialism, and convince workers of the need for education and organization." (74) How did Pritchard theorize his practice as an intellectual of the left? Though Campbell indicates a preoccupation with exploring the "consciousness" of his subjects, he provides no account of Pritchard’s theory of the role of intellectuals in the process of worker emancipation and the passage to a proletarian order. Pritchard supported a resolution at the Western Labour Conference in Calgary endorsing "the system of industrial soviet control" but, Campbell observes, everything Pritchard said or wrote before or after 1919 suggested that he did not agree with replacing parliamentary institutions with soviet-style government. No explanation bearing on his theory as a Marxist of the third way is offered for such apparent contradictions. Campbell contends that Pritchard was convinced that constitutional action could bring about socialism. What was needed was a "working-class majority ready and able to accept the responsibilities of power." (94) Yet, such an assertion discloses little about Pritchard’s adaptation of the classical texts to his time. Campbell’s account of Pritchard’s trial in the winter of 1920 incorrectly claims that criminal charges against Pritchard and the other strike leaders were based on "a spur-of-the-moment, trumped-up amendment to the Criminal Code." (93) The charges were based on the unamended Criminal Code in force in June 1919. Campbell seems ultimately disappointed with Pritchard as theorist. He notes that by the early 1920s, with the decline of the SPC, Pritchard "had little else to offer in its place beyond an unquestioned belief in worker agency that at times seemed more like a kind of religious faith than the product of an historical materialist reading of the state of the working class in Canada and elsewhere in the 1920s." (100)

      The road signs in Campbell’s account of the political pilgrimage of Arthur Mould are ambivalent. "It is not clear why" he became involved in the labour movement. (136) His changing political affiliations are attributed by Campbell to misplaced "faith he placed in J.S. Woodsworth in the early 1930s, and in Joseph Stalin in the ensuing years...." (167) Campbell offers the unflattering assessment that Mould was "a man who sometimes overlooked or chose not to see that he himself was at times incapable of the discernment he expected from the workers themselves." (167) Existential rather than theoretical imperatives appear to have settled his final turn to the left. However, even here we remain on the terrain of speculation, not theoretical exegesis. Campbell reports that Mould never provided an explanation for his turn to Communism and that it was unclear if he ever embraced Leninism. Still, he concludes that Mould embraced Communism because in Mould’s view the Communists were the only party "making a serious attempt to put the ideas of Marx and Lenin into practice." (160)

      The account of R.B. Russell centers on 1919. Russell did not see the strike as a prelude to a proletarian order. Russell "recognized the tremendous amount of educating and organizing of the workers left to do." (188) Broadening his argument, Campbell offers the view that for Russell, and other Marxists of the third way, 1919 was "only a moment of revolutionary potential in that much longer evolutionary process Marxists of the third way saw as the basis of all change in the organic world and in human society." (189) Yet on this important point it remains unclear who would educate and organize the workers, why education was needed, or how the education and organization of workers would threaten capitalist hegemony and lay the foundations of proletarian rule.

      Campbell asserts incorrectly that Russell was singled out for special prosecution in 1919. Like Pritchard, he was charged with seditious conspiracy under the Criminal Code in place in June 1919 and arraigned for trial with the other strike leaders. However, on 27 November 1919, the Crown chose to try Russell separately because A.J. Andrews was concerned that the available jury panel might be exhausted before a jury was selected if the defence exercised all the peremptory challenges at its disposal with eight defendants. Undaunted, the defence sought to extend its number of challenges by having Russell tried under the amended Criminal Code, assented to on 7 July 1919 and in effect since 1 October 1919. Conviction under the amended code could mean a sentence of twenty rather than two years for Russell. The threat of a longer sentence entitled the defence to greater peremptory challenges. The Crown rejected the defence bid.

      Marxists of the Third Way does not achieve the ambitious goals set out by its author. Nevertheless, it is a book well worth reading and thinking about. Campbell’s preoccupations remind us of the need to interrogate the theory bequeathed to the contemporary left and to consider how it has shaped our understanding and interest – or misunderstanding and disinterest – in the nature of capitalist hegemony. Such introspection is essential in thinking about and accounting for the historical possibilities and realities Gramsci alluded to when he asked, "What can an innovatory class oppose to this formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the dominant class?"

Jim Egan, Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence: My Life as a Canadian Gay Activist, compiled and edited by Donald W. McLeod (Toronto: The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and Homewood Books 1998)

JIM EGAN, Canada’s first gay activist, died at the age of 78 on 9 March 2000. In 1949 Jim broke the silence on gay rights in Canada when he started to write letters to newspapers, magazines, and government committees defending gay men and lesbians. At first, only the scandal sheets would accept his letters and columns, but by the 1960s some of the more "respectable" publications began to print them. Later, in the 1990s Jim and Jack Nesbitt, his life partner, took the Canadian government all the way to the Supreme Court in a major same-sex spousal benefits struggle. This was the case that led the Supreme Court to declare that the Charter of Rights includes sexual orientation protection.

      I met Jim a number of times throughout the 1980s and 1990s and learned a great deal from him. This review is written in memory of Jim, in celebration of his activism, and to claim him as a working-class hero. In Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence, gay historian Donald McLeod has skilfully woven together a series of interviews with Jim, informed by Jim’s own writings and other sources, to provide a rich and detailed account of "the social and personal circumstances that allowed Jim Egan to become Canada’s earliest known public gay activist."(13) In this autobiographical oral history Jim’s spirit comes through loud and clear. For those who knew him Jim comes to life in these pages as we again hear and feel his voice and passion.

      Jim’s early experiences were very much working class in character. He was born in Toronto in 1921 and his father was a fine cabinet maker. He recalls excitement when he went swimming naked with other young men in the Don River. Jim remembers that "I certainly had that feeling that many gays have that I was somehow different from the other boys."(17) He became somewhat of a loner and as he describes it "an absolutely omnivorous reader."(17) He became a largely self-taught working-class young man. His mother, who became the main force in his life when his father died, never questioned his reading and he devoured Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, and eventually discovered Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and other references to same-sex passion and desire.

      When he was 13 or 14 Jim tells us:

I realized I was sexually attracted to males. I’d never heard the words "gay" or "homosexual." I think it must be difficult for someone today to believe that young fellows then had never heard these words, but it was certainly true in my case and amongst the boys I knew in working class, east end Toronto ... I became sexually active with some of the boys on the street ... when I was thirteen, somehow or other, ... we started sexual experimentation with each other.... One of the things I quickly discovered was that while they all liked to fool around, they certainly did not want to talk about it. And I realized fairly early on that it was something that could not be discussed, but it was a fun thing that you could do anytime the opportunity arose. (19-20)

Here we get a sense that Jim in his youth may have been participating in the type of largely pre-homosexual, working-class sexual culture that George Chauncey writes about in Gay New York. At the same time we get a sense of the early development of prohibitions on homosexuality as a topic of discussion and form of identification in working-class communities.

      When the war came, Jim tried to join the Army but was rejected because of a corneal scar. He then worked as a technician with the Toronto Department of Zoology where he learned how to preserve animal specimens, and as an assistant at Connaught Labs.

      He joined the merchant marine for the last two years of the war. As in the experiences of many others, and as Allan Berube describes in Coming Out Under Fire, it was the war mobilization and its shifting of the contexts of gender and sexual life that opened up new erotic possibilities for Jim. He discovered the gay world in various ports that he visited. For instance, he describes picking up an Army guy in Piccadilly Circus in London in 1944 or 1945.

      In 1947 he came back to Toronto and began to investigate the local gay world that had expanded during the war years. Although he had many sexual adventures, Jim wanted to meet another man and settle down. He met Jack Nesbitt, a hairstylist, in 1948. Later, in 1949, Jim and Jack moved to Oak Ridges to work for a man who owned a biological supply business. This began Jim and Jack’s love for living in more rural areas that would often take them away from larger urban centres.

      The late 1940s and the 1950s were a difficult time for many gay men with widespread police harassment and entrapment and media coverage marked by silence on homosexual experience in the mainstream media and heterosexist sensationalism in the scandal sheets. Jim stresses that even though "there was a homophobic climate during this period that cried out for change, I think it is important to note that the situation was not entirely bad."(43) Jim’s "fury" at the heterosexism in media coverage is what propelled him into major letter and article writing campaigns that took place in a series of waves from 1949 until 1964. As he put it, "There were never any articles published from the gay point of view, which in my mind equalled a conspiracy of silence on the true nature of homosexuality." (43) Jim set himself the task of breaking this silence.

      While the mainstream print media ignored his onslaught, some of the scandal sheets began to print his letters and articles. He had a series of columns published in True News Times called "Aspects of Homosexuality" and later in Justice Weekly titled "Homosexual Concepts." Jim wrote about the Cold War purges of homosexuals in the US State Department, the Kinsey Report, and the "causes" of homosexuality. In these columns Jim showed himself to be a profound gay working-class intellectual. Jim had contacts with the emerging homophile movement in the US and continued his "omnivorous reading" of materials relating to homosexual experiences.

      Although Jim later stubbornly resisted the insights of social constructionist approaches to sexuality, he was able to write to a Parliamentary Legislative Committee in 1955 such powerful lines as: "The Negro ‘problem’ was created by the white majority; the Jewish ‘problem’ by the Gentile majority, and the homosexual ‘problem’ by the heterosexual majority – who alone can take the necessary steps to bring this problem to a speedy end."

      Jim was also very aware of class divisions within the gay community. Here is his description of the "levels" in gay life:

Gay life in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s was on a series of levels, with your opera queens and the highly educated university types at the top, and the ribbon clerks at Simpson’s at the bottom. While there may have been a certain amount of overlap, we didn’t associate with anybody except from what we might refer to as the "lower orders." And I say that in the kindliest way, because we were part of it.(70)

      Jim also challenged class relations within gay community formation when he assisted Sidney Katz in 1963 in his articles on the gay community for Maclean’s. This public visibility for the gay community challenged the comfort of some middle-class gay men who lived most of their lives in the closet. A friend was asked to arrange a meeting for Jim with a man "who was just oozing money, position, and power." (84) Jim was asked to end his collaboration with Katz since "if you keep on publicizing this the way you are, it won’t be possible for any gay man to be safe. People will begin to get suspicious and gay men will be recognized as living a gay life."(84) Jim, of course, refused to end his collaboration with Katz since he had no investment in the relations of the closet and in contrast he wanted more publicity for gay experience. This points to our need for more historical work investigating class divisions and struggles within gay communities.

      Jim’s impressive activism, however, was at this time not actively supported by other gay men and he laboured largely in isolation. As McLeod points out, Jim’s activism "went in waves" often related to the dynamics of his relationship with Jack and in 1964 his early career as a gay activist ended when he and Jack decided to move to British Columbia. (11) This interaction between activism and our relationships is another area that needs much more focus in our theorizing of activism.

      Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence is a wonderful celebration of Jim’s life. Those who are interested in Jim’s life of activism should also consult: Jim Egan: Canada’s Pioneer Gay Activist, compiled and introduced by Robert Champagne (Toronto: Canadian Lesbian and Gay History Network 1987); and David Adkin, Jim Loves Jack: The James Egan Story (Toronto: David Adkin Productions 1996).

Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press 1998)

THIS WORK EXAMINES Aboriginal people’s bodies as sites of attempted colonization in a number of ways. The most interesting contribution that the author makes is in examining multiple sites of the attempted colonization of Aboriginal people. In her work, Kelm goes beyond attempted colonization as a personal or institutional tool to include colonization as situational, personal, institutional, and political, depending upon the perpetrators. The least effective portion of her work deals with Aboriginal people’s bodies as objects.

      In examining colonization as a situational response to factors inherent in settler societies, Kelm relies heavily upon oral histories and testimony provided by Elders in First Nations located in the territorial confines of British Columbia. In using Elders as historical sources to draw from, the author establishes the veracity of oral traditions as a given fact. This is valuable, respectful, and reinforcing of the understanding that First Nation historical traditions and the traditional preservation of histories are valid and useful tools.

      While the first chapter of this work does not rely heavily on these sources (dealing instead with government-generated population and mortality rates, and hospital admission information) the second chapter deals with the impact of colonization on Aboriginal diet and nutrition. It is important to note that Kelm examines not only the impact of colonial mentality on policy development and the intrusive nature of this policy, but she also makes sure that she addresses Aboriginal people’s responses to the same. She writes of First Nation lobbying and Aboriginal leadership’s negotiations, petitions, and responses (19, 47, 56, 152) in the face of attempted colonization. This is an essential part of the story of colonization that has been overlooked in many discussions of imperialism and its impact on First Nations. By choosing to examine the political response by Aboriginal leadership, Kelm demonstrates that the situational response is as important as the sites of colonization. Importantly, the story of colonization takes form not only in the recounting of colonial history, but also in the reconstruction of Aboriginal people’s personal and political responses to colonialism.

      Kelm also analyses colonization as personal. Aboriginal people’s health and illness are examined in terms of their impact on families, clans, and nations. (10) In this way, the story of attempted colonization is not one that details just the impact of disease and settler response to disease. The work becomes broader and studies not just the pressure exerted by health care and governmental officials on families but also the familial response to these impositions. This effort is laudable. The ripple effect of ill health and the political construction of Aboriginal health extend to the people impacted by both. By examining health policy in this context, Kelm is able to explore the effect on Aboriginal people as a collective. In assessing the ripple effect on the collectivity, Kelm handily defuses studies of disease that either individualize its causes or consequences, and/or attribute it to "cultural" factors divorced from political context.

      In examining the personalization of colonization, Kelm is able to scrutinize both the role of missionaries and the benefit accruing to missionaries as a result of Aboriginal illness. Faced with diseases Aboriginal cultures and doctors had never before experienced, missionaries were able to make a name for themselves with their "humanitarianism colonialism." (146) More specifically, the author effectively establishes that Aboriginal illness enabled missionary staff to administer spiritual and medical assistance - with the end goal being the disruption of the relationship between First Nation people and First Nation medical practitioners. (104)

      The author examines not only the role of individuals who earned their livelihoods from treating Aboriginal illnesses but also the position of medical staff who were "reluctant, even disinterested, colonizers." (135) This is an essential contribution to the colonization dialogue, particularly in an era when the attribution of responsibility is so often linked only to intentional acts. Kelm observes that action and inaction, and not intent, are essential components of a colonial condition.

      Beginning with Chapter 2, Kelm examines colonization as an institutional mandate. Initially, she reviews health and ill health in the context of the reserve system’s impact on traditional foods. What follows is an incredibly detailed discussion of the impact that the reserve system had on Aboriginal people’s ability to maintain health and fight foreign diseases. She addresses the poor soil provided and the exclusion of cultivated gardens in the selection and allocation of reserve lands. She also describes the impact that the immigration of non-Aboriginal trappers, provincial legislation dissociating water rights from land ownership, and fishery regulations had on Aboriginal people’s ability to maintain the health standards present in their communities prior to non-Aboriginal settlement in their territories.

      Predominant in the discussions of colonization via institutions is Kelm’s examination of the role of residential schools (Chapter 4) in creating and perpetuating illness in Aboriginal people. She writes that the establishment of residential schools was "predicated on the basic notion that First Nations were, by nature, unclean and diseased." With this in mind, "residential schooling was advocated as a means to ‘save’ Aboriginal children from the insalubrious influences of home life on reserve. Once in the schools, the racially charged and gendered message that Aboriginal domestic arrangements threatened physical, social, and spiritual survival was reinforced through health education." (57) Clearly evident in this comprehensive analysis are the high morbidity rate of Aboriginal youth in residential schools and the attempted "salvation" of the First Nation students who lived at the residential schools. Kelm’s approach to this topic is an interesting one. She examines not only the physical toll, but the emotional, cultural, and mental toll that residential schooling took on First Nation students, their families, and their communities. She draws our attention to the institutionalization of racially and culturally determinative and imperial understandings as they were entrenched in the residential school organizational structure. From health education and its role in cultural invasion, to the enforced application of western standards and its impact on Aboriginal societal standards, Kelm leaves no stone unturned. (62) She does not exonerate government or missionary societies from our understanding of this bureaucratic brutality. Government and missionaries are viewed as complicit with the residential school bureaucrats in this imperial intrusion which killed one quarter of the prairie First Nation students on residential school rolls. (64)

      Colonization as political will dominate Chapter 7 of this work. Disappointingly, the author is not as able with this research as she is with the research related to the role of missionaries and residential schools in the attempted colonization of Aboriginal people. Perhaps it is because it is difficult to gauge the impact of governmental policy from oral sources or because the political will and manipulation of the time is not evident in the records. In any event, Kelm seems unable to make the link between governmental and political decision making and policy, on the one hand, and the illness that swept through First Nations between 1900 and 1950, on the other. She does condemn the Department of Indian Affairs; Kelm states that the Department did not hire adequate staff and that they did not actively recruit experienced doctors. (129, 131) However, given the evidence related to the federal government’s obligation (treaty and/or fiduciary) to provide health care, Kelm does not make a thoroughly convincing case for the clear abrogation of responsibility by the settler government.

      Referring in passing to a lack of proactivity, Kelm never seems to make the link between disease, ill health, and Aboriginal people’s deaths and the inactivity of the government of Canada with much vigour. She refers to societal responses as "a society that sought control through knowledge and the creation of a colonizing archive of data, rather than overt displays of force" – rather than governmental non-responses in attributing responsibility for Aboriginal people’s health crises. (120) This tentativeness is unexpected and diminishes the strength of the work evident in earlier chapters.

      There is, however, a significant discussion of the role of departmental field matrons, which broadens the reader’s understanding of the shifting perceptions related to Aboriginal women/motherhood.

      Although she refers to disease as differentially understood by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, Kelm does review the attempted colonization of Aboriginal people in light of the understandings that non-Aboriginal people had and have about health and wellness. Disease is perceived as situational and in a Western context, isolated from holistic health and reviewed on a case-by-case basis. In addition, there seems to be an ill fit between the intellectual acceptance of and personal respect demonstrated towards Aboriginal healing. The author demonstrates an implicit acceptance of the fact that Aboriginal medicine exists, is effective, and is sometimes superior to Western medicine. However, there are three notable "tells" that seemingly establish that the author does not have a full understanding of the respect that should be accorded to Aboriginal health research grounded in Aboriginal understandings related to wellness and medicine.

      Just as some pictures and ceremonial accoutrements are not to be photographed in Aboriginal traditions, some stories are not to be related out of context. I am not certain where this line should be drawn as my history and knowledge of such stories may be unduly influenced by the fact that we had to send our sacred traditions underground or risk losing them. The fundamental understanding that comes from this is: if you do not know the protocol, then do not take responsibility for sharing the information. There are a few instances in this work where I was uncomfortable with the degree of information provided about sacred ceremonies. Because our education and health are intricately tied together and are based on experiential and protocol-governed teachings, those descriptions seemed contextually orphaned.

      Secondly, frequent references to Aboriginal "witchcraft" in the context of a discussion of medicine and curative and harmful powers de-legitimizes the skill as something less than medicinal.

      The third point corresponds to the monomania of Western medicine and its preoccupation with "curing the disease." In the holistic tradition of most Aboriginal societies, health was balanced with the alternative. Helpful powers balanced with disruptive. Because the goal of Aboriginal health was to live a good/balanced life, the eradication of one disease is not good health. The work makes passing reference to this but reviews and interprets health in the context of eradication of disease. Perhaps, in the Aboriginal context, the disease is the symptom and living out of balance is the disease. In any event, while this imbalance is referred to, a detailed examination of the Aboriginal understanding of health would have enhanced and grounded the work. In many Aboriginal societies, disease is perceived as animate and as an entity in and of itself. It is an indicator of a larger problem. As well, there is some discussion and separation of the human and non-human realm in this work. Perhaps the larger understanding, and one which would have provided context for the discussion, is that they cannot be separated effectively in an Aboriginal conception of health. As the connection between past and future is understood in a discussion such as this, so should the link between elements and people.

      The metaphor of the "Aboriginal body" seems difficult to reconcile with this understanding. When Kelm writes that the "(c)olonial praxis has situated Aboriginal bodies as particular sites of struggle," the reader is also reminded that the western understanding of the division of soul and body is one which does not necessarily have a correlate in Aboriginal societies. (101) In fact, the division seems all the more inapt as the missionaries, government officials, and residential school staff members themselves were aware of the tie between spirit and body and systematically broke down one knowing the impact it would have on the other. The resultant intellectual split between soul and body has a tendency to objectify just one part of Aboriginality when the whole was detrimentally impacted. While the theory of the construction of Aboriginal bodies as colonized bodies is an interesting one, it is more relevant to the discourse to examine the attempted eradication and suppression of Aboriginal personhood and manhood. In this discussion, the body cannot be separated from the spirit.

      Kelm makes some interesting comments about Aboriginal economies and the effect that colonization has had on them, linking this to Aboriginal people’s health. This is a difficult concept to describe and to capture as there has been little research done in the area. Further, her preliminary discussion of Aboriginal women’s work, its subsequent devaluation, and the impact of this devaluation on Aboriginal health is intriguing. (51) The economic subjugation of Aboriginal people as a result of the implementation of the reserve system is also discussed convincingly in this work. (55) In her discussion of "upward mobility" of Aboriginal doctors Kelm states that "healers gained little wealth with which to confirm elevated rank." (88) In this discussion, Western standards of upward mobility are applied and the result is an awkward analogy. Respect, integrity, and honour are the currency with which mobility was purchased in most traditional Aboriginal societies.

Betsy Beattie, Obligation and Opportunity : Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1870-1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press 2000)

OVER THE PAST several decades, historians of international migration have become increasingly aware, as have their colleagues elsewhere, of the need to consider women as distinct historical actors whose experiences did not always mirror those of their kinsmen. Betsy Beattie’s book Obligation and Opportunity contributes to this corrective effort by recentering the narrative of Maritime out- migration to Boston in the decades around 1900, a narrative formerly dominated by the male skilled workers who relocated, on the women who made up as many as two-thirds of all Maritime migrants to Boston during this era. (5-6) While female migrants in the late-19th century sought work in Boston in order to assist their families financially, Beattie argues, the young women who retraced their steps in the early 20th century envisioned this sojourn as an essential formative journey, an opportunity for individual growth on the road to adulthood.

