::: readings

Paula Fass, “Children and Globalization” in Children of a New World (2007), 202-218 (707-715).

Looking into the effects of globalization on childhood, Fass explores an oft-overlooked aspect of history, the history of children. Interestingly enough, advertisements have not overlooked the effects one’s perceptions of childhood have on individuals, and contintually capatalize on both sides of the coin–the one on feeding consumerism by training kids to want and parents to give, and the other by showing images of the world’s destitute and poor children as they ask for humanitarian support.

I would categorize this under

• Childhood and youth
• Categories of Difference
• and Law, Church, and State

here are some quotes from the text:

“there are startling images that confront us regularly now as the economy becomes a global network and as our means to communicate information penetrates into and out of every village and hamlet” (202).

“It is my hope that an understanding of children’s hisotry will help to make discussions of globalization both more realistic, since many children are and will be affected and more attuned to the peculiar Western sentiments that are evoked in the media’s voverare of the conflicts over globalization.” (202)

“Children are everywhere present in this debate, but never heard from or addressed.” (202)

“In this new system of values and beleive, the child was important not for what he or she could contribute economically, but for the emotional satisfaction hsi cultivation could provide to the family.

“But since the neinteenth century for young people in the West, play has been identified not as time stole from work, but as the very structure of childhood.” (211)

“If children’s work will, as I have suggested, increasingly become a subjet of contention globnally, we can expect that play will become probably an even greater flash point.” (212)

“As a result, in the United States, adolescence became an extension of childhood rather than a preparation for adulthood, although its in-between status was meant to suggest how one could unfold into the other.” (213)

The Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the best know single sermon ever given. Its timeless lessons are more pertinent now than ever before. Below are a few of the practical implications of the nearly 2,000-year-old book.

“the memory of the gift”

Practical Advice:

• If you hear the words of chosen disciples, give head
• If you are poor in spirit, turn to Christ
• If you mourn, allow yourself to be comforted
• If you hunger or thirst, hunger and thirst after righteousness
• If you need mercy, give mercy
• If you are pure in heart, you will see God (in others, in beauty)

D&C 88:47-49

• “I give unto you to be…”

Paula Fass, “Children and Globalization” in Children of a New World (2007), 202-218 (707-715).

Carolyn Steedman — “Reproduction and Refusal” in Landscapes for a Good Woman (1986), 83-97 (788-794).

I was much more excited by the title of this piece and the initial quote than by the actual article itself. I was hoping that she would talk about the changes over the past 100 years more than just about her own emotions concerning pressures to reproduce or not.

It is short though and talks a lot about the emotional pressures that go along with wanting or not wanting children. She definitely falls within the first wave of feminism that was seeking to be more than “man” than it was more fully “liberated women”

Quotes from the text:

“One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans in their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine misison. But the way things are in this world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up sauceopans.” [Alice Schwarzer] (83)

“Accounts of mothering need to recogize not-mothering and recognizing it, would have to deal in economic circumstances and the social understanding that arises out of such circumstances.”

“It is historical accounts like this that may be used to reveal the social sepcifictiy of wanting and not wanitng children in the first palce, and wanting and not wanting them once they exist. Ambivalence has been characterized as a mental structure unique to the borurgeois family…” (90)

Gallo, Gerard; Seifert, Wolfgang; and Strozza, Salvatore — “Immigrants In The German Labour Market: The Case of Italians, Greeks, Former-Yugoslavs and Turks” Status Emigrazione 39.148 (2002): 755-793 (686-705).

This article does an excellent job of presenting the statistics relating to immigration to Germany since the Second World War. It most certainly does not, however, provide much if any commentary nor intepretation of the events described. It would an excellent source for someone looking to interpret and simply in need of the data, however. The only real intepretation provided is the way in which they have divided up the years into three periods, namely:

“the active policies of recruitment in the period 1955-1973; the process of consolidation of foreign presence in Germay from the end of 1960’s to the second half of 1980’s; finally, the carrying aspects of more centy period, such as the fall of the Berlin wall.”

Good for demographics, but not for much else, to be honest; maybe Law, Church, and State as well.

here is a list of scriptures that Ani and I gathered on the topic of “running faster than you have strength”, or in other words, the balance between complacency and contentment.

it seems as though the only real answer is (as i often seem to conclude, and which conclusion i have to reference to a conversation of yesteryear with on ben brinton) the perpetuation of the question.

Scripture Chain:

“Run Faster Than You Have Strength”

Keywords: faster then you have strength, steadfast, giving, time, chance

Mosiah 4: 27

• See that all these things are done in wisdom and order
• Not requisite that a man should run faster than he hath strength

Ecclesiastes 9:11-18

• The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong….
• Time and chance happeneth to them all.

Alma 1:26-27

• Not esteeming himself above his hearers
• All labored according to his own strength
• Impart according to that which they had

Mosiah 4:24

• Not give because ye have not, but say in your hearts, would give if could give

2 Nephi 31:19-20

• press forward with a steadfastness in Christ

Flora Shaw, “Belgian War Refugees” in DiCaprio and Wiesner, Lives and Voices (2001), 404-410. [783-786]

Categories:

• Law, State, and church.
• Categories of Difference

This piece is an excellent example of the growing involvement of the state in the lives of individuals. Particularly telling is the detailed description of the the organization of departments and bureaus to coordinate the massive relief effort. Lady Lugard’s account of not only the “outpouring of public generosity” (406) but also of the “machinery by which the work [i.e. the coordination and placement of displaced families and individuals] was done” (407) is telling. All of this is perhaps best summed up in her statement that “Nations, like individuals, have their moments of unconscious self-revelation. It was a moment which unmistakably revealed the heart of England” (406).

