Committee Room Research Articles

A new journal—in more than one way

As you start turning the pages of this first issue of EMBO Reports , part of your mind must be asking: why a new journal? If your thought process is like mine, a series of other questions will clamour for attention: is this going to be just another journal? What is its scope? What is the relationship between EMBO Reports and The EMBO Journal ? …Before allowing confusion to win out, some answers are needed. So what is the response to the 'Not another journal!' reaction? Simply that EMBO Reports will provide monthly coverage of topics that we feel is needed and will be enjoyed by scientists—our target audience. It will contain material on the impact that politics, society and the financial world have on the environment in which sciences, particularly the life sciences, are performed. Equally, it will show the consequences of the scientific results we obtain for society. I use …

Gender on the Barricades

Review Essays Gender on the Barricades David Barry. Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. London and New York: MacmUlan Press Ltd. and St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1996. 208 pp. ISBN 0-312-12947-5 (cl). Janet Hart. New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 19411964 . Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996. 398 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-3044-5 (cl); ISBN 0-8014-8219^ (pb). Glen Jeansonne. Women of the Far Right: The Mothers'Movement and World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 288 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-226-39587-1 (cl). Mary Nash. Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War. Denver, Colo.: Arden Press, Inc., 1995. 261 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-91286916 -x (cl). Temma Kaplan Few men or women engage in collective action, so those who do seem to be similar to one another and different from others in their society. They may be driven by need or outrage, hope or a sense of obUgation. They may feel empowered by God, by social circumstances, by political threats, or by anxiety about how to assure the survival of their families and communities. The significance of women's behavior on the barricades, in the streets, and in committee rooms may vary with their motivations. Although meanings may change from culture to culture and incident to incident, comparing seemingly similar activities in different times and places may reveal, as these four books do, why issues of gender emerge so often during wars—particularly civU wars and periods of domestic upheaval . At such times, women of all classes frequently gravitate to the center of attention, and gender and its dispositions become matters of public concern. One reason is that civü disturbances—deep rifts that sometimes lead to armed struggle—cut to the quick of national identity. The disruptions of war bring women of all classes out of their own public spaces into male domains. Strife makes the economic and political work of provisioning families and providing shelter—the work women, especially poor and working class women, perform in their own neighborhoods—a matter of © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 178 Journal of Women's History Autumn public interest. Middle-class women also assume more authority either as mothers or as feminists when the men of their class or political groups are at war. Once the social networks women maintain come into view and women appear in the spotlight, the continuity of their behavior becomes a matter of pubUc concern. No matter how necessary the changes in women's public life are to sustaining the nation, their assumption of new positions disorients men of all groups because gender hierarchies are usually mainstays of male social identity. Women engaging in collective action either as mothers or as individuals , or both, effectively challenge the need for men to protect women . Sometimes, when the men are busy at war, women activists on the barricades, at the fronts, behind the lines, or in committee rooms deny their own authority and claim to be expressing the interests of groups identified as male. Some women, while fighting for their communities alongside men, also demand recognition as fuU citizens. MaternaUst movements tend to make claims for the collective good rather than for themselves ; many others become feminists, frequently raising questions about female education, employment, or health care. AU four books under review here focus on women's movements that are not overtly feminist. Yet by zeroing in on the collective behavior of women, they all raise questions about the gendered nature of collective action. Three of the books, New Voices of the Nation, Defying Male Civilization, and Women and Political Insurgency, focus on left-wing, largely urban working-class and rural women's movements associated with domestic wars in Europe. Although Women of the Far Right also deals with bitter national strife, it seems at first to be the anomaly since it considers women on the other side of the Atlantic and at the other end of the political spectrum: middle-class, reactionary, white, Christian women who tried to promote Nazi interests in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s...

Articulating Practices: Methods and Experiences

In this article we describe a set of methods — which we call a 'social poetics ' —for use by a group of practitioners in coming to a more articulate grasp of their own practices, thus to develop them. Crucially influenced by Wittgenstein 's (1953) claims — that "Nothing is hidden" from us in our conduct of our practices, and that "the origin and primitive form of the language-game is a reaction " — we show how the methods of philosophical investigation he outlines can also be used to great effect in our everyday affairs. They work, not in terms of concepts or theories worked out ahead of time in committee rooms or research laboratories by experts, but in terms of certain practical uses of language, at crucial points within the ongoing conduct of a practice, by those involved in it. Crucially, they lead us to focus on novelties, on new but unnoticed possibilities for 'going on' available to us in our present circumstances, but present to us usually in only fleeting moments. If we can allow ourselves to be 'struck by' these novelties, then we can often go on, not to solve what had been seen as a problem, but to develop new ways forward, in which the old problems become irrelevant.