      In Part I, "The Vanguard," Beattie focuses on the Maritime women who migrated to Boston in the final decades of the 19th century. These women’s migration, like that of their brothers, both stemmed from and contributed to the region’s economic decline in the decades following Confederation. (31-32) But while men might primarily migrate to help out the family, such migrations were not incompatible with personal ambition and the simultaneous or subsequent fulfilment of individual career goals. Not so for women: their journeys to Boston revolved solely around their families’ economic need. In this sense, seeking work in Boston was actually part of a larger tradition of Maritime women seeking outside wages in order to help their families cover expenses. As the increasing industrialization of North America minimized young women’s direct economic contributions on the farm, with home production shifting to commercial consumption and farms becoming increasingly specialized and mechanized, farm daughters were no longer needed so close to home; moreover they found fewer employment opportunities at home than in growing urban centres like Boston.

      Boston provided an attractive destination to Maritime women because of the abundance of positions available in the domestic service, the type of work an earlier generation would have done in neighbours’ homes in the Atlantic provinces. Furthermore, Bostonians apparently found Maritime women to be ideal employees; native born women shunned domestic service during this era because of the long hours, and most Maritime immigrants, unlike other Boston immigrants at the time, were Protestants who spoke English with little or no accent. Working in private homes, Maritime women could accumulate a considerable savings in a few years, as compensation included both decent wages and room and board. While the vast majority of Maritime women thus laboured as maids or cooks, over one in six was a seamstress or worked in a related industry during this era. (51) Although newspapers back home were full of cautionary tales, often reporting that only tragic consequences befell women who abandoned home for the dangerous, distant, and foreign metropolis, women tended to disregard these dire predictions of their fate; instead they relied upon the more positive accounts they received from relatives or friends who were already living in Boston.

      While this "vanguard," "the first group of single women to leave the Maritimes in large numbers and go to work in Boston," went primarily to help their families economically, the experience changed them for life. (61) For these women from rural Maritime farming communities, their years in Boston marked their first encounter with an urban metropolis. When they later returned to their homes in the Maritimes, brimming with tales of adventure and excitement in the big city, their broadened horizons and new perspective on life were evident , and they eagerly recounted their experiences to subsequent generations for years to come. It was these stories of adventure, argues Beattie, which fuelled a second wave of migration in the first decades of the 20th century; it is this second wave of female migrants that Beattie addresses in Part Two of the book, entitled "Eldorado." In contrast to their mothers, aunts, and older sisters, personal growth and outright adventure – not familial economic need – were the primary motivating factors propelling female Maritime migrants who sought work in Boston after 1900. These women were often better educated than their predecessors had been; many of them completed high school before leaving home, a fact which bears evidence to their decreasing importance as players in the family economy. Once in Boston, while some continued older patterns by taking work as domestics or in the garment industry, an increasing number took advantage of educational opportunities not available back home, from nurse training programs to night courses in business, another indication that family financial obligations were less pressing for this generation of migrants. Many Maritime women used these educational opportunities as a springboard into a professional career. Still others, entering the various labour markers that courted women to fill shortages in the early 1900s, became telephone operators, clerical workers, and saleswomen.

      Beattie’s sources include contemporary newspaper articles, labour bureau and census reports, letters and diaries, as well as more recent interviews and written accounts. But at the heart of her comparisons is her extensive research in United States federal census manuscripts form 1880, 1910, and 1920. Using these manuscripts, Beattie has identified the occupations of nearly every Maritime woman living in Boston at the time of these three censuses. In addition to compiling this data in superbly constructed tables within the text, she includes a more detailed breakdown of every recorded occupation for these census years in several appendices. Beattie’s maps are also very informative and easy to read, though geographers might criticize certain omissions: for example, none of her maps includes a scale. The occasional photographs of young Maritime migrants at work add a personal dimension to the stories that unfold throughout the narrative, particularly the changing nature of work itself for these women over time. Together, these sources paint a multidimensional portrait of the lives and experiences of Beattie’s subjects.

      As her introduction indicates, Beattie is familiar with a large body of literature not only on other women migrants to the United States during this era, but also on women and work throughout the centuries. Although her attempts to situate her subjects’ experiences within this much larger historiography might strike some as ahistorical, because of the ways in which she appears to essentialize the experiences of women across time and space, at least she is drawing upon the literature. A number of other studies of Canadian migrants to the northeastern US during this era show little awareness of the larger tradition of US immigration studies, or of gender as a factor in migration and work patterns. Beattie’s addition of women to the story of this migration reinforces themes found in existing scholarship of young people’s exodus from the Maritimes in conjunction with economic stagnation. Yet her book provides a unique perspective because it prompts a more accurate understanding of the experiences of the majority of Maritime migrants, who, in contrast to the subjects of previous stories on this migration, were female. Thus, Beattie’s work is a valuable contribution, and offers one more testimonial: failing to consider whether male and female migrants experienced the migration process differently will leave half the story untold.

Paul Rutherford, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)

RECENTLY, THE FOLLOWING unsigned classified ad appeared in Toronto’s weekly alternative newsmagazine, NOW: "SMOKERS RIGHTS. Sick control-freaks led by white supremacists are behind the brainwashing enforcement of non-smoking laws. If they were so concerned about the pollution of air they would be making a noise about the exhaust fumes and industrial wastes which are at least 10,000 times worse & are the true killers of our environment. Why else do you suppose that might be? Whatever happened to Freedom of Choice? Or is that something exclusive to the rich?" While this tangled tale of conspiracy and control in the public space of Toronto seems particularly overwrought and poorly argued, it does point to some of the responses occasioned by anti-smoking regulations and advertising.

      In his new book, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods, senior University of Toronto history professor Paul Rutherford scrutinizes this field of "advocacy advertising" or "civic advocacy" – that is, publicity promoting a "public good" such as smoke-free workplaces and restaurants, or the elimination of drunk driving. It includes, for Rutherford, advertising sponsored by governments (a major player in Canada), political parties, corporations, and organiz-ations, and which is directed at achieving "a drug-free America, social justice and public health, a united Canada or a sovereign Quebec, economic progress, unspoiled nature, world peace, crime-free streets, and on and on." (5) He argues that there has been an explosion of such advocacy since the 1960s, and of the identification of "social risks" such as pollution and AIDS, marking a clear break with the past. What we are seeing, he contends, is the marketing of public goods along the same lines as commodities. While Rutherford devotes some time to discussing reactions to such advertising, including backlashes to anti-smoking, drunk driving, and safe sex campaigns, his central interest in Endless Propaganda is the impact of advocacy advertising on the public sphere.

      Indeed, as far back as the 1930s, a central (and pessimistic) strand of the massive scholarly literature on advertising has been preoccupied with its erosion of democratic life and discourse; by the 1950s, this had turned into an obsession with media manipulation and propaganda. In recent years, the analysis of advertising has become vastly more theoretically sophisticated and wide-ranging, but troubling questions about what has happened to the space of political discourse within advanced capitalist societies have, arguably, become more pressing with the renewed theoretical and practical interest in democracy. Rutherford’s project is located within this broad critical tradition and shares much of its deep pessimism if not all of its approaches.

      Endless Propaganda is divided into five parts, each part beginning with a short theoretical excursion that serves to introduce some of the themes, arguments, and interpretations that run through the discussion of the (mainly televised) advocacy ads that follow. Some readers will find this organization of the book particularly suited to its subject matter and approach; others may find it episodic and at times frustrating as the overall argument disappears under the weight of numerous examples and theoretical tangents. Of the various theoretical influences on the book, Habermas and Foucault are especially important. The ads themselves, and Rutherford has researched an extraordinary number of them, are from Canada, the United States, the UK, and France with scattered references to other national contexts such as Chile and Argentina. Despite this international focus, the argument is not especially comparative and speaks largely to the American experience.

      The book’s first part begins, not unexpectedly given Rutherford’s main focus of inquiry here, with Habermas’s understanding of democracy, his famous account of the public sphere, and his critique of advertising and public relations. "Habermas’s Lament" serves to introduce an historical discussion of the origins of advocacy advertising in World War II and Cold War America as business sought "to remedy the lamentable ignorance of ordinary Americans about the virtues of free enterprise and the villainy of alternatives." (28) A brief discussion of Gramsci on hegemony sets up two chapters on the restoration of order following the serious challenges of the 1960s to American poverty, racism, and imperialism. Examples include the war on drugs and what Rutherford refers to as the merchandising of law and order as "elites regained their command over the shape of the symbolic universe which constructed politics." (66) An outline of Foucauldian notions of power, discipline, and governmentality forms the prologue to part three, in many ways the core of Endless Propaganda. Here Rutherford devotes a chapter each to contemporary health promotion campaigns (smoking, drugs, AIDS); charity ads, especially those focused on poverty in the Third World ("save the children"); and "administrative advertising," a loose category through which he analyzes assorted attempts to "reconstruct citizens" in ads directed at drinking, discrimination, and crime, among other instances. (141) For Rutherford, these campaigns are all about the "new paranoia," but I would have liked to have seen here an historical discussion about the ways in which they differ from, for example, all those paranoid and panic-inducing films of the 1950s (many of which found their way into the schools) about sex, venereal disease, drugs, dating, communism, the Bomb, and the dangers of slovenly personal habits. This section’s concluding chapter draws on the examples of Benneton and the Body Shop to argue that the moral appeals of advocacy advertising have now invaded commodity advertising. Part four of Endless Propaganda considers the themes of technological utopia and dystopia in advocacy advertising by large corporations and the green movement and is anchored by some considerations on the work of Paul Ricoeur. The fifth and final part of the book invokes Baudrillard, not unsurprisingly, for some concluding reflections on the staging of politics as advertising, the suppression of debate and the general colonization of the public sphere by propaganda and marketing.

      Can we get out of this place? After all, propaganda may be endless, but popular tolerance for it isn’t. Rutherford spends some time talking about activists such as the Vancouver-based Adbusters, practices such as "culture jamming" and graffiti, and artists such as the celebrated American feminist Barbara Kruger whose work operates in part through a critique of contemporary advertising. In the last analysis, however, Rutherford does not think such activist and artistic strategies are terribly effective given the fact that real control of the media depends on serious access to money and power. Many will agree with him here; others might want to probe more deeply and ask how contemporary social movements such as the Zapatistas have nonetheless managed to gain significant ground through the international media. Relatedly, there is no discussion at all in Endless Propaganda of the fascinating ways in which international activists have used the internet to get around some (certainly not all) of the limits to debate in the corporate media and to form what some might argue are alternative public spheres.

      More troubling is Rutherford’s account of "the populace" – a rather passive and undifferentiated lot who have learned that "tuning out" propaganda and avoiding the electoral machine is the best that can be made of a bad situation: "Increased propaganda, beyond a certain point, will provoke neither compliance nor argument but a collective turn-off, a psychic blindness and deafness that resist efforts to sell any and all public goods." (255) As in Baudrillard, there is, ultimately, No Way Out. This sense of closure and pessimism is reinforced by an analysis of advocacy ads that, in many cases, emphasizes a one-dimensional message. Sometimes this works; Rutherford effectively points to the questions and points of view that are systematically excluded from certain campaigns such as those against drugs. Yet there is little sense that ads, like other texts, might have multiple and unstable meanings, or might be organized through more than one set of discourses. Nor does he spend much time on advertising campaigns, such as the recent one by a Canadian bank ("Can a bank change?"), which are in part a response to sharp popular critique, in this case of the banking sector. Sometimes, as in his discussion of safe sex promotion, the analysis could have been much deeper and more searching. Citing a journalistic account that claims that "half of the nation’s 20-year-old gay men will contract HIV during their lifetime," Rutherford concludes that, "The extraordinary efforts to banish unsafe sex from the gay community in the United States ultimately failed." (113) Aside from the fact that both the statistic and the argument are debatable, this analysis completely ignores the phenomenal efforts by gay men and their allies to challenge the terms of conventional public health discourse, to create explicit and erotic safe sex materials, and to demand a say in setting AIDS research and treatment agendas. In short, government anti-AIDS campaigns (with all their serious problems) must be situated in a broader context of deep contestation around how AIDS is talked about in the public sphere. Despite the many thought-provoking arguments throughout the book, Endless Propaganda at times comes perilously close to a remaking of 1950s-style media manipulation and conformity theory with Foucault, rather than the psychoanalytic approaches popular in that decade, forming the chief theoretical influence.

Bob Davis, Skills Mania: Snakeoil in our Schools? (Toronto: Between the Lines 2000)

BOB DAVIS’s 1995 book What ever happened to high school history? Burying the Political Memory of Youth: Ontario 1945-1995 made me a fan. In that book he documented how history courses from 1949-1995 were replaced in Ontario’s curriculum by the "age of sociology" courses. In contrast to this kind of history, Davis argued these courses were devoid of content and societal goals worthy of students’s consideration. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Davis’s latest effort, Skills Mania: Snakeoil in our Schools?.

      Davis’s latest effort is divided into eleven chapters and two appendices of course material from his high school black history courses. The first three chapters lay out his version of the skills philosophy and its threat to democratic education while Chapters 4-11 focus on course examples that combine content and skill in various disciplines. In his introduction, Davis writes how this debate began.

      "The new curriculum advisors said we should no longer teach history; we were to teach how to do history (history skills), in case you ever needed it in your job or wanted to do it in your spare time – and one course was enough for this shrunken purpose. This was my baptism as a critic-in-embryo of the new skills education." (3)

      The debate whether skills or content should guide education is as important as it is ancient. Socrates and the Sophist school of Athens debated whether the goals of education ought to be wisdom through reflection upon the content of daily life or the cleverness to be gained in the skills of rhetoric. While the Sophists sold certainty to students about the worth of the skills they possessed, Socrates traded in doubt, questioning the often unexamined ends to which people strove and to which skills were applied. Davis’s position in this debate is clear.

      "... I object to ... the current neglect of what these skills should be anchored in: content, conviction, allegiances, real human beings and, in general, a commitment to helping students understand history, learn about the world and consider ways to make it a better place to live." (9)

      In Chapters 4-11 Davis offers classroom project examples from his long experience as a teacher that combine skills with meaningful content in history, English, psychology, sociology, citizenship education, and elementary and high school science. From these examples it is clear that Davis is an inspiring teacher. His examples of lessons that artfully combine skills and content, however, get lost in tangents harmful to his main point. Chapter 4 for example deals with English. In this chapter, starting from the beginning, we learn of an inspiring American mentor getting fired from a southern US school for handing out candy, a poem written by a student for the mentor, the author’s brother’s disappointment with a teacher’s feedback in the 1950s, reflections on past classroom texts, before ending with a student’s exam answer to exemplify the worthwhile work possible when students encounter stimulating content. No specific examples of competing English curriculum guidelines or objectives are examined, no understanding of the subtleties of the debate are rendered. Rather, as with other chapters, too much patience is asked of readers subjected to unrelated anecdotes that diminish the author’s examples to illustrate how skills and content need not and should not be mutually exclusive.

      While Davis’s book is an attempt to "resist this era’s claims that curriculum content and student conviction be kept out of school," the existence and extent of those claims remain unclear. (14) Davis quotes American William Spady, a skill-centred education advocate from a 1993 Ontario conference address. Spady argued that school subjects should be replaced by domains of competency: Verbal, Qualitative, Technical, Strategic, Social, and Evaluative. (13) A cursory check of Ontario’s recently revised curriculum indicates that Spady has been unsuccessful. Textbooks approved by the government of Ontario for Grade 10, for example, include "Canadian history in the 20th Century," "Civics," "Career Studies," "English," "Math," and "Science." (www.curriculum.org) Davis quotes a 1990 government report, prepared by 19 company presidents, 7 politicians, 5 academics, and 3 trade unionists to further provide the reader with a sense of the era’s claims to which he is opposed.

      "With the advent of new information-based technology and the shift to a more flexible and multi-skilled workforce, employers are finding that generic workplace skills are becoming increasingly important relative to job-specific skills. Generic skills ... include analytical, problem solving, workplace interpersonal skills...." (7)

      Course descriptions in Ontario indicate that content and theory have withstood, thus far the opinions of academics and business interests with majority status on government committees that lack teacher representation. (www.curriculum.org) Davis himself parenthetically acknowledges that "... many teachers ... thankfully support the stress on topics." (34) By failing to provide evidence for the existence and extent of the skills mania that he opposes, Davis undermines his own argument that a skills mania, rather than the well documented correlations between socioeconomic status and school performance, threatens accessible education. Unrestrained by a clearly defined debate to address, at times Davis’s claims are simply irresponsible:

At its worst, then, collaboration in group learning [in classrooms] may produce collaborators with business who operate like collaborators did in World War II: the tune is called entirely by the big piper you’re collaborating with. (34)

      Davis’s book exemplifies a need for the skills of scholarship. The book contains many claims and few references. Among many examples, claims that CEOs send their kids to private schools, "skills zealots" are eroding meaning from education and "big corporations which spend millions retraining staff in attitude shifts, will cheerfully advise government that teacher retraining is an unnecessary thrill!" leave readers unfamiliar with Davis’s anecdotes unconvinced. (7, 19, 186) Editorial sloppiness and poor writing further undermine the persuasive quality of this work.

      "Now a very interesting thing about Snow: I had forgotten what he said his original title was; he was interested in things that really surprised me. It is shown by this quote." (153)

      Fifteen pages later, the reader is asked to "recall that he [Snow] had meant to title the essay The Rich and the Poor." (168)

      The final chapter is the strongest of the book. The weakness of the previous chapters are overcome with a clearly focused question, "Why should we turn away from the skills mania and what should we try instead?" Drawing form Arendt, Einstein, Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin, and educator Eleanor Duckworth, Davis argues that education must be anchored

      "... in people, in their minds, in their history, in their common bonds, in their lives as integrated wholes...." (191) His kind of school would be one that "in the words of radical Canadian educator George Martell ... ‘educates all students for personal integrity, challenging work, meaningful citizenship and the pursuit of social justice.’" (202)

      Of course, many whom Davis would consider "skills zealots" and "right wingers" also believe in this vision for schools. The weakness of this book is that Davis fails to document how schools are failing this vision, to specify to what degree skills mania actually exists, and to provide a balanced rendering of the debate so that readers can themselves judge the state of affairs and measure what Davis has to offer.

L. Ian MacDonald, ed., Free Trade: Risks and Rewards (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000)

THIS EDITED VOLUME is a set of proceedings from Free Trade@10, a conference organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, held in Montreal, in June of 1999. The editor of the volume claims to "provide a historical framework for the ongoing discussion of economic and environmental issues." Although the volume does indeed meet this lofty goal, it does not do so in the way that was probably intended.

      Free Trade: Risks and Rewards contains a dazzling array of contributors that is largely made up of what could be considered the North American political elite. The volume boasts several pieces featuring the views and opinions of formerly and currently elected officials including George Bush Sr., Brian Mulroney, John Turner, Michael Wilson, Bob Rae, Jean Charest, Donald MacDonald, John Crosbie, and Pierre Marc Johnson. There is also a strong representation of non-elected government officials involved in the processes of continental economic integration including such notables as James Baker III, Simon Reisman, Carla Hill, and Clayton Yeutter. Moreover, the Canadian business elite including Thomas d’Aquino (head of the Business Council on National Issues) participated in the conference and make contributions to the volume.

      While the list of members of the North American political and economic elite is impressive, it is unfortunate that in most cases, the calibre of these chapters is unable to match the cachet of the names behind them. To be fair though, it must be noted that the vast majority of these pieces that laud the implementation of continental free markets appear to be direct transcriptions of speeches that were delivered at the conference. As a result, the celebratory, a-theoretical "show and tell" is understandable, though still disappointing.

      More importantly and even more telling is the general tone of the chapters coming from the policy-making and business communities. Jim Stanford, one of the participants, remarks at the beginning of his chapter that the primary purpose of the conference seems to be "an opportunity for mutual congratulation and back patting" rather than a serious and critical discussion of the issues at hand. Pictures interspersed within the volume of the "big-name" conference participants reflect the victory of style over substance and are reminiscent of a research centre brochure or high school yearbook. The book is replete with references to the progressive vision of the political leaders who pushed for free trade, clichés about the role of political will in the process of realizing free trade, and disdain for those who in any way questioned the prudence of a free-trade deal. Perhaps most guilty of this unreflexive cheerleading is d’Aquino, whose salute to Presidents Reagan and Bush and Prime Minister Mulroney is almost enough to make the most seasoned of sycophants blush. Mulroney’s contribution is equally wince-inducing as he attempts to justify his place in history as an economic visionary way ahead of his time, to replace his current standing as the most despised politician in Canadian history. This is not to say though that the chapters by the policy and business communities are completely without merit. In particular, Victor Lichtinger’s (founding executive director of the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Co-operation) short paper on NAFTA and its institutional environmental safeguards comes across as a beacon of honesty and critical engagement with the shortcomings of North American continental economic integration.

      The chapters in the volume written by academics and those involved in the trade union and other civil society movements generally offer more sophisticated and compelling explorations of free trade and its consequences for Canada. Many of the contributors to the volume make reference to John McCallum’s report regarding the economic consequences of free trade on Canada which is included as an appendix. Michael Hart is able to give some historical depth to the concept of free trade in Canada. Jim Stanford and Gerald Larose give critical assessments from the standpoint of Canadian workers of the impact of free trade in Canada while Andrew Jackson emphasizes the differences between the myth and reality of trade liberalization by zeroing in on macro-economic indicators. David Schorr provides an interesting assessment of the tensions between sustainable development and the NAFTA system. Richard Lipsey and Guy Stanley offer chapters that are as thought-provoking as they are unabashedly pro-free trade and pro-neoliberalism. Stanley truly distinguishes himself by being the only author in the volume to devote sufficient attention to the ideology/praxis nexus. As a result, these chapters make up for much of the analytical poverty of the policy and business community contributions.

      The importance of Free Trade: Risks and Rewards comes not so much from the merits of individual chapters as from what the reader can take away in aggregate. This volume not only provides a framework for ongoing discussions of economic and environmental issues but also reveals the actual framework within which issues are discussed among the North American political and economic elite, or are defined as outside discussion altogether. The problematic nature of this framework should be quite apparent to the reflective reader. For example, most of the contributors on NAFTA miss the point that the legacy of this agreement is not free trade or its dispute-settlement procedures but rather the Chapter 11 provisions which essentially usurp popular sovereignty in favour of corporate profit. The inattentive silence on this issue is almost deafening.

      This volume offers incredible insights into who is allowed to speak with authority on the issue of free trade. Unsurprisingly limited to the upper strata of North American society, with a heavy bias towards American and Canadian authorities, it is also predominantly men, with male contributors to the volume outnumbering their female counterparts at over 14 to 1. This glaring imbalance says much about the gender divisions that still exist today. Furthermore, policy/corporate contributors outnumber their civil society/trade unionist counterparts by almost 8 to 1, another reflection of current asymmetries of power within North American society. This volume also clearly illustrates that with a few exceptions, free-market fundamentalism, the world’s newest and most powerful religion, has a firm grip on the elite of North American society.

