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Book Notes / Références Bibliographiques
| Howard Margolian, Unauthorized Entry: The Truth About Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1946–1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)
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PRAISED EXPECTEDLY on the book jacket by Angelika Sauer and surprisingly by Sauer's usual target, Reg Whitaker, this book supposedly discredits earlier studies that suggested Canada welcomed Nazi war criminals and collaborators after the war. As the author of one of these studies, I found the book unconvincing. Margolian suggests that Canada worked hard to keep out high-level Nazi officials and sees no problem in Canada having allowed "low-level" Nazis and Waffen-SS troops into the country. But RCMP officials in the 1950s were concerned that Canada was indeed closing its eyes to the wartime pasts of many immigrants. By contrast, the RCMP gave a thumbs-up to the careful scrutiny of possible Communists that government immigration policies encouraged.
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| Raka Ray, Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999)
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THIS BOOK ANALYSES and compares the feminist movements in Calcutta and Bombay. In the former, an autonomous women's movement works in general harmony with the social democratic government of West Bengal (the party in power styles itself the Communist Party of India (Marxist), but names can be deceiving). But it confronts a culture that is deeply patriarchal. Bombay's feminists operate in a less politically favourable environment than Calcutta's and have opportunistically moved from gender-based campaigns to Hindu nationalism in recent years.
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| Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso 2000)
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THIS BOOK POWERFULLY examines the lives of garment workers of Bangladeshi origin both in their homeland and in England. It nicely blends the testimony of the women themselves with economic analysis by the authors. In Bangladesh, the women tended to work in garment factories and had to cope not only with employer exploitation but also with societal attitudes that frowned upon women doing paid work. In London, the women generally worked as home workers, struggling to cope with exploitation and isolation.
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| Daniel James, Doña Mariá's Story: Life, History, Memory, and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press 2000)
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THIS IS THE BIOGRAPHY of a woman who had worked in the meat-packing plant in Berisso, Argentina, much of her life and participated actively in her union and Peronist politics. DoŒa Mariá is given ample space to describe, in plain language, how she makes sense of Argentina's social structure and politics. But the author's analyses of her subject's discursive practices are opaque.
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| Abigail Gregory and Jan Windebank, Women's Work in Britain and France (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan 2000)
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THIS BOOK EXAMINES assumptions that improving women's opportunities in the paid labour force leads to greater equality of women with men. The authors document the policies pursued by French governments that have improved the career possibilities for women with children relative to their British counterparts. But they demonstrate that these advances in France have not led to greater comparative sharing of unpaid work among women and men. The authors explore the ways in which various theoretical approaches help us to understand why the double and triple workday survives for French women. They also suggest practical changes in gender relations that could reduce patriarchy within society overall rather than simply in labour relations.
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| Elliott D. Sclar, You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2000)
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USING AN ABUNDANCE of American examples, Sclar demonstrates the problems that have resulted from privatization of services once offered under public auspices. While the cheaper labour costs of non-union workers are usually the real incentive for privatization, the profit strategies of private operators have often gobbled up the expected savings to the public purse. In many areas, such as inspections, transit, and fire-fighting, the lower wage rates that result from privatization lead to a deterioration in the quality of the service. The competition that privatization is supposed to induce rarely occurs, with monopoly or oligopoly generally proving the result of privatization.
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| Mary H. Blewett, Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 2000)
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THIS LARGE, MEATY BOOK ranges over gender politics in early New England, the contribution of British immigrant textile workers to class consciousness in their new homeland, gender politics and Ten-Hour reform, and the circumstances that allowed workers to force employers to accept trade unions in their midst.
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| Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessity: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press 2000)
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THIS IS A DETAILED account of current knowledge of Britain's working people from 1470 to 1750. Wrightson examines changes in household size and composition, gender roles, family strategies for survival, and the lives of the poor and of workers more generally.
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| Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)
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HEATHORN ANALYSES TEXTBOOKS in use in elementary schools during the age of imperial conquest. He finds that the very young were being brainwashed with a set of nationalist, racist, and patriarchal images of the British people and the British Empire.
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| Melanie Nolan, Bread Winning: New Zealand Women and the State (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press 2000)
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THIS WELL-ILLUSTRATED TEXT interrogates the ways in which the New Zealand state shaped gender relations in the twentieth century. It spans debates about protective labour legislation, widows' allowances, family allowances, unemployment insurance, equal pay, and domestic purposes benefits.
A.F.
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