Measuring Local Campaign Effects: Labour Party Constituency Campaigning at the 1987 General Election

Thursday 31 March: Polling day. To headquarters at about 9 and from 9.30 am to 6 visiting all the polling stations and committee rooms. We had lunch at the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ and then went out again with our loudspeaker, doing final knocking up. After the polls closed we cleared up the headquarters, went back to the hotel and began watching the BBC Election programme. It was evident that a big Labour victory was coming …1

James Joyce and the Question of History (review)

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Question of History Mark Osteen James Fairhall . James Joyce and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. xiv+ 290 pp. $54.95. James Fairhall's study actually poses a series of questions that shed light on the relationships between certain historical events and Joyce's texts. The questions converge in Fairhall's thesis that Joyce tried to "wrest a realm of freedom from history" for himself and for his readers. To prove this hypothesis, Fairhall repeatedly returns to two key events: the 1882 Phoenix Park murders, and the decline and fall of Charles Stewart Parnell. By comparing a conspirator's account of the murders with later academic histories Fairhall generates a compelling discussion of the intersection of fictional and historical narratives. Although his claim that the murders "lie at the center of Ulysses" is surely exaggerated, and his analysis of the novel is disappointingly cursory, the contrast he draws between factual and "felt" history persuasively demonstrates how Joyce's texts exploit and critique the tendency of history to become fiction and vice versa. Fairhall's rather derivative treatment of Joyce's socialism in his second chapter, while heavily indebted to the work of Dominic Manganiello, nonetheless [End Page 404] furnishes a lucid, straightforward summary of Joyce's politics. When he turns to Dubliners, however, Fairhall gains force and focus. Here he takes Joyce to task for propagating a one-sided view of Dublin and its citizens, and chides Joyceans for uncritically accepting that view. Fairhall provocatively exposes Joyce's blindspots: his effacement of the close relationship between the city and the countryside (as when the first version of "The Sisters" was published in AE's "pigs' paper" flanked by ads for dairy machinery), his depiction of women as passive victims, and his middle-class bias. But these last two claims seem questionable. Dubliners accurately and often sympathetically documents the oppression of Irish women and the religious and social conditions that have created it. To blame Joyce for the victimization he records is to miss the point. Likewise, although it is true that the poor are largely absent from Dubliners, that fact does not prove that Joyce was biased; it merely suggests that he portrayed—often scathingly—the petit bourgeois world that he knew best. Fairhall concludes this section with an enlightening reading of "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" that places the story against the backdrop of contemporary Irish election practices and party politics. His discussions of the alliance between the Nationalists and the drink trade, and his speculations about the significant absence of James Connolly, are particularly illuminating. The chapter on Portrait is highlighted by a detailed and knowledgeable explication of the events surrounding Parnell's fall, and of Joyce's transformation of those events into personal legend. Charting the clergy's involvement in Irish politics, Fairhall attempts to revise Joyce's "history," while questioning the Joyce industry's uncritical acceptance of his distortions. But Fairhall's version—which interprets the clergy's motives far too generously—betrays as much about his own biases as about Joyce's. Nevertheless, Fairhall convincingly shows that the conflict over Parnellism was essentially a middle-class struggle. In the final section of this chapter, Fairhall again contends that Joyce's "handling of female characters" (an unfortunate phrase) implies that he "shared . . . many of his culture's assumptions about women." Yet Fairhall's evidence (for example, Joyce's relationships with intellectual women) could just as easily point to the opposite conclusion. Here Fairhall seems to assume that Joyce cannot see beyond Stephen's myopia. Fairhall's reading of Ulysses demonstrates its creative anachronism: although set in 1904, the novel responds to the social, technological and political events of the teens and early '20s. Borrowing Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," Fairhall explores ways that Ireland reverberated with contradictions that Nationalists attempted to repress but that Joyce reveals. The chapter also provides brief, intriguing treatments of Joyce's adaptation of technological innovations—cinema, trams, autos—-for his formal experiments. But here Fairhall relies too heavily upon tenuous speculations about what Joyce "must have" known or felt, and his insistent paralleling of Ulysses and World War I often...