      In brief, Free Trade: Risks and Rewards meets and surpasses its lofty goal of providing a framework for the exploration of economic and environmental issues by revealing the current theory and practice in North American trade. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history of North American free trade and the history of neoliberalism in Canada, particularly those who approach these issues from a critical perspective. It offers important insights into how members of the North American policy and corporate elite have constructed a highly problematic discussion of free trade and its effects.

George Emery & J.C. Herbert Emery, A Young Man’s Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999)

THE MIDDLE OF THE 19th century witnessed the proliferation of "friendly societies" in North America – fraternal orders that provided insurance, typically sickness and funeral benefits, along with their more general aims of promoting friendship and character development among their members. These societies grew substantially until the World War I era, at which point most entered into a long steady decline during which their insurance benefits became quite peripheral to the organization if not discontinued altogether. The class composition of these societies, and their role in working-class formation has been much debated, but there are large gaps in the literature, with very few studies examining any of these societies over any appreciable period of time.

      A Young Man’s Benefit begins to address this lacuna. It is based upon a case study of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF), the largest of the friendly societies with some 1.9 million North American members at its peak in 1921. The Emerys do not attempt to provide a history of the IOOF; their focus is on the sickness benefit. From 1863 to 1929 this benefit was a right of every member, at which point it became an optional benefit with many IOOF local branches no longer providing it. The central objective of the book is to elucidate the reasons behind its decline. The authors’ aim in this is explicitly revisionist in that they want to challenge existing explanations for this decline and the pro-welfare-state assumptions that underpin them (one of the authors is an economist, seemingly of the neoclassical variety).

      Existing explanations point, in varying combinations, to the unsound financial practices of friendly societies, the Great Depression, and to competition from more efficient commercial insurance and government programs. All, the Emerys note, implicitly assume that the need for sickness insurance was at least constant from the mid-1800s onward (the pro-welfare-state assumption), and increased over an adult’s life span – since sickness tends to increase with age –making it an "old man’s benefit." The Emerys concur that the incidence of sickness increases with age, but contend that the need for sickness benefits among friendly society members actually declined with age, since they could turn to savings (self-insurance) and/or the earnings of family members (family insurance) to replace the income lost due to illness. Consequently, the sickness benefit was really a "young man’s benefit," and as the Odd Fellows’ membership aged, internal support for the sickness benefit waned and this explains its decline.

      The early chapters of the book provide an overview of the beginnings of the IOOF in North America, its internal organization and governing bodies, and examine in some detail the people who comprised its membership up to the late 1920s. Analysing the membership records of a number of local branches in BC and Ontario in the early 1900s, they show that in addition to being overwhelmingly Protestant, white males (the code of laws were explicit on the latter two requirements; women were confined to an auxiliary), the IOOF membership was comprised primarily of skilled workers and clerks/shopkeepers, although the relative size of these two groups varied quite substantially among branches. While never stating it explicitly, the intent here is to establish the presumption that the typical Odd Fellows’ income was sufficient to allow for the possibility of "self-insurance."

      They then turn to the IOOF benefit system and the reasons for its decline, devoting most of their attention to challenging the conventional explanations for it. They allow that the benefit system did have some actuarial shortcomings: it lacked a centralized pool of funds (each branch was responsible for funding the benefit claims of its members), and the IOOF’s flat-rate dues structure, the main source of revenue to fund the sickness benefit, precluded use of "risk-based" assesments. Nonetheless, they argue that the system was efficient; using volunteers (members) to recruit members kept overhead costs low; the requirement that a designated IOOF member (who could require evidence of illness) visit claimants before any payment was made controlled for moral hazard; and age-related initiation fees discouraged older men (with a higher likelihood of sickness) from joining.

      This argument is reinforced by a re-examination of key financial reports which purportedly showed that many IOOF branches faced financial ruin. This suggests that the danger was much exaggerated, as they typically substantially underestimated branch revenue while overstating the cost associated with the sickness benefit. The Emerys also analyse the financial records of 27 local branches in British Columbia between 1890 and 1929, all of which paid the maximum allowed sickness benefit. Employing sophisticated actuarial techniques to assess the financial status of these branches, they provide evidence showing that all but two branches had sufficient funds to cover claims, and that the probability of any of them confronting financial ruin was extremely low. As for competition, they point out that the IOOF faced few competitors in its core "market" of skilled workers, clerks, and shopkeepers prior to 1915, and most did not provide comparable benefits. But, in any case, the IOOF’s sickness benefit began to decline much earlier, in the early 1890s when branches were exempted from the decision (made at the start of the decade) requiring them to pay a specified minimum benefit, and the ensuing years saw further exemptions of various types, as well as a steady decline in the real value of the average benefit received by IOOF members.

      Finally, the Emerys examine the membership records of six Canadian IOOF branches roughly between 1895 and 1925 to directly substantiate their argument that the real explanation for the decline of the sickness benefit lies in its loss of support among the IOOF’s aging membership. To this end they employ a statistical technique called cliometrics (quite appropriately I was assured by a colleague well versed in it) to calculate a member’s probability of leaving the IOOF for each year that he remains a member. The analysis reveals that this probability does increase (statistically) significantly with each year of membership, and this, they contend, substantiates the claim that the sickness benefit is really a young man’s benefit.

      Unfortunately, it really doesn’t. To begin, a look at the actual data (Fig.6.1, 114) reveals that the statistical finding is an artifact of the fact that the probability of leaving increases so dramatically from year one of membership until year five; from year six to 30 it steadily declines. Secondly, this analysis tells us absolutely nothing about why members left. The Emerys claim that it was because they no longer needed the benefit, but they have no evidence of this. It is moreover implausible; we are asked to believe, for example, that some 25 per cent of IOOF members, who overwhelmingly joined while in their 20s, could, within five years of joining, turn to their savings or their children’s income to replace income lost to sickness. Indeed, when the authors looked at which branches chose to make the sickness benefit optional in 1925, they concluded that branches with "older" members (the measure is indirect, but it is the authors’ inference) are no more likely to have done this that those with "younger" members. This may perhaps explain the odd location of this analysis in the middle of the chapter on the financial status of the IOOF.

      At the same time, the Emerys’ arguments that the decline of the sickness benefit cannot be attributed to flawed administration, the rise of competitors, or financial collapse, at least through to the mid-1920s, are quite persuasive. How, then, might it be explained? Ironically, the book supplies much of the answer. The more historical analysis of the IOOF’s benefit system shows clearly that the financial status of the benefit system was an ongoing concern with a good number of branches in some financial difficulty at any time. It would seem, as pro-welfare-state analysts assumed, that the need of IOOF members for sickness benefit repeatedly exceeded their financial capacities to meet it. To their credit, the IOOF made themselves aware of the problem, considered various alternatives and invariably decided that the only practical way to deal with it was to reduce the benefit in one way or another, solving one problem by exacerbating another. The onset of the Depression can only have made matters worse, but any analysis of the ensuing trajectory of the sickness benefit would at least have to take into account the growth of the welfare state and changes in the class composition of the friendly societies.

Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1999)

JO ANN ARGERSINGER offers readers a refreshing perspective on the growth and development of American unions during the pre-World War II period. The book focuses on the rise and fall of Baltimore’s men’s clothing industry and the endeavours of its ethnically and gender-divided labour force to gain union recognition. The needle trades have a disreputable history: low wages, economic instability, a reliance on immigrant and female labour, and cut-throat competition between large manufacturing firms and small contract shops. American historians such as Eileen Boris, Steve Fraser, Alice Kessler-Harris, Susan Glenn, and many others have written extensively on the same subjects. However, what makes Argersinger’s study unique is the in-depth focus on the needle trades in a city prominent in the industry.

      Argersinger is familiar with the city’s labour history. In New Deal in Baltimore, she examined the city’s unionization experiences during Roosevelt’s New Deal. Now, she turns her attention to the garment industry. The author sets out to examine the "interplay among politics and reform, regional market shares and economic policy, and community building and political mobilization in an urban setting." (4) The central role of the Amalgamated in Baltimore makes it an excellent choice for the study of the relationship between the industry’s economic vitality and the union’s evolution. Her research is based on evidence from union records, local newspapers, government documents, and to a limited extent, trade publications, personal papers, and interviews with some ACW (Amalgamated Clothing Workers) leadership in Baltimore.

      The book begins with a look at the needle trades during the late-19th century and ends with an epilogue that outlines the present state of the garment unions now shaped by conditions in a global economy. However, the main focus of the study is on the men’s clothing industry as it gained prominence after World War I. Jo Ann Argersinger argues that her approach is particularly well suited, examining "all the processes attendant upon building a union even as it unravels the complex connection affecting the workplace and the market."(5)

      These were the formative years for the Amalgamated. The union arose in 1914 out of the rank-and-file demand for industrial-based unions in the needle trades. Politically the union was a strong supporter of the "new unionism." As Steve Fraser, the biographer of long-time international union President Sidney Hillman, pointed out in his book Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor:

Hillman and the ACW came of age at, and were shaped by, the momentous historical juncture of two vastly different systems of work and social hierarchy. On the one side stood the circumscribed intimacies of craft producers and skilled labour, family enterprise, local industries producing for local markets, immemorial customs, and personalized authority; on the other, semiskilled operative, bureaucratic hierarchy, functional management of anonymous corporations supplying far flung markets with standardized products, and the impersonal regime of rules.(144)

These systems of work and their corresponding social hierarchy were reflected in two very different ideas of unionism and industrial democracy: the craft unionism of the AFL United Garment Workers (UGW) and the industrial unionism of the ACW. Argersinger documents the transformation as both forms of unionism played out during these years.

      The ACW’s new unionism promised an inclusionary union where brothers and sisters stood arm in arm against the harsh conditions set by the employers in the trade. In the large production centers of Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Rochester, Hillman and the ACW focused their efforts to rationalize labour relations and create co-managed production standards that would establish industrial peace and economic growth. In 1914, one of Baltimore’s largest men’s clothing companies, Sonneborn, offered Hillman an opportunity to co-manage their factory. Jo Ann Argersinger depicts that moment and then, as economic conditions in the industry declined, she shows how the outcome of their efforts is placed in jeopardy.

      In Making the Amalgamated, Arger-singer presents a detailed examination of the industry’s growth and decline, over one of the most interesting periods of the Amalgamated’s history. The study depicts the tensions between the rank-and-file (mainly female) and the union leadership (mostly male). In closely charting these tensions at a local level, the author shows the interconnections between the local union’s successes and the industry’s economic viability. By focusing on the economic viability of Baltimore’s garment industry, Argersinger is able to make visible the daily effect of the logic of capitalist enterprise as it influenced ACW union practices. This approach offers both an opportunity and a challenge for the author.

      The book’s description of union relations at an organizational level reveals the structural restraints and situational opportunities provided in these years. The author’s description of how local trade unionists navigate their way through the relations of power generated at the central office of the union is invaluable. The organizational dilemma posed by a fragmented labour force was/is a troublesome concern for many unions and while it must be resolved at the local level, union building was not just a local affair. Union rules were frequently set by national leaders outside the local. The study of Baltimore needle trades provides an opportunity to examine how the various social relations of power, generated from different locations, connect at a local level. The author describes these tensions extremely well. However, the work is also restricted because Argersinger does not focus on a larger analytical context to explain the tensions she documents here. She does little to situate the union in the larger Baltimore political/union community. Instead, her focus remains squarely on the internal politics of the ACW in Baltimore.

      This research becomes somewhat problematic in the chapter, "Sisters in the Amalgamated." Argersinger shows that while ethnic and gender differences served as effective union recruitment tools, at the same time they "also impeded the achievement of a larger unity within the union." (71) However, the author’s analysis of the actual circumstances in which race and gender played a role in the shops is limited, as both have little active voice. This is partially a result of the limited range of her sources. She claims her "research challenges those studies that suggest that all women responded similarly to inequality in unions or that limit women’s aspirations to fantasias of mass culture or vision of home and hearth," (5) but in this chapter of the book her focus on the union movement’s internal politics hampers Argersinger’s ability to provide a larger analytical framework for working class gender dynamics during these years. As the author documents women’s fight for separate locals, she argues that "Political, economic, and social changes in the post war environment, along with the concerns among union men about women’s visibility in the ACW, figured prominently in making separate institutions more suspect and susceptible to rejection."(119) Yet she provides only limited evidence to support this assertion and does not analyse how separatist organizing strategies were influenced by the predominant ideologies of the period. After the defeat of women’s locals, trade union women took advantage of trade union education programmes to draw women into the union community, making the programmes a central site of gender struggles in the union. Did women’s experience in separate locals facilitate their work in the mainstream of the union? How did the transformation of women’s place in the larger society alter trade union women’s trade union strategies? If far more of Baltimore’s needle trades women held skilled jobs than was true in other centers, did this affect how women participated in the union there? Were gender struggles in Baltimore played out any differently than in New York or Toronto? Unfortunately, she does not provide insights about how women’s working-class culture contributed to women’s sense of themselves inside the union. Jo Ann Argersinger gives the reader a rich descriptive narrative of women’s experience, but the book falls short of explaining ongoing male resistance to women’s equality in the ACW.

      The book’s strength lies in its ability to show the complex relationships between the economic viability of the needle trades and the unions’ success and failure. The book’s focus on the internal politics of the Amalgamated in the context of market changes makes it useful to both labour and business historians. While the case study of the Amalgamated in Baltimore offers a rich narrative of the tensions, it fails to provide answers to the larger question it raises. It will be up to future researchers to build on the rich history.

James R. Barrett William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1999); and Albert Vetere Lannon Second String Red: The Life of Al Lannon, American Communist (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books 1999)

SINCE THE DEMISE of the Soviet Union there has been a small explosion in the volume of work published concerning many aspects of Soviet-United States relations. Diplomatic historians have been taking full advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the opening of Soviet archives to write several rich histories. However, access to documents previously unavailable has not only led to more comprehensiveness but also made earlier simplistic stories more complex. In some ways, following on the coat-tails of these new diplomatic studies, there has been a smaller outburst of published work detailing the history of American Communism. New access to archives has also made these current histories of American Communism not only richer but also much more intricate than previously published work. Two recent publications within this new genre of American Communism studies, James R. Barrett’s William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism and Albert Vetere Lannon’s Second String Red: The Life of Al Lannon, American Communist, add much more to our understanding of both American Communism and radicalism in the 20th century. A comparison of these two biographies is useful because while the two men occupied different levels within the American Communist Party (CPUSA), both suffered similar lives of hardship and persecution while remaining loyal to their ideological roots.

      The first question that must be answered in a review of James R. Barrett’s work on William Z. Foster must be, why the need for a second major study of Foster so soon after publication of Edward P. Johanningsmeier’s Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster? Appearing in 1994, Johanningsmeier’s study, taking advantage of new access to Soviet archives, details, if somewhat ponderously, Foster’s significant impact on 20th century American Communism, radicalism, and the labour movement. Although both historians used many of the same sources, including Foster’s papers in Moscow, the answer to the question lies not so much in the area of expanding our knowledge of the late National Chairman of the CPUSA, but rather in the area of emphasis. Stated quite simply, not only is Barrett’s biography more readable than Johanningsmeier’s, but it is also more nuanced. The earlier of the two biographies states that the Comintern’s influence over Foster was important, but not perhaps as important as Foster’s roots stretching back to his early organizing days and belief in a French version of syndicalism. While Barrett partially agrees with Johanningsmeier’s contention, he also plainly states that the key to understanding Foster is to appreciate the balance between the two forces that shaped much of his life: directives from Moscow on one hand and uniquely American working-class circumstances on the other. "In this regard, I differ from Johanningsmeier, who argues, ‘Once Foster’s Communism is grounded in the history of modern American radicalism the influence of the Comintern becomes less important’.... On the contrary, the essence of Foster’s radical experience lies precisely at the juncture between these two great influences in his life." (4) The difference is an important one and Barrett returns to it throughout his work by frequently stressing the significance of international Communist policy on Foster’s thinking.

      Barrett’s biography of William Z. Foster, as suggested by the title of the work, serves two main functions. It is both a biography and a detailed account of the American radicalism. Although the opening chapter of the book, covering the years from Foster’s birth in 1881 to his becoming politically active in 1904, is rather bereft of significant detail (both Barrett and Johanningsmeiere state that little has been left to historians concerning Foster’s early life), the remainder of the work is replete with information. All of the stages and ideological changes in Foster’s life are chronicled: early support of syndicalism and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), effective organizing during and after World War I (most notably during the Great Steel Strike of 1919), support for the radical Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), infighting with Earl Browder at the highest levels of the CPUSA, falling in and out (and in again and out again and finally in again) of favour with Comintern, increasing alienation from the American working class and the final days in Moscow before his death there in 1961. Barrett suggests throughout that although Foster was in many ways a complicated man, he found himself in increasingly complex situations, especially after 1920. These were often caused by the strain of trying to juggle directives from Moscow with what best appeared to him for American workers. In his final years Foster increasingly sided with Moscow and this would ultimately lead not only to his isolation from the CPUSA but also from his beloved American working class.

      Barrett’s work contributes perhaps its most useful function to readers when it is fulfilling its second purpose, providing a history of American radicalism in the first half of the 20th century. As has already been stated, one of Foster’s main dilemmas, especially after 1945, was juggling Moscow directives with the apparent need of American workers. This, in a much larger sense, was also a major problem for radical individuals and organizations throughout the United States. The pervasive nature of the Red scare atmosphere that dominated America in post-World War II years did not lend itself to radical industrial organizing, something that Foster had been committed to for much of his life. For American unions and radicals this meant the choice of either becoming more conservative or being left out in the cold. William Z. Foster, according to Barrett, chose to remain loyal to his earlier strict Leninist ideals while many key members of the CPUSA and important American unions chose to move to the right. This overall move to the right, leaving Foster and a few other radicals isolated on the left, would have an enormously negative impact on American workers in the years following his death in 1961.

      Barrett’s biography ultimately avoids being emphatically sympathetic or unsympathetic towards its main topics, Foster and American radicalism. Rather than provide the reader with a clear bias, the strength of Barrett’s work lies in its nuanced approach to complex subjects. However, perhaps quite importantly, the author does provide a slight glimpse of his biases in the conclusion. "If William Z. Foster’s life story can be seen as a tragedy, then we might ask ourselves if it is not an American tragedy as well as a personal one. Many of the problems that moved Foster in sometimes erratic political directions are still with us. It is in the struggle to find solutions to them that we continually create our own history." (277) After writing such a well-balanced account, the author can perhaps be forgiven for one small expression of personal opinion.

      Writing biography, as has been suggested by many historians, poses certain unique difficulties. If this is indeed the case then writing about one’s own father must bring with it its own set of distinct problems. The strength of Albert Vetere Lannon’s Second String Red: The Life of Al Lannon, American Communist, lies partially in the fact that the author was unable to write such an unbiased biography of his father. In a similar fashion to Barrett’s work on Foster, Lannon describes his father not so much as a complex individual, but rather as someone who often found himself in complicated situations. The author never shirks his responsibilities as an historian and chronicles several episodes from Lannon’s life that do not throw an appealing light on his father. Referring to himself throughout in the third person, the author manages to keep his own views out of the story until the very end. However he does allow himself, in a rather touching last chapter titled "A Son’s Reflection," to bring his own unique perspectives to bear on trying to understand Al Lannon as both father and Communist. This biography is only strengthened by this somewhat unusual but distinctly insightful last chapter.

      Written in a refreshingly straightforward prose style, Albert Vetere Lannon’s biography chronicles the life of a man who spent most of his days in poverty. From his birth in 1907 until his death 62 years later, Al Lannon never moved out of the ranks of the working class. He often fought passionately for the rights of this same class. This also meant that he and his family would endure considerable hardships until the very end. Any negative feelings that Lannon may hold towards his father concerning this situation are not revealed in the study. Al Lannon was a committed member of both the National Maritime Union (NMU) and the CPUSA, and even after 1945 remained fiercely loyal to both Communism and his beloved Soviet Union. During the Red Scare years of the 1950s Lannon would spend time in prison for his political beliefs (thus the title of this biography) and yet never wavered in his revolutionary commitment to radical social change in America. Towards the end of his life he fell out of favour with the CPUSA and apart from a brief comeback at the CP’s 1969 Los Angeles convention, spent many of his last years in political exile. His health had been poor for some time and it would be his eighth heart attack that would kill Al Lannon in 1969.

      Perhaps the primary significance of both of these biographies is the simple fact that they disabuse many of the Cold War myths that remain throughout American society. The nature of domestic Communism during the Cold War era has been hotly debated by historians for many years, and with new access to Soviet archives the debate has recently taken on renewed vigour. Al Lannon, while remaining loyal to the Soviet Union throughout his life, fought courageously for American workers. In a political climate far more hostile than the one many so-called radicals find themselves in today, Lannon placed fighting for worker’s rights above his own health, financial comfort, and maybe even above his own family.

      The lives of Al Lannon and William Z. Foster run parallel to each other on many levels. Both men lived in poverty for much of their lives, travelled around the country and worked at an early age, remained fiercely loyal to the CPUSA and Soviet Union, and were persecuted under the Smith Act (ill health alone prevented Foster from serving prison time). But perhaps most importantly of all both Al Lannon and William Z. Foster can be best remembered for fighting courageously for the rights of American workers. The climate of the country was often hostile as Lannon attempted to organize sailors in the 1930s and Foster steel workers in 1919, and yet both men were successful in improving the lives of many.

      Albert Vetere Lannon and James Barrett have written important biographies. Barrett has been able to bring to life and add complexity to the story of a well known American Communist. Lannon has done much the same for a lesser known, but in many ways equally important person from the history of 20th century American radicalism. Biography, for many years ignored by labour historians in the United States, has been making a comeback of sorts recently. If we are to understand the full scope of the American experience in the 20th century, then there must be a place for biography alongside studies of the rank and file, labour organizations, and communities. These two works are welcome additions to this most recent trend in working-class history.

Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism and the Cold War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 1999)

PROFESSOR JESSICA WANG’s book is the most detailed and scholarly account of the sociopolitical relations of science and the history of a critical period, 1945 to 1950, which was to leave its imprint on the future and to become the basis of our age of anxiety. Her book is an important contribution to understanding the global problems of today.