This piece also shows much of the optimism and strength of nationalism at the outset of the war, and into the first few years. As time passes, and the war drags on, this charity obviously wanes (which is evidenced in this report by the decreasing availability of accommodations and the rescinding of offers as temporary guests become something more permanent, and the hospitality of even the more philanthropic individuals is taxed, as seen on page 409).

Another important clue contained within the report is found in respect to the statements on class divisions. Lady Lugard is clear to praise the effort’s widespread support, stating that the “outpouring of public generosity… came not from one class nor from one place, bur from all classes and from all places. Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Nonconformist, high and low, rich and poor united, all unaware, in a spontaneous tribute of sympathy and respect” (406). Particularly telling, however, is not only the fact that she distinguishes here between classes but more specifically that she highlights the plight of the wealthy class of refugees and how she has given specific and personal attention and time to helping them. She first states that, once the crisis proved to be of a more enduring nature, it was needful to find employment for those of the lower classes. She then goes on to state that “since Christmas we have been most acutely pre-occupied [with] giving suitable help tot the urgent needs of the propertied and professional classes. This is a class with which I have myself been thrown into close and constant touch, and the sorrows and difficulties of their position are very vivid to me. They have suffered, of course, horribly in regard to their material possessions, and the numbers increase daily of persons accustomed to live in the comfort of comparative affluence who are reduced to absolute penury. Such cases call for the sincerest sympathy and for practical help” (409).

Victoria De Grazia — “The Family Verses the State” in How Facism Ruled Women, ITaly 1922-1945 (1992), 77-115 (625-646).

Challenging the traditional interpretation of top-down politics, De Grazia argues that families, and particularly mothers, in Italy’s Facist Regime played significant roles. Indeed, as they saw it, the State owed them something after they had given it their wedding rings, firstborn sons, and time. They demanded things in return, and were ready to organize to request them. In one sense, they had truly “married” themselves to the state, only now (as a marriage partner) they demanded something back in return.

Quotes from the text:

“…it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it, an internal enemy–womanhikn in general.” — georg wilhelm friedrich hegel

“this rallying to the cause did indeed appear to seal a new union between Italian women, their families, and the fascist state”

“Yet the ring ceremony also generated unorthodox messgages about the realtionship between women, their fmailies, and the state. the very gesture of traind in gold bands for cheap tin substitutes cast uncertainty on whether a woman’s first obligation was to the Dice, facism, and the nation or to her spuse, children, nad kin as decreeed by suctom, sacred church vowsw, and pronatalist sloganeering.”

“The dictatorship thus became trapped in a paradox of its own making.”

“…in Wesern socieites, becomeing more nuclear and more dependent on the state and the market to carry out protective, educativce, and recreational functions they previously had not needed or had once fulfulled themselves.”

“all int he state, nothing outside the state”

“far from being incenties fo family growth, the family allowance system was thus tied to cutting wages to substandard levels.”

“the idea that their offspring belonged to the nation and that in case of war they had to be sacrificed to its well-being. The dictatorship thus combined paternalism in the familiar, humanitarian sense with a murdeous, abstract claim on the lives of dependendts; it obsessed about the pricledged bond between mothers and children, and the brutally violated it.

“Thus facism’s cult of the family in the service of the state was undercut by antistatist attutde that might be characterized as ‘oppositonal familism.’”

Susan Grayzel, “Women’s War Work: Remunerative, Voluntary and Familial” in Women and the First World War (2001), 27-50 (588-602).

Understanding the role women played in the ammunition factories and elsewhere on the “home front” of WWI is crucial to a complete understanding of how relationships between men and women changed in the 20th century. Indeed, perhaps more than anything else, the first world war propelled the Western world on a trajectory that led it to its current position. This is true even though many things went “back to normal” after the end of the war. Still, the seed had been planted and the old molds broken.

Grayzel explores this and other changes in the lives of women during the war.

Some quotes from the text:

“One of the more visible changes in women’s lives during the war came with their entrance into a wide range of occupations, some of which had never before included women.” (27)

“Women entered not only wartime factories, but also banks and places of business and government as clerks, typists, and secretaires. They were found running trams and buses, deleiving milk, and even joinly newly-created armed forces auxiliaries and become police officiers” (27)

[often they would work in the same filed of occupation as their husband who went away to war, but not always.]

“In Britain, the decision to institute conscription in 1916 followed the creation of a National Register in August 1915, recording the age, sex, and occupation of all men and women between the ages of 16 and 65.” (28)

“[Women] became important figures of wartime propoganda.”

“In either case, the question of pay became a heated one; if women earned less than men for the same job, they undercut male employment. On the other hand, paying men and women equally seemed far too radical and, some argued, unfair since male workers were undoubtedly superior. As a compromise, womena nd men were paid the same for piece work, but not for time rates.” (30)

Employment for women within medicie grew during the war bothe because of the expansion and prefessionalisation of nursing servies and of new opportunites for medical training and for women doctors” (37).

“the wartime world required this service from women, but the postwar world was not always sure what to do with the women who had performed it.” (41)

Lloyd Bonfiled, “European Family Law” in Family Life in the Long Ninenteenth Century 1789-1913 (2001), 109-154 (551-574).

Legal histories focus, as does this one, on the effects governments have on familied. It is, undeniably, important, especially when one begins to talk about legal custody of children. This article talks about the change of the legal status of women.

By the nineteenth century, many reforms had already taken place, giving women more right to the legal custody of their children, and of the legal status of married and divorced women.

This definitely falls under the category of Law, Church, and State, as well as Family Economy and Marriage and its Dissolution.