Equality or Equity? : Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Futures

The Hon. John Dawkins (then) Minister for Employment, Education and Training, launched the Aboriginal Education Policy at a grand event in the Committee Room at Parliament House on 26th October 1989. The Prime Minister blessed the occasion with his presence and a short speech. Three of the former Chairs of the the National Aboriginal Education Committee were there, as were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educationists from most Australian states. Only New South Wales, which decided to boycott the launch, wasn’t officially represented.There are two reasons for calling the policy that the Minister launched the Aboriginal Education Policy. Firstly, because it is the first policy formally endorsed by any National government; and secondly, because it responds to the call made in the 1988 Report of the Aboriginal Education Policy Task Force, for a concerted national effort – to achieve broad equity between Aboriginal people and other Australians in access, participation and outcomes at all stages of education. (National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy, 1989: 1.2.6 – Draft).

Politics in the Pumpkin Patch

IT WAS A TYPICALLY SULTRY Tuesday morning that third day of August, 1948. Summoned on short notice by the unpredictable House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), a contingent of Washington reporters with note-pads and pens in hand filed into a large imposing hearing room usually reserved for the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and waited for the unscheduled public session to begin.' HUAC was up to something, of that the reporters were sure. As was often the case, the committee had begun its morning session in Executive Session, meeting behind closed doors in their cramped Old House Office Building hearing room. Standing in the hallway, waiting for the day's witness to reappear so they could snap another photo, reporters barely had enough time to smoke a cigarette when staff informed them that the committee had abruptly adjourned, having elected to reconvene in open session. Six congressmen, all critics of Harry Truman's democratic administration, along with the press corps, crossed New Jersey Avenue, entered the ornate committee room, and waited for the chairman to pound his gavel.2

Pressed for space.

Are you wondering why there was a lowering of the pitch in the famous 'NHS - to fund or not to fund' debate a few weeks back? You are probably not, but if we are to believe the Fleet Street hacks, there have been fewer accounts than normal about what actually happened to John Moore and Tony Newton in a certain committee room where the Social Services Select Committee report on the NHS was being discussed.

The think tanks roll

The think tanks roll

A NEW PARLIAMENT HOUSE — A NEW PARLIAMENTARY ORDER*

Abstract: The physical design and location of the existing Parliament House has influenced the evolution of Australia's parliamentary system. The new Parliament House will exert a new set of influences. The Executive will assume an entrenched position within its own enclave and Ministers will be physically more remote from backbenchers. The physical arrangements of the Executive entrance and the Prime Minister's suite will encourage a presidential‐style status in the office. But the architecture also emphasises the public's access to Parliament in the spirit of Burley Griffin's original conception. There is likely to be a strong “congressional” impetus arising from the prominence given to committee room space and backbencher facilities. Tensions between the Executive and Parliament will be exacerbated. Changes to procedures and to parliamentary administration are also likely to flow from the new layout and facilities. The new building will provide an impetus for widespread parliamentary reform.

How the New Congress will Legislate Biotech

The new Congress is taking a long, hard look at biotechnology. A number of proposals will be debated in committee rooms and on the floors of the House and Senate this year, proposals which could have important effects upon the negotiation, funding, and commercialization of biotechnology research.

Marvin Jones: The Public Life of an Agrarian Advocate.