      There is great merit in the author’s choice of the period 1945-1950 to analyse the relationship between science and politics. With the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the future was forever altered and the age of anxiety firmly established. As Robert Oppenheimer later admitted, the scientists who built the bomb and supported its military use had known sin. Professor Wang’s book is a major contribution to understanding the dynamics of that time, the focus of a hysterical nativism against communism, and the obsession with secrecy. In this period the roots of the future were planted and the complex relations between science and politics became the engine of history driving us into the troubled times of the present. The communist target of nativism became a global policy of the US to complete the ideological cleansing of the world and globalize capitalism with the US as the leader. In effect, the essence of nativism was globalized, with Pax America to enforce it.

      The events of that critical period led directly to the decades of the Cold War, the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union , and the emergence of a unipolar world. It conventionalized the huge nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia, creating the ultimate threat to global survival. It spawned the spread of civil nuclear power and, through its fatal link with the military, it led to the current problems of nuclear proliferation. The US became a global security state dedicated to the continued containment of Russia and China with operationalized programs to fight and win a nuclear war, including the first use of nuclear weapons. It also led NATO to adopt its global agenda. At the same time it spawned a world movement dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons.

      America, born out of a revolution, became the leading anti-revolutionary state in the world. Most of us are familiar with the rampant anti-communism of the post-World War II period quickly evolving to the period of the Cold War and beyond the demise of the Soviet Union to the policy of ideological cleansing in the 1990s. As the author states, "Long before the onset of the Cold War, anti-radical nativism was already a familiar part of American politics." (4) The targets of these politics were radical movements, elements of FDR’s New Deal, and the labour movement. Nativism is the ideology that rejects all foreign influence while focusing on communism as the target of its venom. It demands unconditional loyalty. Anything less is un-American. It places America first, foremost, and forever, with its self-identification of being Number One.

      It was the impact of the Great Depression in the 1930s that radicalized both the labour movement and elements of the scientific community and their organizations. It was in this period that the American Association of Scientific Workers (AASW), composed of scientists on the progressive liberal left, was formed in the US and Britain. They not only questioned the capacity of capitalism to produce social justice, but organized in opposition to the rise of fascism in Europe. That social elites like scientists would identify themselves as a part of labour, i.e. scientific workers, speaks directly to their left-wing ideology. Later, in the period following the atomic bombings, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) emerged from an earlier organization first appearing in the 1930s.Also the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was formed and the new journal, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, first appeared.

      It is of interest that decades later a World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) emerged. This author participated in a failed attempt to form a Canadian affiliate in the late 1950s following a visit by Professor J.D. Bernal to Montreal. More recently, he attended the Millennium Conference held at the University of Regina, August 2000, where representatives of the 60-nation WFSW met with Canadian and American delegates in the hope of attracting affiliates from these latter countries.

      Professor Wang correctly identifies a powerful theme in American social and political life. This is the phenomenon of "nativism." The hysteria derived from nativism, with its "Red scare" component is evident in the case of the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In part, in sentencing them to death, Judge Irving R. Kaufman stated, "your conduct ... has already caused, in my opinion, the communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and, who knows, but that millions of innocent people may pay the price of your treason." Later evidence proved that the information supplied by the defendants was not critical to the Soviet nuclear bomb program. Decades later, on the floor of the House on 8 June 1999, Congressman Dana Rohrabacker, responding to Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary’s massive declassification of so-called "secrets," stated "This is worse than the Rosenbergs.... This is someone who has a fanatical anti-American attitude, in a position to hand over to our enemies secrets that put our young people and our country in jeopardy.... Those who benefited most were the minions of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Chinese." This equates a rational process of declassification with treason. The US is hysterical about secrecy. By 1999 they had almost 90 million secrets in their classification system.

      The case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee came after Professor Jessica Wang’s book was published. In regard to this case, C. Paul Robinson, director of Sandia National Laboratories, described the magnitude of Lee’s alleged offence: "These tapes could truly change the world’s strategic balance.... These tapes would allow the design of weapons that would kill several million people if a single weapon was detonated in a city." The claim about changing the world’s strategic balance is so ridiculous as to be outrageous. Professor Wang provides us with an early case of which this reviewer was unaware. In 1955 the US deported Tsian Henueshan, a Cal Tech professor and one of the world’s experts in rocketry, on the grounds of his friendship with a member of the American Communist Party. Ironically, the excessive zeal of anti-communism turned out to be a gift to China. Professor Henueshan became director of China’s ballistic missile development, now beginning to haunt the US. The obsession with secrecy combines nativism, the "Red scare," and even a strong strain of racism that persists in American culture.

      An extreme example of nativism was a statement by the late US Senator Richard Russell, "If we have to start again with Adam and Eve, then I want them to be Americans, not Russians, and I want them on this continent, not in Europe." One might note he didn’t mean Canada or Mexico. This paranoid statement reflected the organizational/judicial power of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the notorious Senate hearings conducted by the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy reviving the witch hunts of Salem. The consequences were indiscriminate purges and firings, loss of security clearances, withholding of passports, and other arbitrary violations of civil liberties. Guilt by association and suspicion was even extended to guilt by exoneration. To be interrogated by Senator Joseph McCarthy was a sufficient basis to infer a questionable loyalty to the US. Un-Americanism became the house built by nativism.

      The dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki created significant divisions among the scientists involved. Even in advance of these events some scientists were opposed and recommended a demonstration of the bomb’s power to which Japan would be invited to send observers. The above divisions deepened and became enmeshed in the politics of nativism. Professor Wang’s case studies of individual scientists involved in this conflict provide a penetrating analysis of issues and events. Divisions of understanding between scientists on the entire issue of nuclear weapons persist to this day. Scientists like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who played a significant role in launching the Manhattan Project, realized too late that they had been co-opted by the military and the US government.

      I can recommend this book without reservation, not only to students in the academic fields of the history of science, political science, and social studies of science, but to the millions of people concerned with the fate of the earth. And particularly for practicing scientists, the lesson is powerful, namely the perversion of their profession by the goals of the establishment. "Faustian bargains" have a predictable fate.

Paul Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Durham: Duke University Press 2000)

THEODOR ADORNO, a major 20th century philosopher and critic, contends that as soon as culture is set down, a film is made, or a symphony is performed, it becomes part of the culture industry, an industry he links to capitalism. According to Adorno, the best that can be said for the culture industry is that it "celebrates its spirit" or rather that which "might be safely called ideology." It is from this standpoint that Paul Apostolidis, in his book Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio, takes aim at Christian right culture in the United States.

      The book is based on the author’s analysis of about 80 half-hour broadcasts of "Focus on the Family," a program which, since 1977, has dominated the Christian radio airwaves south of Canada’s border. It is important to note, as Apostolidis points out, that Christian radio ranks third in popularity, just behind country and adult contemporary music stations. The host of "Focus on the Family" is psychologist Dr. James Dobson, "the undisputed king of Christian radio," and also a best-selling author and well-known leader of the Christian right. Apostolidis contends that Dobson and "Focus on the Family" has been instrumental in moving the political debate in the US to the right – not simply in terms of delivering votes but also in terms of promoting an ideology which has significant bearing on public policy. Dobson’s prescriptions include a ban on all abortions, the re-introduction of spoken prayer in public schools, tax cuts, and rejection of human rights protection for gays and lesbians. However, Apostolidis feels there is a need to more fully understand the Christian right and to look behind their public rhetoric. To do this, he examines the Christian right culture in the context of the experiences of the post-Fordist political economy.

      The most fascinating part of the book concerns the fraying of health care provision and human services. As in Canada today, in the US the state has less of a commitment to social welfare programs than it did a generation ago, bearing in mind the US started out with a much weaker welfare state than Canada. A major shift in policy was former president Bill Clinton’s putting a stop to federal assistance for poor families with dependent children, a social program which had endured for more than 65 years. George W. Bush has pledged that social services will be provided by nonprofit and/or religious organisations and groups of volunteers – this despite the fact that many religious organisations want to serve their own minions rather than the general public. There is also the question about whether faith-based services would indeed be accessible to non-Christians or those who want nothing to do with religion. Apostolidis points out that though the evangelical churches historically have been less concerned with social mission and doing good works than the Catholic and most Protestant churches, the fanfare generated by Christian right television and radio programs, like "Focus on the Family," has created new programs and services within the evangelical culture. For example, the "Focus on the Family" website advertises a new social program: the World Wide Day of Prayer for Children at Risk. The site (http://www.family.org/fofmag/sh/a0015800.html – 22 May 2001) explains there are many homeless and hungry children in India who need help and "simple as it sounds, we can all pray" for them. Evangelical churches are encouraged to set out tracts about the horrors of life in India, poster the church with photos of needy children, and hold group prayer sessions. According to "Focus on the Family," all these things will help. Apostolidis maintains that this and other examples of evangelical ministry are not benign. He says that Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) make the point that good-hearted people who personally intervene in a situation to "make curable individual cases out of socially-perpetuated miseries" make human suffering a permanent feature of human existence. For the misguided, the way to combat problems is on a person-to-person rather than on a societal level. Evangelists, like Dobson, epitomize love and understanding and at the same time profess the scientific and professional expertise to solve most social problems. Apostolidis argues that in the wake of the decline of the welfare state, the well-meaning "heart of gold" figure who promotes individual charity and "feels" for the underprivileged dominates not only US media culture but also the business culture. Further, quite often these people spill over into the political realm, and that is what has happened with the Christian right.

      Apostolidis argues vigorously against the agenda and policies of the Christian right. He gives many examples from the "Focus on the Family" broadcasts – which, mercifully, are not yet beamed into Canada – that the root of most social ills are mothers who go out to work or gays, who have a "developmental disorder." Despite the fact that more than 40 million Americans have no health care insurance, the Christian right insists Americans should trust their doctors’ expertise and professionalism and reject the tyranny of government, with its high taxes and intervention into people’s lives.

      What can Canadians learn from Stations of the Cross? Perhaps not to be complacent about the social programs we still enjoy, such as medicare. The Christian right, albeit much smaller than their US counterparts, exists in Canada and when coupled with the Canadian Alliance’s populist agenda is a formidable force against progressive social change.

Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapter Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 1998)

SCHOLARS HAVE LONG acknowledged women’s role in the antislavery movement. In The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement, Julie Roy Jeffrey takes this truism and demonstrates the complexity, variation, and evolution of female participation in abolitionism. In a carefully researched study which goes beyond the customary boundaries of New England and white middle-class women, Jeffrey examines how black and white women lived out their commitment to antislavery. The "what" of this phenomenon may be familiar, but the details of "how" are illuminating and challenge several aspects of received wisdom on this subject.

      Antislavery built on a long-standing tradition of female benevolence, drawing strength from Quaker traditions and successful British women’s antislavery activism. Nevertheless, in its Garrisonian form, America abolitionism was a radical movement tinged with unsavoury connotations that often deterred would-be sympathizers. Women had to be informed and then persuaded to give whole-hearted commitment to activism on the slave’s behalf. By reading, attending lectures, and discussing the issue, women underwent a moral awakening that bound them to work for the enslaved. No sooner "converted" themselves, these women undertook to bring family members and friends to the same point of view. Jeffrey explores how "women’s influence" actually worked. Women included antislavery in family prayers, proselytized relatives and friends, and permitted antislavery to inform decisions about domestic consumption of slave produce. They brought subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to bear on fence-sitting pastors, sought the use of churches for abolitionist functions, and when all else failed, separated themselves from pro-slavery churches to join with like-minded friends in antislavery congregations. In these ways, abolitionist women directed conventional behaviours to unconventional ends.

      Women also undertook a wide range of antislavery activities. Their role in fundraising underwrote the economic survival of the movement. From small cent-a-week societies in rural villages to the great antislavery fairs of Boston and Philadelphia, women raised thousands of dollars for the cause, encouraging supporting agents, newspapers, and pamphlets to spread the word. Women sewed for fairs and for fugitive slaves. They attended, sponsored, and even gave antislavery lectures. They wrote and published antislavery tracts and fiction. Defying social conventions and prejudice, some publicly "associated" with African Americans in attempts to break down discriminatory laws and practices. And by the thousands, they drew up, circulated, and signed petitions to Congress pressing for legislative attacks on the "peculiar institution."

      These activities changed women. Fundraising efforts, especially the antislavery fairs, increased their awareness of business and economics, as women dealt with questions of efficiency, organizing production, pricing, and advertising. Participation in female antislavery societies provided training in organizational procedure and public speaking. Petitioning enhanced their awareness of the political process and broadened their understanding of participation. More importantly, participation in antislavery, Jeffrey argues, constituted an important aspect of middle-class formation. These experiences helped to define middle-class status by exploring its boundaries particularly as they pertained to women. Antislavery fairs, for example, repeatedly challenged gender conventions. Sewing for antislavery raised few eyebrows, but what happened when women sold these articles? Similarly, needlework was a useful accomplishment, but when women embellished household items with antislavery emblems, domesticity became politicized.

      Jeffrey explores women’s response to various turning points in the antislavery movement. Instead of reiterating the role the woman question played in splitting the movement in 1840, Jeffrey argues that the division actually permitted antislavery to become more inclusive as it fostered a range of women’s activities, providing options to suit those with different understanding of appropriate roles for women. The Fugitive Slave Law re-energized many longstanding abolitionists and also provided a propaganda opportunity that Harriet Beecher Stowe and other women readily exploited. However, the focus on the fugitive created tensions within female abolitionism. Emerging middle-class values exerted a powerful influence on antislavery literature and rhetoric that laid the groundwork for an image of the thankful slave filled with gratitude for the efforts of his, or more often her, white female rescuers. Such preconceptions caused real difficulties when white abolitionists came into contact with black abolitionists with their own priorities and agendas. In addition, concerns were raised in white societies about whether efforts expended on the fugitive left the fundamental problem of slavery untouched.

      The conflict in Kansas and the Dred Scott decision moved antislavery into the mainstream. As abolitionism gained respectability, a second generation of female abolitionists emerged and these younger women did not experience the ostracism their mothers had risked. During the Civil War, women continued sewing, fundraising, and petitioning but invested these activities with new meaning as they attempted to steer the national struggle toward emancipation. This proved problematic after the war insofar as most abolitionists had no clear program for what was to follow the end of slavery. Here Jeffrey might have drawn a useful comparison to women’s experience following the achievement of suffrage. In 1920 a similar focus on a political objective as a panacea also forestalled detailed consideration of what the aftermath might bring, leaving campaigners at something of a loss once their goal had been achieved. In this case, however, African Americans became the victims of white antislavery success. Indeed the abolitionist vision meant that there could be no post-emancipation program. Although the paternalistic ethos of some white abolitionists mandated continuing oversight of the experience of African Americans, the liberal/bourgeois values that undergirded the movement required freed people to be left on their own to stand or fall according to their own devices.

      One of the strengths of Jeffrey’s work is her determined effort to explore the distinctive experience of African-American women in antislavery. Their different priorities, different opportunities, and different modes of action not only had different outcomes, they sometimes brought black women into conflict with their white co-workers. Black women were permitted to be members of some white antislavery societies if they conformed to white standards of respectable demeanor. For black women, however, respectability was a means to undermine prejudice and discriminatory attitudes and not simply about establishing social position. In contrast, Jeffrey notes, their white counterparts often seemed much more concerned about slavery in the abstract than African Americans in their midst. As a consequence, black women often formed separate societies of their own. Jeffrey also points out that given the economic circumstances of most black families, black women undertook antislavery activities in addition to paid labour and family responsibilities. The Fugitive Slave Law did not divide black women; it increased the unanimity of the African-American community because it put them all, free and fugitive, at risk. Similarly, since the well-being of the race had always been a priority for African-American women, they experienced no uncertainty following the Civil War.

      Jeffrey brings nuance and complexity to an oft-told tale and deepens our understanding of the dynamics of protest movements in the process. This excellent study is marred only by some peculiar editorial practices. In much of Jeffrey’s account white women are referred to by their given names whereas black women are designated by their surnames (including one instance where Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is referred to as "Harper Watkins"[233]). Whatever the logic, the result is jarring both in the belittling of white women and in the sharp contrast between the naming of black women and white women. This practice is particularly puzzling in a work that succeeds so well in respecting the specific experiences of different groups of women.

John H.M. Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study of Class Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830-1924 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2000)

FROM GLASGOW and Chicago alike, it is only a small distance up the river from the cities of commerce and industry to the country of coal – a territory centred in these cases on such mining towns as Larkhall, Wishaw, and Blantyre on the River Clyde, and Braidwood, Streator, and Spring Valley on the Illinois River. Building on a wealth of local research, John Laslett has constructed a powerful comparative study that includes assessments of economic growth, social structure, class formation, and political behaviour. The selection of these communities in the southwest of Scotland and the midwestern United States was not accidental, as considerable numbers of Lanarkshire workers participated in the movement of experienced coal miners to the 19th century American industrial frontier and settled in northern Illinois; in 1870 almost half the miners in Illinois were British-born. Yet this book is much more than a venture in comparative local history or an account of the emigrant worker experience in North America. Rather, this is an exceptionally well-conceived study that uses the tools of the social historian to address major questions concerning the similarities and differences in the process of class formation in Britain and the United States. Rejecting essentialist explanations for the divergent political traditions associated with British and American workers in the 20th century, Laslett invites us to explore the social and historical origins of the acknowledged differences.

      The formation of the industrial working class in the Lanarkshire coal towns in the decades after 1830 provides an important foundation for this discussion, for Laslett clearly demonstrates the range of experiences and responses that emerged in this environment and the historical contingencies that gave rise to what are sometimes assumed to be inevitable outcomes. The traditional artisan-collier, with his assumptions about respectability, skill and independence, worked alongside or in contention with less skilled semi-proletarianized workers and newcomer-rebels from the countryside, Ireland, or the European continent. Meanwhile, as the coal industry entered its boom period, the coal operators introduced innovations in technology and social control that fostered resistance, both at the workplace and in the community. Out of this process came the occupational solidarity that, in the long run, produced the militant unionism and political activism often associated with the Lanarkshire coalfields. But Laslett makes it clear that this was indeed a long-run development. The class harmony ideology of the influential union pioneer and Member of Parliament Alexander McDonald prevailed for decades. From the 1870s onwards, however, this approach was challenged by a new generation of leaders such as Keir Hardie, whose unionism was premised on a recognition of the realities of class conflict. This new unionism helped make the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain the strongest union in the country, but plans to encourage increased state intervention through an independent labour politics were less successful. Laslett provides a useful reminder that the participation of the coal miners in the political process remained far from complete, as most coal miners could not vote prior to the 1884 franchise reforms and even then the vote was not extended to all male adult citizens until 1918. Hardie (and others) failed to persuade the Lanarkshire miners to follow their political lead until well into the 20th century. Although individual miners were often elected to Parliament as Liberals and independent labour politics had some success at the community level, Lanarkshire failed to elect even one Labour MP to Parliament until 1918. The impact of the Great War on British workers had much to do with the change in perceptions, as did the broader class conflicts in British society and the ongoing crisis of the Liberal Party in this period. This proved to be an historic breakthrough, and after the promise of mines nationalization was betrayed by the state, the coal miners helped to carry the Labour Party to its first taste of power in 1924.

      From this perspective on class formation in southwest Scotland, developments in northern Illinois appear to have been remarkably similar. The timing, of course, was different, as the take-off period for this coalfield arrived in the period of urban and industrial expansion after the Civil War. Initially the American miners enjoyed better housing and higher wages than their Scottish contemporaries, and this was a factor in attracting emigrant coal miners to the American prairie. However, the breakdown of ideals of class harmony was apparent in both places in the 1870s and 1880s, and Laslett draws a series of parallels between the local strikes of this period on both sides of the ocean. In many respects the issues affecting workplace and community experiences in both Scotland and Illinois proved to be similar ones that involved rivalries between local and immigrant workers, contests over workplace discipline and community institutions and struggles for union recognition and state intervention. Growing class polarization resulted in the formation of strong national unions in both countries in the form of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (1893) and the United Mine Workers of America (1890), and both were engaged in a series of major confrontations with the coal operators and the state in the following decades. Moreover, in both countries the perceived threat of bureaucratization in the unions was answered by rank-and-file revolts emphasizing direct action and syndicalist ideas. Socialist influence was certainly present among the coal miners in Illinois, who emulated the British miners in electing socialists to local office and organizing co-operative stores. But the political consequences of the formation of the Labour Party (1900) and the Socialist Party of America (1901) were ultimately dissimilar. While British miners had engaged in a protracted struggle to achieve political recognition and win the franchise, the political process in the republic had remained relatively open for American trade unionists, or at least for those who were male and white and in command of the language of politics in America. This presented a difficult quandary for militant unionists with social democratic ideas. The Illinois miners’ leader John H. Walker, for instance, a Scotsman generally sympathetic to Keir Hardie and a moderate socialism, nonetheless endorsed pro-labour Republicans for state office and affiliated the Illinois miners to the American Federation of Labor’s state federation of labour, with its well known policy of non-partisanship. Walker himself later ran for governor on a Farmer-Labor ticket in 1920, but by that time with little prospect of success. Laslett argues that the ultimate parting of the ways between American and British political practice did not arrive until the time of World War I, which exacerbated ethnic and cultural divisions within the American working class and marginalized the socialists as a political force. Meanwhile, the UMWA under the leadership of John L. Lewis had succeeded in burying the programme for public ownership of the coal industry, thus helping to reduce the expectations that workers would direct at the American state. The success of the Labour Party in Britain accordingly coincided with the collapse of mass politics on the American left, symbolized by the failure of Robert M. LaFollette’s 1924 presidential campaign. While this divergence was an outcome of considerable significance to the history of both Britain and the United States, Laslett concludes that there was nothing inevitable about it, and that the case of the coal miners cannot be used to deny existence of class conflict or class consciousness in American society.

      In all, this is a compelling study that contributes new perspectives to the debates around such themes as American exceptionalism and the failure of socialism in the United States. While considering some of the perennial big questions in the field, this is also a multi-dimensional discussion that examines the significance of social and geographic mobility, standards of living, temperance, education, gender, ethnicity, religion, and race as contributing factors in each of the contexts. Without qualifying his general argument, Laslett readily notes some of the differences that were apparent only a few miles away in the east of Scotland or the south of Illinois, and his approach accordingly invites further comparative studies involving more local contexts. There are some tentative references as well to class formation in Germany and other countries, but, not surprisingly in a study of this scope, there are only a few brief references to the Canadian context in these pages – not enough to make the index. Of course, it is obvious that the characteristics of the Canadian coal country have been shaped not only by complex local conditions and regional variations but also by both British and American influences; in some ways it may be more appropriate for comparative studies in Canada to begin with inter-provincial rather than international comparisons. Meanwhile, Laslett has written a model comparative study that shows how stimulating comparative history can be when it is driven by a vigorous historical intelligence and a thorough command of sources. Moreover, at a time when social history is increasingly caricatured as a record of historical irrelevance, he has shown how the disciplined use of the methods of social history can shed light on major themes in national history.

James Jaffe, Striking a Bargain: Work and Industrial Relations in Industrial England, 1815-65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2000)

THIS BOOK is both a useful contribution to the study of early industrial labour relations, and a symptom of the current condition of labour history. Jaffe’s strength as a researcher lies in his ability to penetrate the opaque surface of the 19th century workplace. He is very adept at using a range of scattered, fragmentary evidence to understand the underlying relationships between employers and employees. In his first book, on early 19th century Tyneside coalminers, he displayed these skills to good effect. Now, in this present volume, he seeks to apply his insights to the wider industrial field. Nevertheless, at the level of argumentation, the relationship between the two volumes is not entirely clear. Whereas the first book contended that labour relations hinged on a "struggle for market power," this present volume argues that the entire system of collective bargaining, generally regarded as a late-19th century innovation, was already well developed by the early-19th century.

      Jaffe begins by taking issue with the early-19th century political economists who assumed (with scant evidence) that wages were set by the labour market. The notion that capitalists and labourers were equally endowed rational actors, each pursuing his self-interest, was nothing more than a pious myth. This, of course, is hardly a new observation. But whereas most labour historians of the 1970s and 1980s tended to infer an inherent conflict of class interest (sometimes open, sometimes hidden) from this fact, Jaffe draws a very different conclusion. He acknowledges that the resources of capital and labour were inherently "asymmetrical" but suggests the relationship between them was generally co-operative and mutually respectful.

      Jaffe’s aim, as he makes clear, is not to offer any grand counter-narrative to the classical master narrative of labour’s increase in organization and class-consciousness. Nevertheless, he presents a series of concrete vignettes and situations in which work militancy was nowhere in sight. So, far from producing an intensification of class antagonism, the early industrial era, as Jaffe depicts it, was an era of ever more effective class collaboration. Even when their material interests came in conflict, capitalists and labourers remained part of the same community of discourse. Masters and men (Jaffe has little to say about women) could resolve their disputes amicably because they were both fundamentally committed to the same reciprocal notions of a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

      The great strength of Jaffe’s approach (which is ultimately also its weakness) is the assumption that social relations between capital and labour were sorted out, provisionally, on the workshop floor. "Shopfloor bargaining," Jaffe concludes, "was an intrinsic element of work experience during the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Its presence in the workshop, on the factory floor, and down the pits cut across the levels of skill, occupational specializations and regional diversity." Previous historians, according to Jaffe, have underestimated the significance and ubiquity of this shopfloor bargaining because it was carried on through informal contracts, codes, and conventions, because it did not leave much of a paper trail, and because it lacked a visible, institutional base. The result, he believes, has been to reinforce a distorted chronology, which assigns class compromise and collaboration to the second half of the 19th century, and depicts the early-19th century as an epoch of class antagonism and strife.

      This, Jaffe believes, is too simplistic. Collective bargaining, albeit of a more informal and intermittent kind, can be found throughout the entire period of the industrial revolution in England (Jaffe has nothing to say about Scotland and Ireland). Given the complexity of the workplace rules, wage rates, and local circumstances, industrial disputes should be reinterpreted as narrowly framed encounters (often theatrically scripted) over particularistic grievances, enacted by antagonists who would ultimately appeal to the same rhetoric of justice and equity. In a world where employers held the advantages of authority and position, workers were still able to obtain redress of particular grievances inasmuch as they retained de facto control over the conditions of work. Both sides had an interest in resolving disputes without strikes, violence, or lock-outs. Hence, they were willing to use a wide range of intermediaries, from legally empowered magistrates to informally chosen "honest brokers" to break through otherwise intractable impasses. Arbitration, Jaffe contends, was no new innovation of the 1860s.  More informal instances were ubiquitous throughout the entire 19th century.

      All this is interesting and some of it is novel. The question remains, however, what does it mean? Rooted as his work is in the inherently contingent and evanescent, Jaffe offers no assessment of the typicality of his examples, or of how far his analysis might be extended to understand social relations as a whole. But to introduce this wider perspective is to see more clearly the limitations of his work. Relations between labour and capital were not played out exclusively at the point of production, and not all workplaces permitted grievances to be peaceably redressed. The alienation felt by working people was often reinforced by their precarious relationship to the market, their abysmal living conditions, their strained family circumstances, their exclusion from the polity, and their coercion by the state. Inevitably such distress fed back onto their experience of the labour process. To read Jaffe’s book, one might not even realize that his subject was coterminous with the world’s "first industrial revolution," an era of utterly wrenching, rapid, and dramatic social and economic change.

      Yet, without considering these larger processes and experiences, even his own examples cannot be adequately understood. Consider, for example, his analysis of the London publishing and Coventry ribbon trade. Jaffe is impressed with the consistent commitment to retaining stable wages and prices on the part of both masters and men. No less striking, however, is the fragility of such arrangements in the face of shifting economic conditions and outside competitors not party to the agreements. Might the compositors adoption of a more aggressive bargaining stance, with the onset of inflation in 1783, help us to understand the more general political and social mobilization of the artisans that began in this year? Jaffe notes the intervention of the Coventry authorities to resolve industrial disputes in 1819 and 1831, when existing agreements collapsed. Might this sudden elite commitment to arbitrating industrial relations have something to do with Peterloo and the reform crisis which loomed so large over these two crisis years? Jaffe never even asked these questions.

      Throughout his book, from the Introduction onward, Jaffe betrays a tone of extreme nervousness that anything he might say will offend the reigning poststructuralist orthodoxy. "Of course, postmodernists will have already smelled the foul air of materialism and its representationalism and it would be foolish to defend myself against such charges." (6) While Jaffe will not dispute that the concept of class is still relevant to his subject, he carefully avoids employing it anywhere within his book. Instead he scurries industriously in search of more flashy sounding frameworks – game theory, the "gift relationship," associational psychology, and magnetic fields of force – none of which bear much relationship to the actual substance of his research.

      In one of his more interesting theoretical digressions, Jaffe contends that Hodgskin was engaged in an exercise in Brownian epistemological decoupling when he claimed that "circulating capital was nothing less than ‘co-existing labor’." (52). But then, a few pages later, Hodgskin and Brown are dropped, as London’s compositors are re-inducted into the "civilizing mission" which the language of commerce entailed. (55) "Indeed Pocock’s ‘commercial humanism’ may accurately identify an important strand of working-class ideology." (60) Here, one suspects, it is not only the labourer who is trying to adjust to a world in which commerce is hegemonic, but also the labour historian who is trying to adjust to an historiography in which "discourse" appears to be the only game in town.

Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)

THE GOAL of this book is to illuminate the role of English elementary schools between 1880 and 1914 in instilling in working-class children a particular sense of national identity and citizenship, a "national patriotism" infused with conceptions of race and gender. As Heathorn puts it, his purpose is "to suggest the way in which classroom reading set the conceptual boundaries and shaped the imaginative ‘experience’ of the mostly working-class children of the English elementary school." (216)

      To do this, Heathorn relies largely on a content analysis of elementary school readers, and especially of their treatment of history and geography. As he rightly observes, history and geography were seldom taught as formal subjects in English elementary schools in these years. But, to compensate for this, the graded readers contained a considerable amount of history and geography, usually presented in the form of story and romance designed to appeal to children with what were assumed to be rudimentary reading skills and little cultural capital. In addition, Heathorn makes some use of school logbooks, with their descriptions of lessons and school activities.

      The analysis of these materials turns up no surprises. It is hardly news that schools in these years – as in later years also – defined citizenship in consensual terms, designed to smother differences of class and culture in an ideologically constructed sense of national citizenship, as defined in schools, emphasizing duty, service, conformity, patriotism, and the like. Similarly, though Heathorn has some useful things to say on this point, we have long known that citizenship was defined in gendered and racialized terms, with different roles and dispositions for boys and girls, and emphasis on what were said to be the distinctive characteristics of Englishness, especially when contrasted with all those whom Kipling described as "lesser breeds without the law." In this regard, Heathorn makes the valid point that the distinction that is conventionally erected between civic and ethnic nationalism is far too neat and tidy, especially in the years covered by this study, when English schools infused their celebration of the British heritage of freedom and self-government with a substantial dose of Englishness. The suggestion was that, thanks to its Anglo-Saxon "racial" heritage, England had a special propensity for constitutional government and imperial rule.

      None of this is especially novel, but Heathorn successfully fills in what had been a broad and overly generalized picture with a mass of informative detail. Other studies have investigated textbooks in history and other subjects, but none to date has explored the readers in the degree of detail contained in this book, and, as Heathorn rightly observes, it was through these readers that teachers taught history and related subjects to working-class children.

      What Heathorn does not explore, however, is the extent to which these children actually believed what their teachers tried to teach them. There is something methodologically old-fashioned about the way this study was conducted. Heathorn rightly rejects old social control notions of schooling, but his investigation nonetheless seems to fall within that research paradigm. Time and again one comes across phrases that say or imply that working-class boys and girls were merely the objects of the schooling they received. In Heathorn’s words, his book is "a study of the means by which the English masses were taught their national identity." (vii) It is "a study of how working class individuals were directed to understand themselves as part of a social whole." (x)

      It is not at all certain, however, that working-class children so readily did what they were directed to do or internalized what they were taught. They did not come to school as empty vessels or as cultural vacuums; nor were they all so illiterate as Heathorn seems to assume. They and their parents had their own ways of seeing the world and of interpreting their experience that were often in conflict with the officially inspired views of citizenship and identity that the schools were trying to teach. It could well be that children were more influenced by their domestic and everyday surroundings than by anything they were taught in the classroom. After many years of working in and with public schools in Canada, I have learned to view with scepticism any claims about the impact of schooling. Years ago I learned that what teachers teach is not necessarily what students learn. It is a commonplace of curricular research in the study of education to distinguish among the curriculum-as-intended (the syllabus and its associated resources); the curriculum-as-delivered (what teachers actually teach, both knowingly and otherwise); and the curriculum-as-experienced (what students actually learn). But this kind of analysis is missing from this book. Here, as elsewhere, Heathorn ignores what could have been useful insights to be gained from educational theory and research.

      Nor is it at all certain that teachers effectively taught what their programmes of study and classroom readers required them to teach. As Heathorn recognizes, elementary school teachers were not especially well trained or educated and usually faced overwhelmingly negative working conditions, as evidenced by large classes, lack of preparation time, inadequate resources, and the rest. The result was that lessons could often be sterile, boring, imaginatively and intellectually narrow, and little more than exercises in imposed discipline. As H.G. Wells observed in 1921: "If you go into any school today, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, you find an inexpert and ill-prepared teacher giving a clumsy, vamped up lesson ... and a halting and faulty discourse will be eked out by feeble scratching with chalk on a blackboard, by querulous questioning of pupils, and irrelevancies." (The Salvaging of Civilization 160-1).

      In such circumstances, schools were unlikely to have accomplished all that much, especially when the citizenship they tried to teach, based as it was on visions of a consensual community set in a mythically romanticized ruralism, flew so obviously in the face of the daily experience of working-class children. Lessons in citizenship and identity, for example, did not prevent children around the country joining the children’s strikes of 1911, walking out of school in sympathy with their striking parents and making their own pedagogical demands in addition (no homework and the like). Surprisingly, this is an event on which Heathorn is silent.

      Teachers themselves, often from working-class backgrounds, did not always accept the version of citizenship and identity they were expected to teach. They were not merely transmitters of official ideology. They were variously secularists, socialists, feminists, suffragists, and dissenters of various kinds, and their training, no matter how meagre, often opened their eyes to alternative ways of looking at the world. In addition, as Heathhorn acknowledges, pedagogical orthodoxy in these years was swinging to a child-centredness that emphasized what was thought to be best for children, so that teachers increasingly found themselves torn between the demands of the official syllabus, with its emphasis on citizenship, and what they saw as desirable pedagogical practice, with its emphasis on meeting the needs of students.

      We do not know, and probably never can, what proportion of teachers subverted, or at least modified, the official curriculum, but such teachers certainly existed and were probably more influential than Heathorn is prepared to allow. Certainly, contemporary observers thought so. As one conservative commentator put it in 1908, in a tract significantly titled, John Bull and his Schools: "The Socialist leaders already perceive what a splendid field the elementary schools afford for their peculiar propaganda. What better career can they offer to their sons and daughters than to enter the teaching profession and in a discreet way play the socialist missionary?" Heathorn concedes that some teachers resisted curricular orthodoxy, but claims that most were "oblivious" to the ideological messages conveyed in their teaching, or were in no position to do other than what they were told. He provides no evidence for such a conclusion.

      He refers to instances where school boards, trades unions, socialists, and others objected to the militarist or imperialist biases of citizenship exercises and readers, but he tends to underestimate their impact, arguing that school authorities were largely able to absorb such protests and carry on undisturbed. In this regard, Heathorn might have paid more attention than he does to those who not only dissented from, but actively opposed, official curricular policies. One such, for example, was Frederick Gould, a London teacher whose secularism put him at odds with his employers, and who became a much published and widely read apostle of secularist education, taking a particular interest in history as a vehicle for a secularist and globally oriented moral education, embodying a very different vision of citizenship from that found in official curricula. He, and others like him, such as Annie and Tom Higdon of the Burston Strike School, do not appear in Heathorn’s pages, which as a result make educational policy and school practice seem much more ideologically monolithic than it was. Heathorn mentions a London headmistress, Sophie Bryant, for example, as writing that schools should promote social peace, and that "the duty of the citizen was to be loyally obedient." However, Sophie Bryant was also a suffragist and an Irish home ruler, who organized mock elections in her all-girls school, even though women did not have the right to vote, precisely as an exercise in feminist consciousness raising. Her example suggests that the teaching of citizenship was more complex and conflicted than Heathorn allows.

      In his conclusion, Heathorn comes close to saying this, turning to two working-class autobiographies to see to what extent their authors were influenced by their schooling. Both in fact show students defying or distorting the official messages they were taught in school, but Heathorn argues that this very defiance indicates that schooling achieved its desired effect. Examining a case where a group of boys converted a drill exercise into a release of ribaldry, Heathorn notes than though the boys turned the symbols and language of citizenship to their own adolescent purpose, "they had to have first understood the dominant meanings of the marching and the patriotic songs in order to poke fun at them." (216)

      The argument seems too ingenious for its own good. It seems obvious that to understand something does not necessarily mean to accept it. Research on education in the former Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc has shown that students learned to master the officially imposed ideology they were taught but that they did not internalize it. This distinction between mastery and internalization is missing from Heathorn’s book. It seems downright contrary to say that children who turned official ideology upside down and who conspicuously mocked it were nonetheless its products.

      Heathorn ends his book by suggesting that the rush to the colours in 1914 shows that working class schooling "was a key part of a certain kind of ‘nation building’ after all." (218) Perhaps so, and H.G. Wells was later to blame history teachers and their teaching of the "poison called history" for the militarist chauvinism that made the Great War possible. But young men had many reasons for enlisting. To the extent that working-class soldiers in the Great War were patriotically motivated, it seems likely that their patriotism sprang from many sources other than the schools, not least from the mass circulation press, entertainment, and advertising. And patriotism apparently had its limits, since the British government found it necessary to introduce conscription in 1916. It is well known that the common assumption in 1914 was that the War would be short and that it would be a great adventure. In these days of counter-factual history, it is interesting to speculate how many men would have rushed to volunteer if they had known what really faced them. In such a case, would school-induced citizenship have been enough?

      Surprisingly, though he refers to it briefly through a quotation, Heathorn makes no use of the Gramscian concept of hegemony, though it would seem to be especially appropriate in a study of this kind. As is well known, hegemony is not a simple, top-down exercise by which dominant elites impose their view of the world on society at large, but rather a process of negotiation, resistance, imposition, subversion, and continuing interaction among social groups and classes. Much of the most fruitful work in curricular research in recent years relies on some version of Gramsci and it is strange to see him so conspicuously ignored in a study such as this. As it stands, Heathorn’s book is not so much a study of the actual construction of citizenship, but rather of what policy-makers hoped they could make it.

      This said, however, this book makes a useful contribution to the history of education. Its value lies in its empirical findings and in its exploration of classroom materials that have been largely ignored until now. It deserves to be read not only by historians of education, but by anyone interested in the role and use of history in the schools, which ought to mean all historians in these times of increasing public debate about which and whose history should be taught in the schools and what kinds of citizens it should aim to produce.

Walter Galenson, The World’s Strongest Trade Unions: The Scandinavian Labor Movement (Westport, CT: Quorum Books 1998)

OVER THE PAST four decades labour economist and historian Walter Galenson has produced numerous books and scholarly articles on the labour movements and industrial relations systems in Asia and other regions and nations of the world, with a particular emphasis upon the US. His most recent book, published a year before his death in 1999, focuses on Scandinavia. Strictly speaking, "Scandinavia" typically includes only the three nations Galenson examines here, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Given its strong historical, socio-cultural, ethnic, and linguistic ties to Scandinavia, Iceland is commonly included as one of the "Nordic" nations). However, it is unfortunate that he did not elect to include Finland in his comparative study. Finland is, of course, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the other Scandinavian countries. And unlike the other three Scandinavian nations, Finland is not a constitutional monarchy. Nevertheless, in addition to its obvious close geographical ties – it forms part of the same peninsula linking Norway and Sweden and has the same rugged topography and inhospitable climate – Finland’s similarities with Scandinavia are much more significant than its differences. Indeed, in some respects, Finland is more similar to Sweden than is Norway. They are both more industrialized, and with a greater emphasis upon high tech industry, than elsewhere in Scandinavia. Finland was a province of Sweden until 1809, when it was lost to Russia in the war against Napoleon, and Swedish remains one of the nation’s two official languages today. And, as in the other Nordic nations, a greater degree of cultural uniformity and the dominance of Evangelical Lutheranism as the official and most widely (if dispassionately) embraced confession have served to attenuate the religious conflicts that have sometimes rent other parts of Western Europe. Perhaps most significantly, it is Finland’s relatively strong labour movement, lower levels of poverty, commitment to greater equality, and highly-developed social democratic welfare state that have prompted its inclusion in most comparative studies of the nations of Europe’s northernmost region – a group of countries sometimes collectively referred to as "Norden" to highlight their shared history and remarkably similar social and politico-cultural traditions.

      The nature and efficacy of the welfare state and social policy in the Scandinavian nations have been the subject of several comparative studies, typically applauding their achievement in social justice, but occasionally castigating them as overly-bureaucratized capitalist, socialist, or corporatist socio-economic systems. Galenson, instead, foregrounds and contrasts the labour movements of Scandinavia. The eleven central chapters of his study touch on several of the key dimensions of the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish systems of industrial relations, including the structure of their trade-union movements, union policies, the links between the major union federations and social democratic parties, white-collar unionism, the relationship between blue-collar and white-collar labour confederations, the role of women in the trade union movement, and the changing nature of collective bargaining. Not surprisingly, the author spends somewhat more time on Sweden, where the labour movement has been strongest, has implemented a number of very innovative policies and programs, and realized the greatest gains. (And, where it presently faces the greatest challenge from a powerful and well-organized capitalist class and employer offensive). He is understandably impressed by the incomparable strength and durability of the Scandinavian labour movements relative to their counterparts elsewhere in the capitalist world; while trade union density, for example, has experienced long-term stagnation or decline in Britain, North America, and much of continental Europe, it has continued to expand in Scandinavia over the past two decades.

      Galenson’s book is centred around two broad questions: (1) what accounts for the extraordinary strength of the Scandinavian labour movements?; and, (2) what lessons can labour movements in other nations learn from the Scandinavian experience? Although the similarities among the three nations are most striking, as Galenson points out, there are some noteworthy differences too. Sweden’s population (just under 9 million) is considerably larger than Denmark’s (less than 5.5 million), and twice the size of Norway’s. And, Sweden is more industrialized than either Denmark or Norway, the least industrial of the three nations. These factors have influenced the nature of their respective labour movements, as evident in the varying rates of union density.

      Union density refers to the ratio between actual union membership and potential union membership. Some caution must always be exercised when comparing union density rates cross-nationally because the issue of which organizations should be treated as trade unions and who should be included as a union member may be handled somewhat differently from one nation to another. For example, some estimates of union density in Sweden include retirees and the unemployed. This is quite logical. Although they are not part of the labour force, they are still part of the union and, in addition to unemployment benefits, may also obtain information and advice about training programs, full-time or supplementary part-time jobs, pension rights, and other programs, as well as several other services, through their unions. However, their inclusion can considerably inflate Sweden’s union density rate. Thus, during the early 1990s, when Sweden experienced a severe recession with very high levels of unemployment, its "gross" union density rate was over 111 per cent. Union density rates must also be distinguished from collective bargaining coverage rates, which measure how many workers are under union contract rather than the proportion of the workforce that is unionized. For Sweden, the two measures are quite close, between 85 per cent and 90 per cent. However, for some nations, such as France, the union density rate (10 per cent) and the coverage rate (90 per cent) differ dramatically.

      In the latter half of the 1990s, trade union membership as a share of employed labour was relatively high in Denmark (71 per cent), Norway (57 per cent), and Sweden (90 per cent). Norway’s union density rate is considerably lower than Denmark’s and Sweden’s, but it too has seen growth over the past two decades. However, it is only Sweden that has experienced a decline in traditional (blue collar) union membership. The high levels of unionization in Denmark and Sweden, Galenson notes, have been encouraged and bolstered by the early creation of voluntary unemployment insurance schemes administered and managed by bodies closely affiliated with union organizations, an approach known as the "Ghent system." Norway had also introduced a Ghent system early on, but it did not survive and was soon replaced by a compulsory, public unemployment insurance system. Centralized bargaining was a key part of the industrial relations system of all three nations but especially in Denmark, where it was first established, and in Sweden, where it has been most developed – although it began to break down in the early 1980s. All three nations have also introduced solidaristic wage policies and have had some considerable success in reducing wage differentials to a greater (Sweden) or lesser (Norway) extent. Sweden’s exceptional gains here are closely related to the early establishment and predominance of industrial unionism. In Denmark, in contrast, where craft unionism remained quite strong, the labour movement was more often beset by splits among skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers, and their respective organizations.

      Largely sidestepping the large and expanding body of literature that points to a variety of cyclical, structural, political, and/or institutional variables to try to account for the decline of unions in recent years, Galenson instead highlights three related factors to explain labour strength in Scandinavia. First, he points to the early emergence of the Scandinavian blue-collar confederations (the LOs) and their long and close historical and organic connections to social democratic labour parties. In the Swedish case, for example, the social democratic party (founded in 1889) actually established the LO in 1898 (not in 1902, as stated on page 9). Second, he notes the success that these three nations have had in organizing white-collar workers and professionals, and in establishing separate white-collar confederations. In Sweden, in particular, the blue-collar labour central played an instrumental role here, helping white-collar groups to organize their own central rather than attempting to incorporate them into its own ranks. As Galenson notes, this was partly because the LO did not want to dilute its programs and orientation with those of white-collar workers, who were viewed as less radical and less likely to support strikes, and partly because many white-collar workers did not want to be part of a confederation (LO) so closely tied to the social democratic party (SAP). This was also the case in Denmark, if to a lesser extent, but not in Norway, where the white-collar unions that were not absorbed into the Norwegian LO have been weaker and less accommodating. Outside of Scandinavia, of course, these groups often remain largely unorganized or divided amongst numerous organizations. Finally, Galenson acknowledges the very high levels of female participation in the Scandinavian labour forces, the role women have played in the unions, and the gains women have made working within long-established labour organizations and parties. This is in marked contrast with other nations, such as Canada or the US, where the labour movements have been much weaker and greater emphasis has been placed upon setting up separate women’s organizations.

      Galenson’s book provides an excellent and informative overview of the Scandinavian labour movements. However, including the introductory and recapitulatory chapters, the book is only 153 pages in length. Most of the chapters are very short (only 10 to 12 pages of text), leaving very little space to actually explore what is unique about these labour movements in any kind of depth, or to introduce much that is not already familiar to those with an interest in Scandinavia. There is little discussion of recent developments, including globalization, the EU, the pronounced employer offensive (especially in Sweden), rising levels of inequality, and the recent attacks made on labour, the industrial relations systems, and the welfare states – or of labour’s response to these new challenges (see e.g., Gregg M. Olsen "Re-modeling Sweden: The Rise and Demise of the Compromise in a Global Economy," Social Problems 43, 1 (1996) 1-20; and "Half Empty or Half Full?: The Swedish Welfare State in Transition," Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 36, 2 (1999) 241-267). Galenson also spends little space discussing the growing divide between the social democratic labour parties and their long-time, blue-collar allies or the emerging and widening splits within and among the major labour federations. He does note that many of the more highly skilled and highly educated workers and their unions have become increasingly dissatisfied with solidaristic wage policies that emphasize equality (a general reduction in wage differentials, rather than equal pay for equal work) over social justice (fair wage differentials given different levels of skill and education). And, he suggests that this divide will make it harder to organize more highly-skilled and educated white-collar workers in the future if the old wage policy is supported. A similar problem in the social policy field, however, was headed off when social democratic governments oversaw the installation of a set of income-related social programs on top of the flat-rate (and relatively modest) universal benefits in order to maintain support for the welfare state among higher-paid, white-collar workers.

      To his credit, Galenson explicitly reminds us that the Scandinavian model(s) cannot be adopted holus bolus or easily imported into the US or any other nation. However, if we are to learn from this more "labour-friendly" region of the world, Galenson’s useful little book must be supplemented by other, more wide-ranging studies (e.g., Mikko Kautto, Matti Heikkilä, Bjorn Hvinden, Staffan Marklund, and Niels Ploug, Nordic Social Policy: Changing Welfare States, (Routledge, 1999).

Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press 2000)

THIS IMPORTANT conceptualization and survey of world-wide Italian migration in terms of transnational identities and diaspora is part of the series "Global Diasporas," edited by Robin Cohen, University of Warwick. His own Global Diasporas: An Introduction (1997), Nicholas Van Heer’s New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities (1998) as well as a study of the Sikh diaspora by Darsan Singh Tatla have already appeared. In the announcement of the series Cohen notes: "The assumption that minorities and migrants will demonstrate an extensive loyalty to the nation-state is now questionable." Nationalist politicians and ideologues who have always questioned such loyalties often have turned migrants and minorities into refugees. Thus the real question is: Why have historians and other social scientists remained welded to the ideology of nation states and of delimited ethnic groups rather than looking at transcultural lives of migrants? Even everyday language points in that direction. It is not accidental, Gabaccia notes, "that the modern Italian word for country is the same as for village (paese)." (3) Furthermore, as all of us know, "citizenship" of a country conceptually derives from "city-zenship," membership in politically active sections of delimited urban populations.

      Gabaccia, who has long pursued the study of international working-class movements, transcultural immigrant lives, and transnational co-operation of diaspora groups begins her narrative with a chapter on migration from the Appenines peninsula from 1200 to the 1780s. Dynastic Europe – nations had not yet been invented – was often divided by warfare, but was unified by trans-European nobilities and trans-European intelligentsias. Among the latter, "Italians" played a particularly important role in science, architecture, and several branches of high culture. "To feel Italian was to identify culturally with ‘civiltà italiana’ – an elite culture that had developed in and spread from Italy to Europe between 1000 and 1600." (8) In the century from 1790 to the 1880s, a process of self-definition (my liberal translation of "risorgimento") began and resulted in one Italian state but two "races," northern (superior) and southern (lesser) Italians. In consequence, Gabaccia raises the question whether migrants formed one diaspora or two. She discusses the creation of nationality in the diaspora – "Italians made abroad." As among all immigrant groups a contraction of the many local cultures into one ascribed national category occurred. No receiving society was able to distinguish between someone from Biella (Piedmont) or from Cosenza (Calabria). The immigrants themselves did distinguish by village, province, and the north-south dichotomy but needed the larger "Italian" identification for projecting an image of themselves to their immigrant neighbours as well as for political clout. They had to homogenize their mutually unintelligible dialects to even arrive at a common Italian language. Italian national consciousness was made at home and abroad, and both variants interacted, reinforcing or contradicting each other.

      Three chapters cover the global labour migrations from the 1870s to the early 1920s with a major break in 1914. Gabaccia first outlines the migrations. According to official statistics, 16.6 million men and women left in five decades, though many returned or, because of multiple migrations, were counted more than once. They moved within a Europe-focused global economy that had developed since the 16th century and in the late 19th century developed from colonialism to imperialist strategies of domination and accumulation. Colonies in Africa were populated by migrants; former colonies, as independent states, began to attract migrants from Europe: "To govern is to populate" was a policy-guiding concept in Argentina. In a North American historiographical perspective, Italian men and women have often been described as "unskilled." Many, in fact, came as highly skilled railroad workers, drilling tunnels, and laying tracks. In particular, the immigrants spreading from Montréal along railroads and to construction sites as far as the Rocky Mountains are an example. Often these men had migrated to similar jobs within Europe before crossing the Atlantic. Similarly, women’s work in the garment industry demands high skills, even if a gendered labelling of jobs does not always accept this. Italian migrants moved internationally to segments of labour markets accessible to non-natives. In addition to their skills they carried with them traditions of peasant rebelliousness, artisanal radicalism, and urban labour organization. Both the socialist parties and the Catholic Church developed institutions to advise prospective emigrants and to aid them in their new locations. Ethnic entrepreneurs, padrones, facilitated migrants’ insertion at their destinations but also often bound them into relationships of economic dependence.

      Migrants selected among destinations and developed transcultural lives. Even if village relationships were reconstituted by patterns of living and working, after migrations such relationships spanned several continents. From the southern town of Picinisco, to give only one example, one third of the migrants worked in Paris, one third in towns and cities in England, the last third in places as varied as Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Russia. (71) Members of a family or a community spread across several states but remained in contact, returned, left again. For purposes of mutual support and to ease the transition to different social patterns they congregated in ethnic neighbourhoods. To acquire an economic base they concentrated in particular niches of labour markets. Thus "Italian" quarters and labour market segments emerged, "national patterns in a world economy." (74) Italian women made the transition to industrial work more quickly than immigrant women, shunning positions as domestic labour. The image of the male-controlled Italian wife staying at home is another of the many clichés to which historians have succumbed.

      Migrant men often worked in outdoor occupations, living in boarding homes, bunkhouses, or camps. Some migrated seasonally between harvest labour in Italy and Argentina, for example. Construction workers destined for Canada delayed arrival until the frost was off the ground. In Italian language such lifestyles were described as of "outsiders" or "beyond civilization." Seasonal or multi-annual migrants’ wives remained in villages at home, a threat to traditional concepts of social respectability since female sexuality was viewed "as a powerful and potentially disorderly force." (85) When the "men without women" (Harney) called for "women who wait" (Brettell), communities emerged and patterns of life incorporated several regional cultures (transcultural) within the distant frames of states. Thus "international family economies" emerged in which the real value of cash earnings had to be known for the several locations of family life. Highly informed accounting rather than vague images of opportunities explain migration decisions of men and women, and decisions to send children to seek waged work. For those who returned, however, cash was turned into social prestige rather than into investments.

      Internationalism began with the pan-European revolutionary attitudes in support of popular rule of the followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini. Shifting from politics to class and increasingly associated with socialism, anarchism, and communism, a new labour internationalism posed a challenge to the many nationalisms in the decades before 1914. "The relative importance of class, nationalism, internationalism, region, and religion varied enormously in the ‘other Italies’ that gradually coalesced from the satellites of Italy’s many village-based diasporas." (107) Proletarian attitudes at home – "for us there are no frontiers" – merged with and were informed by those of political exiles from Italy, who in turn were influenced by existing movements and radicalisms in the respective host societies. Italian migrants in France could join an established labour movement whereas in North Africa and Latin America, especially in Argentina and Brazil, they had to create labour movements. In North America, both Italian men and women became involved in several of the AFL unions, those of the garment trades in particular. Out of these activities "other Italies" emerged, communities based on internationalism and anti-clericalism. Ybor City, Florida, cigarworkers with their connections to Havana, Manila, Hamburg, and many other craft-class communities, provide an example, though their three major local mutual aid societies remained centred on culture: Italian, Asturian, Cuban. Everywhere "articulate" internationalism was divided, however, along the ideological lines of the Left parallel to the labour movement. Catholic priests reinforced a labour migrant consciousness as well as an Italian-Catholic consciousness.

      In the 1920s and 1930s, states, claiming the objective of creating monocultural nations, turned hostile to immigration and, in particular in the case of the fascist countries, hostile to emigration. While the slowdown of labour mass migration was thus ideology-driven, its collapse came with the Great Depression after 1929. The old labour diasporic communities were now joined by political exiles, while some of the prominenti supported the "new" state. Only in the late 1940s and in the 1950s did mass labour migration resume, especially to Northern Europe and to Canada. (Chapter 7) The take-off of the Italian economy, however, first involved large internal south-to-north migrations and, second, turned Italy into an immigration destination with considerable in-migration from Northern Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, some of it undocumented.

      The Italian proverbs, "All the world is a village," and "All people everywhere are the same," emphasize the face-to-face global community. However, at the same time, Italians across the world developed cultures specific to everyday life and institutional frameworks of the host societies. Donna Gabaccia’s study is a model of a differentiated assessment of a global community of migrants, since the 19th century mainly working-class migrants, on five continents. Her knowledge is world-wide, the analysis penetrating. No single disaspora emerged, but concepts of ethnic enclaves and hyphenated cultures cannot capture the multi-faceted patterns of migration, acculturation, and militancy. In her discussion of the global, individual men and women remain in the centre.

David Palmer, Ross Shanahan, and Martin Shanahan, eds. Australian Labour History Reconsidered (Adelaide: Australian Humanities Press 1999)

THIS BOOK is dedicated to the memory of a former South Australian Labor premier. And one of its innovatory features is to shift the perspective on labour history towards that neglected state by extending geographical coverage well beyond the usual emphasis on Eastern Australia. The editors, David Palmer, Ross Shanahan, and Martin Shanahan, all write from South Australia, and the publisher is based at Unley. It very successfully shifts the focus of this reconsideration of Australian labour history towards the centre of the Australian continent.

      The chapters are grouped into themes with numerous individual authors covering a large array of topics. In their introduction the editors identify some features of a distinctly Australian interpretation of labour history as an aspect of a society and emerging culture with many features and multiple "personalities." They provide a good background account of the history of Australian labour, but focus their analysis on the problems and possibilities emerging from the new form of globalized capitalism. The founding and sustaining myth of the political Labor Parties was their role in civilizing capitalism and smoothing its periodic crises; the reality, as time passed, was sometimes the deputing of Labor governments to administer the same sorts of restrictions on workers earlier sought in the name of capitalism. By the time of the Hawke and Keating governments the pressures "to decide" were towards "deregulation," a process which accelerated wildly throughout the 1990s as Labor fell out of office in the federal and state spheres of politics. The impact on organised labour was extensive, but it helped to broaden alliances and widen outlooks, and the effect on labour historiography was towards the diversification of ideas well represented in this book.

      The chapters which follow discuss patterns and themes in the new labour history of contemporary writing. These themes include culture, gender, and the Australian worker; the political culture and organized labour; communities of working-class people; myth and reality in Australian egalitarianism; alternative identities based on colour or marginality, and the place of intellectuals in relation to the working class and to labour historiography. Some of the many authors in this collection offer vignettes, and there are helpful summaries by the editors, but the chapters are extensively researched. There are some typographical errors here and there throughout the text, which detract from an otherwise excellent and high quality book production.

      Part one of the book consists of a study of the ethos of the Australian Workers Union by Mark Hearn, and an essay on women and the professionalization of Australian nursing, by Glenda Strachan. Both provide an excellent survey of work in the field, and both cast their nets wider than the conventional mainstream history. Henry Lawson, Australia’s world-class short-story writer and poet, for example, is recognized by Hearn as quite central to the creation of the bush myth around which the Australian Workers Union developed. He also takes fully into account the research of John Merritt that from the beginning the shearers’ inclination to a radical industrial stance in the shed, or workplace, never excluded their hopes and aspirations to own a farm or make something of their lives outside and beyond their work. William Lane, the radical socialist writer and editor, whose literary personae "John Miller" and "Lucinda Sharpe" symbolised the functional schizophrenia of the shearing shed and industrial confrontationism, proceeded to lead his followers on to the New Australia project overseas. Australia henceforth remained behind for a time in such radical thoughtstreams, but a continuing haven for the practical man and woman. The descent of such activism and functional egalitarianism into the world of nursing in the course of the 20th century nicely makes this point of its wide acceptance in the community.

      Part two of the book looks at the links between culture and labour institutions. David Palmer examines the experience at Broken Hill and Mount Isa of union struggles over safety problems between the two world wars. Chris McConville compares waterfront unionism in Buenos Aires, Melbourne, and San Francisco. Workers in such port cities had direct contact with workers elsewhere and were consequently an advanced sector of the union movement.

      In part three Bradley Bowden traces the emergence of labour identity in Ipswich in the years after 1861. The second city of Queensland had a geographical proximity to Brisbane which ensured that Labor representation finally followed the growth of a sizable workforce based in mining and industrial activities. Nevertheless, the hegemony of the old order remained intact until 1912 and it was not finally broken until 1915. Wagga Wagga, on the other hand, is presented by Warwick Eather as a case study of the comeback of conservatism in a rural setting and in the circumstances presented by the 1950s. The people of Wagga Wagga believed that their city had become the social and political capital of the Riverina, and warmed to the purge mentality of the Menzies era, notwithstanding its earlier role in the creation of the Labor myth.

      An interesting discussion of the elements of myth and reality in Australian egalitarianism follows. Like America, in some respects, Australia has often been seen as a "classless" society, though this is perhaps more a matter of perception than reality. Ross Shanahan discusses something of the reality in terms of making and judicially enforcing the idea of workplace agreements as contractual in the industrial disputations of the 1890s and in the present era of "deregulation"; Martin Shanahan looks at the personal wealth of labourers prior to World War I; and Glenn Giles looks at award restructuring and changes in the workplace, a chapter which provides an interesting challenge to the famous de-skilling thesis proposed by Braverman and others.

      Part five begins the real divergence away from traditional labour history in its discussion of identities. Christine Nicholls and Ross Shanahan provide a piece on oral history in central Australia, while Robin Haines looks at the expectations and positive response of new arrivals to South Australia during the last century; Desmond O’Connor reviews the confrontation between Italian and Anglo-Celtic workers in Adelaide during the Great Depression, and Murray Couch reviews a research project on Broken Hill.

      Just as the earlier chapters provide an up-to-date survey of recent research, so too is part six of the book at the forefront of labour history writing. Ray Markey takes the history of the Labor Council of New South Wales right up to the era of "deregulation"; Robin Gollan reviews the writing of labour history from its acceptance as a scholarly discipline in 1960 until recent times; Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer look at labour historians as labour intellectuals, their efforts and achievements amongst the "most ambitious and innovative" achieved by Australia’s intellectuals; and Verity Burgmann looks back in reflection upon her essay about the strange death of labour history in Australia in its earlier circumstances.

      It seems now that the rumours of Labor’s fall into the darkness of a deregulated world were somewhat exaggerated and labour history has regained its elan and something of its earlier standing. There is enough evidence now available to suggest that the future of both labour and its intelligentsia is bright enough for survival, even if in an election year the policies of parsimony are to be slapped into reverse. Whatever the outcome there, it seems likely enough that politics will soon become more about people than just dry statistics, and that history will reflect the change, as it did in decades that were better than the 1990s.

Gerald Hunt, ed., Labouring for Rights: Unions and Sexual Diversity Across Nations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1999)

THIS COLLECTION sets out a very ambitious goal: to "explore the motivations toward, impediments to, and outcomes of alliances between organized labour and sexual diversity activists." (5) Part of the series Queer Politics, Queer Theories, edited by Steve Phelan, Hunt’s collection reaches beyond a single country, where such an exploration would be daunting enough, given the range and diversity of issues, activists, and unions typically encountered in each country. Instead, it provides a broadly comparative perspective on these alliances and their effect on workplace-based issues related to sexual orientation across several countries, considered in three major geographic configurations: North America, Europe, and a piece of the southern hemisphere including the South Pacific, Australia, and South Africa. The collection will appeal to those interested in the stories, struggles, and history of ordinary people involved in gay and lesbian liberation, organized labour, and the intersection of the two. Readers will find this book to be wonderfully rich in historical detail, refreshingly varied in both the analytical approach and individual perspective of the contributors and – best of all – decidedly readable.

      As with many comparative analyses, the choice of what is being compared will be criticized. Some will wish for greater depth, or "thickness," in looking at individual countries and even individual unions. Others may wish for greater breadth, to include accounts from Latin America and the Middle East, where vibrant unionism often exists side-by-side with institutional and societal oppression of gays and lesbians. Leaving readers with an appetite for more information, however, is hardly a shortcoming, particularly given that this collection is the first scholarly foray into this (mine)field. Rather, the international, comparative nature of this collection should be seen as providing a great base – and one might hope incentive – for future scholarly examinations that aim to improve both the depth and breadth of our knowledge of this subject. On the whole, the approach taken by Hunt is amply justified, both by the "connectedness" of the individual scholarship, and by the space limitations of a single volume (this one is 300 pages).

      Six of the fifteen chapters deal with North America. The Canadian situation is addressed by Hunt who provides an overview of the activity of umbrella organizations and a number of case studies showing union leadership on sexual orientation issues. Cynthia Peterson then traces the participation of organized labour in the Canadian cases of litigation around same-sex spousal benefits. Both chapters highlight the extent and commitment of Canada’s labour movement to issues of sexual diversity.

      Each of the four chapters dealing with the Unites States focuses on a distinct aspect of the relationship between labour and queer activism. On the basis of a historical review of the increasingly assertive involvement of organized labour in fighting discrimination based on sexual orientation, Christian Bain is optimistic about the future of the alliance between organized labour and queer activism. Miriam Frank, who analyses the phenomenon of gay and lesbian caucuses within unions, is also generally optimistic about future activity. Desman Holcomb, in explaining how even hostile administrations have been pressured into providing benefits for domestic partners, highlights the strategic importance of both formal and informal alliances between gay and straight workers. After the optimism of the preceding five chapters, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller provides a "reality check" by chronicling the indifferent response of organized labour to the recognition of same sex marriage in Hawai’i.

      Taken together, the US chapters suggest that organized labour’s support of sexual diversity is strongest when "equity" is framed narrowly around benefit coverage and other issues traditionally associated with workplace and collective bargaining. When the issues at stake include much more controversial measures of equality (such as marriage) the support of organized labour is much less enthusiastic.

      Jaqueline Leckie’s study of the Pacific Islands emphasizes the cultural context in explaining why unions are slow to recognize women’s equality and have remained silent on sexual diversity and associated legal rights. Examining the situation in Australia, Shane Ostenfeld shows how gay and lesbian movements have, for two decades, recognized that unions were an important part of their struggle, how the response of organized labour was "considered, incremental, and hotly debated among members," and how Australia produced "arguably the best developed relationship of this type in the world." (181, 6) In the "new" South Africa, the first country to provide full equality to gays and lesbians in a national constitution, Mazibuko K. Jara, Naomi Webster, and Gerald Hunt show that, while there may remain a considerable gap between constitutional pronouncement and actual practice, coalitions between labour and sexual diversity activists are forming. The need for those coalitions is great, but the authors express cautious optimism that the widespread recognition of equality as a cornerstone of the new social order will, with quick and assertive action by sexual diversity activists, come to be reflected within organized labour and then broader society.

      The four-chapter section covering Europe begins with a chapter by David Rayside in which he provides a broad overview of activism across Europe, drawing on representative examples from Britain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Despite a high level of activity in three of the four countries (France lags behind in the development of alliances and in political activism), issues of sexual diversity have not assumed much prominence in the new European Union. Ronald Holzhacker then provides a closer look at Germany, showing that alliances between organized labour and queer activists have only recently begun to offer the promise of growth and influence. Drawing on extensive survey data, Phil Greasley’s chapter on Britain highlights a curious contradiction: In the home of Queen Victoria, societal attitudes towards most things sexual have remained somewhat conservative and the leadership of British unions has tended to reflect that reality. Nonetheless, a mutually beneficial relationship has developed between queer activists and the labour movement. Perhaps the Thatcher era motivated labour leaders to take their allies where they could find them. Indeed, Fiona Colgan, in the final chapter on Europe, argues that "Over the last decade, trade union interest in lesbian and gay issues has increased steadily as has lesbian and gay participation within trade union structures." (262) Her chapter is based on a detailed case study of UNISON, the largest public sector union in Europe (formed from the 1993 merger of NALGO, NUPE, and COHSE). Its long-standing recognition of gay and lesbian members and concern for their representation adds to our understanding of how large unions are able to integrate sexuality issues into the broader context of workplace issues.

      In a mere ten pages, the editor draws on the preceding chapters to reach for some broad conclusions.  He traces three related developments: the increasing strength and stability of unions that emerged from the post-war settlement and the later reversal of fortunes as neo-liberalism took hold; changing demographics within the labour movement, and the strength and visibility of the women’s movement within the ranks of organized labour. In addition to permitting some conclusions about what accounts for the growing number of alliances between organized labour and "sexual diversity activists" in the studied countries, this review also challenges the social movement orthodoxy that would characterize queer activism as "new" social movement activity and labour activism as "old" (or traditional) social movement activity.

      The book is a valuable addition to a field of scholarship desperately in need of additional study. The focus on the intersection of queer and union activity means that the book could be used effectively in a variety of courses, although the absence of both an index and a comprehensive bibliography limits its usefulness as a reference book, a role for which it is otherwise well suited. Nonetheless, Gerald Hunt has edited a collection valuable to any university or college library. It should also find a place in the personal libraries of anyone interested in organized labour, workplace equity, social movements, or queer history.

Judith Glover, Women and Scientific Employment (London: Macmillan Press 2000)

I HAVE A SIZABLE collection of photographic images of Marie Curie. In several she is looking directly at the camera; her countenance is intelligent but there is no hint of a smile. Her expression is dour even in pictures with her beloved Pierre or her daughters. The historian of science Margaret Rossiter has attributed Curie’s success in science to a strategy of "deliberate overqualification and personal stoicism." A century after her brilliant work earned her two Nobel prizes, women still accept her approach as necessary to gain admittance to the world of science.

      In Women and Scientific Employment, Judith Glover examines the theoretical discourses that have framed the issue of women in science and presents selected empirical data to illustrate the continuing problem. Glover has focused primarily on women in academic science as this is the data set that has been available through university and government records for many decades. Measures of persistence and promotion are readily extracted. As Glover indicates, women scientists in the private sector and women with lower levels of education employed in scientific jobs are rarely captured in these data sets. Similarly, women who are members of trade unions in university or government laboratories are seldom mentioned in surveys of scientific employment or in the type of secondary analysis performed by Glover. This gap makes it difficult to assess the impact of trade unionism on women’s employment in science. Technology and trades organizations are beginning to fill in this missing piece.

      Glover makes a distinction between two types of feminization of the sciences: quantitative feminization refers to increasing the numbers and proportion of women in science, while vertical feminization refers to the movement of women into top positions or high academic rank. She refers to these as measures of "getting in" and "getting on," respectively. Both are essential for monitoring employment equity in science.

      Glover has conducted research on gender, science and technology, and on the representation of women in scientific work for the European Union. She is presently Reader in Sociology and Social Policy at the Roehampton Institute in London, England. In this book she reviews the extensive international work on the "problem" of women in science, and presents the key authors, debates, and relevant employment statistics. Although there are more than two dozen charts and graphs, this is not a compilation of endless columns of raw data. Rather it is an exposition and interpretation of informative comparisons within and between countries. One chapter is devoted to analysis of the situation for women in the United Kingdom. In a separate chapter Glover presents representative data from the US and France that parallel the British situation. She highlights the differences and the striking similarities. In all three countries, attrition between first and graduate degrees is markedly higher for women than men. The comparative data also confirm that vertical sex segregation remains rampant in academic science, even in disciplines such as biology that have experienced a high level of quantitative feminization sustained over many years.

      It is unfortunate that the most recent data was more than five years old at the time of publication. Although researchers in this field know how consistent the participation rates are over time (and space!), science and education policy makers want to believe that their efforts are paying off. They are not content with last year’s numbers and often demand the most current statistics.

      Glover pays considerable attention to the lack of resistance by women scientists to their situation. She outlines a variety of arguments about the socialization of women scientists to relatively conservative values, and their persistent belief in the fairness of systems of evaluation including the mythology of the operation of an objective "scientific method" in determining hirings and promotions within scientific fields. Faith in peer review and objectivity remain almost untouchable even in the face of evidence of their limitations. To those explanations I would add that women scientists are highly educated, paid well for interesting work (although not as well as their male colleagues), and admitted to an elite professional class. In general they are unlikely to think of themselves as oppressed by almost any criterion. Involvement in "women in science" organizations or the "women’s caucus" within scientific societies is viewed as suspect by many scientists, including women, and as evidence for a lack of the requisite absolute commitment to science and only science.

      Glover argues that it is time to stop thinking of science as one giant monolith, and to start thinking about discipline-specific exclusions of women and their causes. An entire chapter is devoted to the particular case of physics which has been largely refractory to efforts to increase participation of women. For comparison, Glover presents Witz’s study of the exclusion of women from medical education and practice in the 19th century. She argues that both power and knowledge accrue to "disciplines" in the sense of the word used by Michel Foucault: accepted techniques and paradigms within a discipline serve to examine, control, and limit behaviour. Glover also presents the work of historian David Noble on the Christian clerical origins of universities, and the evolution of authority from the church to science within the same institutions. Women were not just excluded, but were viewed as the antithesis of the monastic life of the mind. Glover acknowledges that one of her purposes in discussing Noble’s work is to bring it to the attention of more European readers. It is unfortunate that the work of another scholar on the issue of "getting on" in science was not addressed. Gerhard Sonnert is the author of a substantial sociological survey of successful American scientists entitled The Project Access Study and published as Who Succeeds in Science? Sonnert identified the ongoing accumulation of small disincentives as an issue for women in science that alters their career over the long term.

      In all of the chapters Glover presents a critical review of a substantial body of literature in a clear and concise manner. The reference lists at the end of each chapter are extensive and useful to readers looking for the primary sources. Glover makes extensive use of footnotes, and they provide insight into her thinking and rich anecdotal evidence for her arguments.

      Glover’s conclusions have significant implications for both education and science policy. In countries like the US, UK, and Canada, large national programs and local grass-roots initiatives have focused on increasing the participation of girls and young women in science education and employment. Modest improvements in the rates of entry into science and engineering have been observed ("getting in"), but enhanced persistence and success ("getting on") has been much more elusive. Glover contends that these are separate issues with separate solutions and no stoichiometric relationship.

      Finally, Glover is critical of the assumption from feminist standpoint theorists that women will change the face, agenda, and conduct of science. Such essentialism ignores the larger players in science. In the time of Da Vinci and today as well, scientific agendas have been set by the material forces of capitalism. No wonder Marie Curie never smiles.

Anders Hayden, Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time, Consumption, and Ecology (Toronto: Between the Lines 2000)

ANDERS HAYDEN is commonly known as the guy who works 24 hours a day for a shorter work week. As a staff person for the Toronto-based 32 Hours campaign and as a volunteer activist, no one has done more than Hayden in helping to build political support in Canada for policies to reduce average working hours. Now, with the publication of Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet, Hayden also makes an impressive intellectual and empirical contribution to our understanding of this important but complex issue. The book describes a holistic vision of progressive social and economic policy reforms, rooted in reductions in working hours combined with measures, especially ecological tax reforms, to enhance the "eco-efficiency" of current economic activity.

      Shorter working hours are commonly advanced as a simple solution to unemployment. If there is a shortage of job openings, then a shorter work week will spread available work around to more people, thus reducing the incidence of unemployment. Hayden is more careful than most shorter work-time advocates in noting the limitations of this rather mechanistic argument. He cautions that shorter work-time should not be seen as a form of "collective austerity" that is, as a means of sharing unemployment. Rather, a stronger campaign for shorter work-time will be built by viewing it as a positive goal in and of itself, as a means of capturing the benefits of technological development and productivity growth in the form of increased leisure time (rather than material consumption), and as a means of reshaping our economic activities to become more harmonious with ecological as well as economic priorities.

      Hayden also offers a careful critique of what he terms the "productivist" trend in the shorter work-time movement. It is often suggested that shorter working hours can enhance hourly productivity (because workers are more rested and less harried), thus delivering cost savings which can largely or even wholly offset the cost to employers of the work-time reduction. In this analysis, employers must be somehow irrational not to see the win-win potential in reducing regular working hours.

      But for Hayden, this approach misses the point on at least two grounds. One fundamental rationale for reducing working hours is to shift our overall lifestyle away from material consumption and in favour of leisure time. The productivist argument inverts this to propagate shorter working hours as being conducive to more output (and hence consumption). It also underestimates the extent of employer resistance to demands for shorter work-time. There are concrete economic factors behind the desire of employers to impose longer hours on an ever-smaller group of well-paid "core" employees, and the consequent polarization of working hours between that core group and another group of underutilized peripheral workers. This dominant trend in employment practices over the past two decades reflects the socially destructive but powerful bottom-line interests of employers; we should not be naïve about the likelihood of winning them voluntarily to the cause of shorter working hours in the face of these economic pressures.

      Indeed, the history of working-time struggles indicates strongly that more progress on this issue will result not from naïve appeals to employers that shorter work-time can be good for them, as well. Rather, it will require the adoption by workers of shorter work-time as an important goal (in both collective bargaining and in broader political struggles), and the successful mobilization of those workers and their allies to impose that preference over the resistance of their employers.

      One especially useful feature of Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet is its detailed review of the successes and failures of various concrete shorter work-time initiatives, in Canada and numerous other countries (both industrialized and developing). Both the politics and the practicalities of work-time reduction initiatives can be very tricky, and Hayden’s international overview gives us valuable and concrete insights. There are numerous ways in which lifetime hours of work can be reduced – a shorter work day, a shorter work week, longer vacations, earlier retirement, leaves for parenting or education – and different approaches tend to demonstrate different degrees of success in maintaining worker support and stimulating new job creation. Hayden’s Chapters 6 and 7 provide a dense, convenient, and invaluable primer of "best practices" for anyone wanting to learn quickly about the plethora of ways in which work time can concretely and effectively be reduced.

      Like most economists, I still have some difficulty with the broad ecological critique of economic growth which underpins many of Hayden’s policy prescriptions. Hayden is more careful and nuanced than many environmentalists on this point, but he still tends to portray economic growth in general as damaging to the goal of environmental sustainability. I would argue that this approach, broadly shared within the green movement, ultimately undermines the struggles for both shorter work-time and environmental protection.

      In the first place, given the green movement’s obsession with the measurement errors implicit in conventional economic concepts (like Gross Domestic Product), Hayden, like others, at times ironically conflates economic growth with the production of what he calls "more stuff."A full 70 per cent of Canada’s GDP is composed of services, not "stuff." Much represents the value-added in the production of public caring services which progressives value highly (and which Hayden himself wants to see more of).

      To be sure, we need to think carefully about how economic growth occurs, and what types of goods and services are produced, in order to regulate and limit the environmental consequences of that growth. Some types of economic growth are grossly destructive of the environment (such as monster home suburbs, sport-utility vehicles, and tar sands developments). Other types of economic growth seem benign: like the caring services we need more of. A few types are even environmentally beneficial, like investments in emissions reduction or the construction of new parks, expenses which show up in the GDP as surely as any purchase of a new Ford Explorer.

      The challenge, I would argue, is not to try to stop economic growth (which is the ultimate if often unstated conclusion of the assumption that growth is generally bad for the environment), but rather to radically regulate growth, ensuring in particular that we get more public services consumption and less private goods consumption. The GDP can still grow, jobs can still be created, average incomes can still rise, and human living standards will improve (in both material and non-material ways). But the impact of economic activity on the environment could be moderated significantly.

      This is a daunting challenge, admittedly, especially in light of the growing and bleak evidence regarding energy consumption and global warming. But on the other hand, if we equate a green economy with a no-growth economy, then the political constituency for a green economy is likely to evaporate quickly. Average workers will quickly conclude (wrongly, in my view) that ecological goals are incompatible with their legitimate desire for a higher standard of living (measured correctly, and not by how much "stuff" they consume). A no-growth economy, far from constituting a green utopia, would in reality be marked by growing poverty and inequality, a popular backlash against both ecological rules and government in general, and a chronic lack of real resources to dedicate to environmental goals (such as improved infrastructure or the amelioration of environmental damage). And it will take a lot more than Hayden’s environmental taxes to bring about the necessary pro-environment regulation of the economy. (To be fair he also discusses, albeit in less detail, other possible forms of environmental regulation to promote his goal of "eco-efficiency.") Environmentalists and progressive economists need to do some networking about the limitations of market price signals in bringing about desired changes in economic behaviour, before we jump so enthusiastically on the "green tax" bandwagon. In many cases, direct regulations of the command-and-control type will be infinitely more effective than the ecological tax reforms so popular with market-oriented reformers.

      More convincing and appealing to me is Hayden’s clarion call to build a new cultural politics which rejects the dominant ideology of consumerism. If we can struggle against the commercial notion that one’s happiness is directly correlated with the amount of one’s private consumption (and generally with the most ostentatious and shallow forms of that private consumption), then we will build a stronger basis for all kinds of progressive goals. This new politics would clearly assist in mobilizing support for shorter work-time, since the assumed trade-off between material consumption and leisure time will become less worrisome. It will also assist in the all-important struggle against tax cuts, and to preserve popular support for public forms of consumption (such as public or caring services, parks, and public transportation).

      Hayden correctly identifies that it will be a huge challenge to overcome the cultural factors contributing to the "work-and-spend" mentality which dominates so many Canadians’ lives. But this goal seems to me to be an important prerequisite for future progressive success, on the work-time issue and on many other issues as well, and Hayden challenges us convincingly to take up the challenge.

      Working hours have become more polarized in Canada over the last decade. Employers are demanding the right to impose longer hours on a select group of core workers, while other workers scrabble to find enough hours of work in part-time jobs to survive. Right-wing governments, like the Harris regime in Ontario, have targeted the rollback of existing work time-regulations, inadequate as they are, as a major political priority. Anders Hayden’s book couldn’t have come at a better time to help labour unions and other activists resist these regressive trends, and seize the initiative once again in the fight over time. I heartily recommend it for anyone with an academic or an activist interest in this important issue.

Norma Daykin and Lesley Doyal, eds., Health and Work: Critical Perspectives (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1999)

THIS BOOK is particularly relevant to paid and unpaid workers struggling to have their voices heard concerning unacknowledged health and safety related problems related to their work. I read this book as I settled into a new work setting, amid concerns from my fellow workers about the air quality in our sealed work environment. At the same time, there were news broadcasts about the struggle by Ontario firefighters to receive compensation for what they believed were work-related cancers. In both cases, despite reassurance from various scientists and officials, these workers continue to believe that toxins in the air are causing some of their health-related problems. This book provides a theoretical framework, research methodology, and case studies for concerned workers to use to investigate work-related risk, hazards, and health concerns.

      Knowing Doyal’s earlier critical work on women and health (1995), I looked forward to reviewing this new edited collection, and I was not disappointed. Doyal’s strengths in political economy and gender studies play a strong influence in this book. The authors focus predominantly on women’s occupational health and safety issues. Most of the earlier chapters are case studies that deconstruct and challenge traditional occupational health and safety rhetoric and practice. The last few chapters elaborate on the deconstruction of concepts and rhetoric, and on participatory research.

      The authors make a consistent effort to provide comparative analysis. They compare the situation for women in various occupations, and the health risks of workers in countries of the North and South. Special attention is paid to the impact of global economic restructuring on all these workers. The authors raise concerns about the resultant intensification of work and "flexible" employment within industrialized countries of the North. At the same time they caution against any additional transfer of occupational risks to workers in the South.

      Through various case studies, the authors illustrate the failure of the top-down, biomedical approach to adequately research work-related health problems. This book promotes a more holistic, critical, and participatory approach to occupational health and safety research, and provides examples using case studies. I recommend that readers hoping to learn more about participatory research check out the recent book titled Uncertain Hazards (2000) by Sylvia Tesh. Her book complements Doyal and Daykin’s book by providing insight on the values that influence scientists. She illustrates how environmentalist science is emerging as a result of a paradigm shift in society. Societal understandings of risk are changing, and there is a growing field of research that is informed by experiential knowledge.

      Within the book Health and Work, some authors focus on the impact for paid and unpaid workers of economic change, and of the changing definitions of work. The authors call for the development of gender-sensitive health promotion policies, with specific chapters on unpaid caregivers and domestic workers, disabled workers, and sex workers. Current occupational health notions ignore certain workers at risk, and prioritize the health of some workers over others. For example, while nursing journals acknowledge the physical and psychological stress on paid care providers of HIV/AIDS patients, they fail to discuss the risks that unpaid caregivers face in their work. There is an insightful article on the shortcomings of health promotion efforts regarding HIV/AIDS in many sex workers. Researchers tend to blame prostitutes for HIV transmission, while failing to acknowledge the poverty that leads many girls and women into this form of work, their appalling working conditions, and the health risks that they face.

      I found the article on the problems of epidemiological research particularly insightful. Workers are subject to multiple exposures to toxins, and they change jobs, making it difficult to trace these exposures. Exposures to toxins and occupational health problems are frequently underreported. There are disagreements among scientists on "acceptable risk" levels, and among occupational health practitioners on the diagnosis of health-related problems. There is in general a lack of resources committed to occupational health and safety. Employers, governments, and insurance companies often lack the political will to address prevention, detection, and compensation issues.

      All of these problems are exacerbated by economic restructuring. Work gets moved to sweatshops and private homes, or subcontracted to smaller firms, which generally have fewer health and safety precautions than large firms do. Risks increasingly get exported to countries in the South where their impact is greater because of double standards and weaker controls.

      Lay and professional researchers seeking to investigate occupational health and safety issues can learn from this book’s case studies. The last few chapters elaborate more specifically on the postmodern approach of deconstruction which guides this book. There are also more specific illustrations of effective participatory research in Italy and Latin America.

      This book needs to be supplemented by books by Tesh (2000), mentioned previously, as well as Phil Brown and Edwin Mikkelson, No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action (1990), in order to prepare researchers for the scientific debates that participatory research provokes. The participatory research illustrated in this book has much in common with the "popular epidemiology" approach which has been very effective in documenting community health problems due to exposure to industrial toxins.

Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds., The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press 2000)

THIS IS A TIMELY and useful book. It is timely because we are in the midst of another major shake-out/restructuring of agriculture on a global basis in a time of capitalist world hegemony. Further, this restructuring, and related crises in the food industry, has provoked deepening concern among the general population over the unregulated and poorly researched applications of biotechnology in the food system. This current of public concern has contributed to the growing "anti-globalization" movement, providing one of the conditions leading to the possibility of a period of sustained politicization of large numbers of people around the world.

      It is a useful book because the thirteen chapters, each written by a leading scholar in the area, provide a surprisingly comprehensive presentation of many key issues in this most recent crisis in world agriculture, as well as reminding us of central features of the historical context. As a result, this reader could be useful in a wide range of social science courses dealing with issues in political economy, the environment, rural sociology, science and technology, class and power, and the move to world free trade.

      The book is also an antidote to the received wisdom not only in the media and politics, but also among a depressingly widening circle of intellectuals that the Marxist paradigm is dead and best consigned to the museum of historical intellectual curiosities. Many of us continue to argue that the Marxist scientific paradigm has never been so useful, nor has it been so clearly relevant, than in these years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breaking of the iron rice bowl in China leading to the ascendancy of the global triumphant capitalism, with its free market ideology and its brand of economic pseudo-science. It is refreshing to read a book in which a group of scholars, including many from a new generation of social thinkers, demonstrate the urgent relevance of the Marxist paradigm in addressing key aspects of the world capitalist system. Whether dealing with issues of biotechnology, environmental collapse, modern social structural transformation, sustainable agriculture, a farmgate-to-supermarket analysis of the transnational capitalist food system, the Marxist paradigm continues to clarify, to explain, to criticize, and to pose, as always, the possibility of alternatives.

      As a whole new generation of activists battle world capitalism, the resurrection, clarification, and novel application of the Marxist paradigm is an especially important intellectual task. And this time around, that task will be less encumbered by the albatross of the distorting lens of the official dogmas of the Soviet Union and of Maoist China. Only Cuba remains of the 1917 promise in Russia, and the 1949 promise in China. Yet Cuba remains a special case because its social experiment was rooted in its own autonomous revolution and only turned to the Soviet model in desperation during the relentless siege by the United States. Cuba provides today not so much a demonstration of the classical Marxist paradigm as an example of an alternative approach to agriculture in a hostile world capitalist market. As Peter Rosset’s chapter on Cuba demonstrates, Cuba found itself in crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a loss of privileged, subsidized access to the markets of the Soviet bloc. Blockaded by the US, deprived of the Soviet market, many predicted Cuba’s ultimate collapse. That has not yet happened partly because Cuba, out of desperate necessity and not for any ideological reason, retreated to a strategy of sustainable agriculture. As Rosset concludes,

The Cuban experience illustrates that we can feed a nation’s population well with a small- or medium-sized farm model based on appropriate ecological technology, and in doing so we can become more self-reliant in food production. Farmers must receive higher returns for their produce, and when they do they will be encouraged to produce. Capital-intensive chemical inputs – most of which are unnecessary – can be largely dispensed with. The important lessons from Cuba that we can apply elsewhere, then, are agroecology, fair prices, land reform, and local production, including urban agriculture. (212-213)

      Although I recommend the entire book, there are a few gems worth noting. The editors’ overview is excellent, characterized by clarity and force, providing a unifying justification for what follows by weaving the diverse strands of the book into the Marxist paradigm focused on "the political economy of agriculture, food, and ecology." (8) As the editors say,

Capitalism presents us with the paradoxical reality of a rapid growth of food production and perpetuation of overproduction (relative to markets and income distribution) on one hand, accompanied by the reinforcement of social exclusion and thus the growth of hunger on the other. The latter is not, as is sometimes thought, mainly a result of population growth (which has generally been surpassed by the growth of productivity in agriculture), but instead a consequence of the fact that the immediate object of food production is not human sustenance and well-being but the growth of profits. The coincidence of hungry mouths with overflowing grain silos may seem to be a paradox, but it is a paradox not of our analysis, but of capitalist agribusiness itself. (9)

      The editors also affirm a commitment to Marx’s dictum, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it," by always insisting on a focus on the multi-faceted struggle to change the system. This is best expressed when they conclude their overview with these words:

Those who wish to radically transform the present agricultural-food system often focus on issues such as the proper scale of agriculture, the question of whether food should be organized in local or global systems, and the appropriate technology to be adopted. Although all of these questions are significant – and we should emphasize the importance of relatively small-scale (by today’s standards), local production in agriculture, using technology appropriate to a given set of social/historical/ecological conditions – it is well to remember that such issues are essentially secondary under present circumstances to the question of the commodification of agriculture (and indeed of nature itself) promoted by the capitalist economy with only one end in mind: the production of profits. "The moral of the tale," Marx wrote in Capital (vol. III, chapter 6, section 2),

"is that the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers." (21)

      I have already exceeded the editor’s thousand words and have only scratched the surface of a book packed with thoughtful ideas and challenging analyses. Given my own work on the agrarian petite bourgeoisie in Canada, I found Wood’s article on the agrarian roots of capitalism, Lewontin’s chapter on the proletarianization of farmers, and Araghi’s piece on the peasant question on the cusp between millennia lucid and controversial. But having satisfied the reader’s historical and social structural curiosities, the book then challenges the reader with the moving front edge of controversies in biotechnological applications in agriculture. The editors have done an excellent job in the selection of articles and/or the assignment of topics. They have packed a great deal into what is really quite a short and tightly edited manuscript.

      Though edited collections usually find little sympathy from this reviewer, this book is definitely an exception.

Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith, eds., Abandoned Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000)

A GROWING LITERATURE on abandoned children is enhancing our understanding of the extent, diversity, and ramifications of abandonment. Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith make an important contribution to the field in Abandoned Children. They bring together the work of eighteen contributors including anthropologists, historians, psychologists, research officials, and an economist. Those familiar with studies of abandonment and those for whom this book is a starting point are well served by the citations that conclude each article. Not only are the references wide-ranging, but taken together they reveal a core of works which anchor abandonment studies.

      In her introduction, Catherine Panter-Brick explores the complexity of the book’s central concept. She argues that the category of "abandoned" children has emerged as "other" to the contemporary Western idea that a proper childhood is domestic and dependent. Today this can result in inappropriate cross-cultural interventions that ignore existing self-help systems. For Panter-Brick, abandonment is a social construct that must be examined analytically and empirically. She further argues that abandonment studies must take into account children’s perspectives and their agency.

      Four of the articles in the book deal with the long-lived European foundling system that by 1850 took in an estimated 100,000 new children a year. Isabel Dos Guimarães Sá examines the circulation of children in 18th-century Portugal. Children sent as infants from the Porto foundling home usually returned at age seven to be redistributed once again. David I. Kertzer finds that children from the Bologna foundling home had lives comparable to their non-foundling neighbours and often integrated into the families and communities where they grew up. Malcolm T. Smith delineates the costs of foundling care in the Azores and concludes that high mortality rates were essential to the functioning of the system. Had most of the children lived, the system would have collapsed under its own weight. Pier Paolo Viazzo, Maria Bortolotto, and Andrea Zanotto offer an overview of the changing patterns of abandonment, care, and mortality of 375,000 children who passed through the Florence foundling home over five centuries. Scare resources meant hard choices. The directors at the Innocenti in Florence shortened the period they paid wet nurses in order to raise their wages. This attracted more nurses and meant the babies moved out of the home faster. Sadly, however, the resulting decrease in infant mortality was offset by a correspondingly higher weaning mortality.

      Together these four articles reveal the market economy of the foundling homes that integrated city and countryside. Wet nurses from remote rural areas, foster families, and transport drivers who operated regular routes moving thousands of babies, were all integral to the system. In addition, a multitude of officials oversaw the elaborately regulated process. Children were part of this market economy as well. Their labour repaid their room and board when they were old enough to work.

      Two articles deal with children and war. Eftihia Voutira and Aigli Brouskou outline the eerily similar programs of the warring Greek Communists and Nationalists who by 1949 had separated 50,000 children from their parents to bring them up inculcated with "appropriate" ideologies. While many eventually returned in a repatriation process that continued into the late 1970s, they often failed to put down roots where they had started and moved on to urban areas or abroad. Helen Charnley looks at responses to the separation of children from their families in the Mozambique war during the 1980s. She argues that efforts to help the children should have derived from indigenous community-based responses.

      Four of the articles are based on fieldwork studies, primarily from the 1990s, with street children. Tobias Hecht argues the term "street children" is an oxymoron that homogenizes a diverse population. He estimates the actual number of street children in Brazil is only half of one per cent of the seven million claimed by UNICEF. Rachel Baker and Catherine Panter-Brick study abandonment in Nepal and conclude there is a need for longitudinal studies comparing the later careers of street children with other local children. Heather Montgomery turns her attention to child prostitutes in a Thai community. She argues that it is the society and state that provide no support for desperately poor families who have abandoned these children.

      The final articles focus on refugee children. Rachel Hinton studied Bhutan refugee camps in Nepal. She found the children did not share their parents’ sense of abandonment. Rather they exhibited resilience, adaptability, and agency. Failure to recognize this can result in inappropriate intervention. The volume concludes with Mia Flores-Bórquez who, partly from her own experience, explores the sense of abandonment felt by Chilean children in protracted exile in Britain. Their sense of isolation was exacerbated, not alleviated, when their families returned with them to Chile.

      The subject matter of the articles in Abandoned Children is unquestionably disparate. The editors have conceptualized "abandonment" in the broadest possible terms. Is that the strength of the book or its weakness? In fact, the articles do intersect, making the book viable as a single entity. The historical and contemporary studies collected here inform one another in multiple ways. There is a continuity of themes in regard to abandoned children that transcends space and time. Perhaps the most important of these is that, with rare exceptions, "abandoned" children are working children.

Helen Brown
Malaspina University College

Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press 2000)

AS A CONTRIBUTION to the Concepts in the Social Sciences series, Paul Taggart’s Populism provides an insightful introduction to the concept of populism and a very useful overview of some of the most important cases of populist politics. For those who are familiar with populist politics and the scholarly literature on populism, however, this new monograph may prove disappointing. The series publisher, Open University Press, promises that Taggart "provides a new definition of populism." Unfortunately, there is little in Taggart’s attempt to define populism that is truly new. Nor are there any significant new insights into the five cases of populist politics that he reviews. Thus, while Taggart’s Populism is a very good introduction to the subject, and a worthwhile read for scholars of populism, it does not substantially advance our understanding of populist phenomena.

      Although the burden of Taggart’s Populism is to define a genuinely universal ideal type of populism, over half of the book is dedicated to surveying many of the classic cases of populist politics. He makes no pretensions to comprehensiveness. Nevertheless, over the course of five chapters, readers are introduced to a range of American populisms, the case of 19th-century Russian narodnichestvo, Peronism and other examples of Latin American populism, Alberta Social Credit, and what has come to be called the new populism of the contemporary radical right. Informative, but too often lacking in depth, this survey of populist politics is uneven. Particularly disappointing was the chapter on the populism of Alberta Social Credit. Less than six pages in length, and relying almost exclusively on studies published in the 1950s by C.B. Macpherson and John Irving, this chapter never confronts the substance of the theoretically rich and empirically informative debates regarding the character of Social Credit populism and the relationship between this and other cases of prairie populism in Canada.

      Taggart, unlike his predecessors writing in earlier decades, is able to examine the new populism as a contrast to earlier populisms. This is very valuable. It would be an impoverished understanding of populism that did not take into consideration the politics of the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, Pauline Hanson, and Preston Manning. Unfortunately, however, Taggart’s treatment of the new populism sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth. His discussion of new populist parties ranges across nine countries – France, Austria, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, and America. Almost by necessity in a short monograph, many of these cases receive no more than a few paragraphs of attention. In the case of Canada, for example, only four paragraphs are dedicated to the case of Preston Manning and the Reform Party. Then, to make matters worse, this brief discussion references only a single journal article on Reform’s populism. This is insufficient to the task of gleaning lessons about populism from individual cases.

      It would be unfair to be overly critical of Taggart for particular exclusions when the range of potential populist case studies is so large. All the same, some readers will find it striking that Taggart makes absolutely no mention of an important and much written about case of populism that shaped British politics for over a decade – that is, the "authoritarian populism" of Thatcherism. Not only was this an important case of populist politics, but the unique Gramscian theoretical framework that influenced much of the scholarship on Thatcherism deserves to be considered more closely by Taggart in his attempt to come to terms with the essence of populist politics.

      For those interested in this question of defining the essence of populism, Taggart provides a concise and useful review of almost a dozen approaches to defining populism. Most, but not all, of these definitions characterize populism as a defensive reaction against social and economic change and/or the power of some sort of entrenched elite. Running through these definitions are attempts to capture what populism is a reaction against. It is argued, for example, that populism is against, among other things: the established order, the social, political and economic establishment, modernization, industrialization, social differentiation, and entrenched liberalism. In place of these evils, populism is said to offer moralistic nostalgia, a defence of community as it was, small-scale production, and more local politics.

      In the end, the one thing that ties most of these definitions of populism together is an anti-elitist exaltation of "the people." But, unlike many earlier students of populism, Taggart argues that focusing on "the people" is a "dead end because it is too broad" and amorphous as a concept. (98) Taggart argues that the populist commitment to "the people" is actually "derived from a sense of heartland." (3) The "heartland," he explains, "is a territory of the imagination ... an evocation of that life and those qualities worth defending ... that place, embodying the positive aspects of everyday life." (95) For Taggart, then, populism is a political commitment to advancing the political interests of the "heartland."

      But there is more to Taggart’s populist ideal type than this. He draws six themes together and suggests that, at bottom, populism can be characterized as follows: (i) Populism is a reaction to a sense of extreme crisis; (ii) It is a set of ideas that are hostile to representative politics; (iii) It champions an idealized "heartland" within the community. Moreover, he contends that (iv) populism is an ideology that lacks core values because (v) like a chameleon, it adopts the colours and values of its environment. And, finally, Taggart argues that (vi) populism is episodic and self-limiting because its hostility to representative politics creates insurmountable institutional dilemmas for populist movements attempting to enter and influence formal politics.

      For a variety of reasons, it could be argued that populism’s lack of core values, its chameleonic character, and its self-limiting nature are observations about populism that are not central, or essential, to the concept’s definition. The fact that populism is a reaction to "crisis," on the other hand, is potentially important to understanding populist politics. Unfortunately, Taggart does little to theorize crisis or to adequately clarify the link between crisis and populism. Thus, what remains at the unstated core of Taggart’s own conception of populism is the championing of "heartland" and the hostility to representative politics. Indeed, these two themes dominate all three of the chapters that are dedicated specifically to detailing the "characteristics of populism." In those chapters, Taggart does a very good job exploring populism’s antipathy to representative politics and the institutional dilemmas that flow from this. In the end, however, Taggart’s primary theoretical contribution is the significance he places on the notion of "heartland."

      The usefulness of Taggart’s notion of "heartland" is that it provides a positively defined continuity to "the people" of populism. Too often "the people" is negatively constructed in contrast to those social groupings that are demonized and excluded by populist discourse. Too often, Taggart contends, the lines of exclusion are clearer than the lines of inclusion. Unfortunately, in making this important point, Taggart overstates the importance of focusing on the positive content of the "heartland." He overplays the need to disentangle populism from "the people." He wants us to understand "the people" as merely a rhetorical device that serves to express the soul and spirit of the "heartland." At one level, this line of thinking is most useful, but Taggart goes too far. Not only does he verge on suggesting that populism and an objective "heartland" exists before "the people," but in outlining the six themes that characterize his populist ideal type, no direct mention is made of the fact that most definitions of populism have highlighted that populists challenge the power of some sort of entrenched interests.

      In suggesting that the "heartland" can only be understood in relation to those aspects of the community that are demonized and excluded by populism, one does not lose all the positive content associated with the idea of "heartland." It remains useful, in other words, to suggest as many have before, that "the people" can only be understood in relation to the "entrenched special interests." The people/heartland and the demonized/special interests are, from this perspective, simultaneously constructed. The notion of the "heartland" retains its usefulness for understanding "the people," but it is no longer superior. One is not the device of the other, and neither is objectively given.

      In the end, Taggart’s Populism is a very useful introduction to populism and the classic cases of populist politics. While there is little that is truly new in this monograph, it is a worthwhile read. Moreover, Taggart’s advocacy of the use of the notion of "heartland" to provide a positively defined sense of "the people" of populism is worthy of scholarly attention.

Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press 2000)

A WIDE READERSHIP, inside and outside the academy, will welcome Susan Buck-Morss’ superb new book. Lavishly illustrated with the iconographic debris of a disintegrating Soviet Union, and studded with parallel examples from the rival symbology of Fordist consumer capitalism, her study offers a profound, scholarly, reflection on the "mass utopias" of 20th-century industrialism, grasped at the moment of their disillusioned end-of-the-Cold-War collapse. As the book’s title suggests, its focus is especially on the official dreamworlds that faced one another, in complicity as well as hostility, across the East-West (meaning Soviet-American) divide. Other mass utopias are set aside, including the atavistic nationalisms and fundamentalisms that have rushed to fill the post-Cold War gap. It is indeed that gap itself which is her main concern – a disorienting ideological vacuum most palpable, perhaps, in the rapidly becoming ex-"socialist" world where the book (in a confessedly touristic sense) locates itself. Many will already be familiar with Dialectics of Seeing (1989). This earlier text brilliantly reconstructed Walter Benjamin’s unfinished "Arcades" project (on the consumer culture of Baudelaire’s Paris), and established Buck-Morss both as an authoritative commentator on Benjamin and as a major cultural thinker in her own right. Dreamworld and Catastrophe seeks, in effect, to extend Benjamin’s dialectical investigations into the imaginary of modern culture to another time and place. The moment is similarly one of danger, similarly involves the play of trauma and recollection, and similarly provokes reflection on the place of the messianic in history. But the scene shifts from Paris to Moscow, from les Galeries Lafayette and the Hollywood dreamworld that fascism was about to shatter in the 1930s, to Soviet socialism at the hallucinatory moment of its Gorbachevian disappearance 50 years later. This double transposition, Buck-Morss makes clear, involves more than a mere updating. In late 1980s Moscow new themes present themselves, including the shift from modernity to postmodernity, the fate of the socialist dreamworld, and the prior over-determination of the ideological field, in both camps, by the binaries of the Cold War.

      All in all, Buck-Morss suggests, the trauma of historical erasure that attended the Bolshevik Revolution is repeating itself. Worse: the dreamer is awakening to another dream already gone stale. This moment of extreme disillusionment, at the same time, has a revelatory significance. The very process of liberation in which the statues in which Bolshevism had attempted to monumentalize itself are toppled, has, temporarily at least, unhinged the collective memory. Alongside the rebuilt churches and palaces of Russia, and alongside the eagerly embraced capitalist signage pouring in, old images are welling up from the fading "Communist" past itself. Discredited ones of propaganda art, of Stakhanovite posters, of tractors, collective farms and industrial mega-projects, of Mayday parades, and cults of Lenin and Uncle Joe. But also images from before, from the Revolution’s springtime: the images of Vertov, Livitsky, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, of all the exuberant artistic experimentalism which, for a giddy moment, and before being suppressed, had seemed to put aesthetics and politics in the sublime service of one another. More recent images swirl about too: of the post-World War II space and arms race, of the ironising art of the Brezhnev years, of Glasnost and Solidarnosc, and, finally, of those crazy juxtapositions of global brands and Leninalia in the streetscapes of Moscow which heralded, just as visibly as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the "Soviet socialist" dreamworld’s irrevocable fading.

      Despite, but also because of, its Benjaminian inspiration, Buck-Morss’ disinterring of these stratified layers of collective memory forgoes melancholy for a soberly guarded hope. In the revolutionary art of the 1910s and 1920s, even in its ambiguous corralling by the Party, she sees an excess that points beyond the limits set by the actual course of events, beyond those set, indeed, by the productivism and techno-enthusiasm that such art shared with the whole industrial age. The wager is that in the whole collision of images, and of that past with this present, the utopian meanings buried beneath the bones of Stalinism might become radiantly, and shatteringly, accessible once more. At the same time, on the basis of her Moscow and other encounters, she is honest enough to note the refractoriness of East bloc progressive intellectuals, however much in tune with the latest in Western critical thought, to any such rekindling of left-wing hope. The Westerners in her company – which included Jameson, Derrida, and Lyotard –were constantly met by bafflement that such hope could still be entertained, or that the equation of markets with freedom and democracy could be seriously questioned.

      There is much here to ponder, not only for historians, sociologists, and cultural theorists, but also for all those who continue to aspire for a post-capitalist future. How is the horizon of such an aspiration now to be imagined? Or is the moral of the story that it should not be imagined at all? There is the question too of the status of such questions. For some, Buck-Morss’ very emphasis on the visual, the symbolic, and the discursive will seem too culturalist. In the scene setting Chapter 1, for example, the Cold War is itself presented as a contest between two "imaginaries," each a kind of mirror opposite of the other – the heroic (collective) producer vs. the happy (private) consumer – a capitalist dreamworld founded on the colonization of space confronting a socialist one premised on the colonization of time. There is power in this analysis, but is it enough? Actually, however, Buck-Morss anticipates the "materialist" objection (which Adorno had made to Benjamin) through the device of a "hypertext" that runs along the foot of the page. Here, the rival imaginaries are related not merely to one another, but to the material conditions of Fordism and primitive accumulation, and to the further capitalist dynamic which in the end undermines not only the islands of "actually existing socialism" but the legitimizing myths which throughout the 20th century helped sustain order on both sides of the Wall.

      Others (perhaps sniffily) will note the book’s origins in the jet-setting alternative international intellectual circle that gathered, behind the lines, to witness, and discuss the implications of the East’s vertiginous demise. It is a provenance which, as Buck-Morss frankly acknowledges in her closing chapter, reveals all too clearly the political isolation and social privilege of contemporary critical theorists. It also reveals the aporias of critical theory itself once history (as such theory may claim) has "objectively" dissolved the revolutionary subject and stalled the transformist project. Under the circumstances, the best that can be done, no doubt, is what Buck-Morss herself does: that is to eschew the pretence of speaking from nowhere, lay bare the immediate context, and critically reflect on the biases that such situatedness may impart. This she attempts in the last chapter, though its almost embarassing chattiness (one is reminded at times of the Warhol diaries) risks a self-indulgence that would undercut its serious intent.

      More seriously, perhaps, the book’s self-reflection is more in evidence at the social-political level than the conceptual. Here, indeed, one of the book’s great virtues – its conscientious effort to make widely accessible and intelligible a most complex analysis – is linked to a weakness, or at least to a self-imposed limitation. It hides, to a large extent, and especially at a second-order level, its own conceptual workings. Buck-Morss makes explicit use of Benjamin’s ideas (in Theses on the Philosophy of History) about "dialectical images." But what precisely, in that appropriation, has been retained and what rejected from the larger Benjaminian framework? And with what theoretical and ideological consequences? What operation, more widely, is Buck-Morss performing, and arguing for, on the field of radical/critical theory itself? Meta-reflection on such matters may be too esoteric for all but a specialised audience. But it is presumably needed if we are to advance that critical engagement with the categories of progressive thinking that the book’s presentation of its rich historical material is otherwise brilliantly calculated to provoke.

Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (New Haven: Yale University Press 2000)

IF YOU HAD ASKED an educated English gentleman, towards the end of the 19th century, to name the most important political philosopher of the century, the answer you received would very likely have been: Herbert Spencer. The same question asked of an educated American gentleman during this same period would have produced the same answer. If anything, the American response might have been a shade more enthusiastic even than the British response.

      Spencer was, among other things, a follower of Charles Darwin, and the core of his political philosophy was an attempt to apply to society key insights garnered from the Darwinian theory of biological evolution.

      On Spencer’s reading of the Darwinian theory of evolution, featuring the principle of natural selection, the biological principle of the "survival of the fittest" could be extended in such a way as to justify a laissez-faire marketplace society. Wealthy capitalists prospered and deserved to prosper because they were the fittest to survive, while the poor, being unfit, should be allowed to perish. Or so Spencer argued. Indeed, government assistance to the poor, in the form of social welfare payments, was likely to do more harm than good by protecting the unfit from their deserved fate. By allowing the poor to survive and procreate, one was defying the natural order of things and weakening society. Little wonder that Spencer quickly became as big a hit in early capitalist America as he was already in middle-capitalist Britain.

      Those who make a pilgrimage to Marx’s monumental grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery might notice, if they look carefully, a small unkempt grave located almost opposite. On the small head-stone atop this grave, overgrown with weeds and in danger of falling over, is carved the name of Herbert Spencer. Spencer may have towered over Marx in life, but in death the tables have been turned.

      Interestingly, although Karl Marx himself had enormous admiration for the work of Darwin, as did Marx’s collaborator and close friend Friedrich Engels, the Left has predominantly come to associate Darwinian evolution with Herbert Spencer’s right-wing doctrine of social Darwinism and its associated defence of the competitive marketplace.

      In this little book – really, a longish (60 page) essay – the Australian philosopher Peter Singer attempts to rehabilitate Darwin for leftists. If the Darwinian struggle for existence has seemed more congenial to thinkers of the right, the fault rests partly with Herbert Spencer, but also with evolutionary biologists themselves, who until comparatively recently have neglected the important role that co-operation can play in improving an organism’s survival prospects.

      The central political question, according to Singer, may be simply put: "How can we build a society that is co-operative and offers a strong safety net for those who are unable to provide for their own needs?" Singer argues that the answer to this question can be found by modifying the insights of traditional Left thinking and blending them with those of Darwinian Left thinking. Singer tries to persuade his reader that the phrase "Darwinian left thinking" is not an oxymoron. Despite the extreme brevity of his treatment of this complex issue, Singer presents his ideas clearly and comprehensibly.

      Singer contends, then, that some widely accepted traditional leftist assumptions need to be modified in the light of what Darwinian biology has to teach us. We are probably not capable of being transformed into the saintly altruists of socialist day-dreams but, at the same time, we aren’t necessarily doomed to remain the greedy egoists described by capitalist ideology.

      Against the traditional Left, Singer argues that it is simply unrealistic to suppose that human nature can be perfected, or that either socialism or communism is capable of ushering into existence a society in which all conflict and competition between human beings will be absent. Equally, however, it is unrealistic for the Right to imagine that most people are incapable of responding positively to genuine opportunities for co-operation.

      Our species evolved by a natural process of competitive struggle, yes, but mutually beneficial co-operation and individual sacrifice on behalf of group flourishing have also been important evolutionary strategies. Evolutionary theory, properly understood, shows that people can be motivated by altruism as well as by narrowly self-seeking behaviour. If society were organized under a different socio-economic system it is likely that the prevailing balance could be shifted somewhat away from competitive individualism, towards a more co-operative and community-oriented kind of society. Notice how cautious this claim appears to be: the balance can be shifted, but competition may well turn out to be an inescapable and important part of human nature. We are not infinitely malleable, carrying within our nature, as we do, the evolutionary baggage of our spcies.

      Singer acknowledges that this is a sharply deflated vision of the Left, but he offers it as

a realistic alternative to utopian socialism, and as a highly attractive alternative to the triumphant marketplace capitalist ideology which currently holds sway in most western li