Son of a north Texas wheat- and cotton-farming family, Marvin Jones grew up with strong agrarian roots and a taste for Democratic politics. Elected to Congress in 1916, he joined the Texas delegation and learned the political ropes from John Nance Garner. Named to the House Agriculture Committee, Jones later became its chairman and directed the destiny of New Deal agricultural legislation in the House of Representatives. Jones's Panhandle district lay in the 1930s Dust Bowl. As Roosevelt's chairman of the Agriculture Committee, he fought for New Deal farm legislation--low-interest loans and mortgages for farmers, soil conservation, farm subsidies, agricultural research, and new markets for farm products. Many of today's federal agricultural policies were born in his committee room. As war food administrator in World War II, Jones put his knowledge and experience to use in balancing U.S. agricultural production with military and civilian food requirements. At war's end he accepted a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Claims and later became chief judge, noted for just, compassionate decisions couched in everyman's language. Jones was a gentle, hard-working man, a realist who extolled the rural life but accepted the urbanization of America. More reserved than his mentor, Garner, less shrewd than his good friend Sam Rayburn, Jones probably surpassed them both in terms of real achievement. Using archival sources and Jones's memoirs as well as his own numerous interviews with Judge Jones, Irvin May provides a solid account of this transplanted Texan who remained the farmer's advocate throughout his life.

Crime waves in post-war Britain

Reading the newspapers and listening to television news in 1980, we could be forgiven for believing that 'crime' and disorder are now an inescapable and overwhelmingly serious reality in our cities, a significant factor in everyday experience, and, what is more, that they are problems of relatively recent origin, an expression of a very contemporary loss of Authority in civic life. It is perhaps instructive, then, on this Centenary occasion, to remind ourselves of the "crime situation" that obtained one hundred years ago in this part of industrial England at the time of the opening of the classes at Firth College on Leopold Street and the beginning of the University in Sheffield. 1880 was the year of a bitterly contested General Election in Britain, and here in Rotherham anti-Tory feelings were such as to provoke a mass riot on 9 April in front of the Ship Hotel, Westgate, with the Riot Act being read and the Streets being cleared by the Hussars (we are told) "at full gal!op up Main Street". The handful of West Riding constables who were stationed in the town joined in, "making free use of their batons" and, contemporary • accounts continue, a "grand melee ensued" [ 1 ]. According to the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, the riot was a product of the anxieties created by the unexplained presence of a large body of police and the 21st Hussars from Leeds from 11 a.m. onwards and the associated presence in the town of "young gentlemen of no particular occupation", virulently opposed to a further term of Tory Government under Disraeli, and who gathered outside the Ship Hotel (the Tories' committee rooms) [2]. The background to this riot was the recent decline in the economic situation of both the artisan and lumpenproletarian classes in Northern England, a decline had continued for some time, resulting in "large numbers" of skilled cutlers and toolmakers emigrating to the United States [3], and was only to be reversed in the mid-1880's with the wave of commercial and industrial expansion consequent on the imperial activities of British capitalists throughout the world.

D Notices-mystery of British journalism

‘A spectre,’ wrote The Times on 16 July, ‘has been haunting the Committee Corridor of the House of Commons each Tuesday morning for the past five weeks as the Select Committee on Defence has taken evidence on the workings of the D Notice system. The invisible presence in Committee Room 8 has been that of Bismarck, the maker of modern Germany.’ The DPBC ( Defence Press and Broadcasting, or D Notice, Committee) consists of four top civil servants and 11 representatives of the British press and broadcasting organisations. Its origins date back to the period before the First World War when, as The Times put it, ‘Bismarck's observation on the help French newspapers had given to the Prussian general staff in discovering the disposition of French troops in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 … convinced the British defence establishment of the need for a system of press censorship’. The Committee issues so-called D Notices giving details of information it does not wish published and relies on the voluntary cooperation of editors and journalists in suppressing the information. Interest in the system, in recent years largely forgotten, was reawakened in February this year by the publication in the New Statesman of a series of articles by Duncan Campbell on such topics as telephone tapping and the activities of the MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies. Admiral Ash, Secretary of the DPBC, wrote to Bruce Page, Editor of the New Statesman, to remind him of the ‘continuing validity’ of D Notices Nos 10 and 11 on the need to protect information concerning the intelligence services. In an exchange of letters with the Admiral, Bruce Page queried the validity of the D Notice system, which Duncan Campbell, writing in the New Statesman on 4 April, called ‘one of the greater mysteries of British journalism’ – misunderstood or ignored by British journalists and considered by their American and other foreign colleagues to be a typical example of ‘peculiarly British placid press complacency’. Many British journalists have, however, for some time now expressed criticism of the excessive secrecy with which the government and the civil service in this country conduct their affairs, campaigning for the abolition of Section Two of the Official Secrets Act ( see Index on Censorship 1/1978, pp 9–14) and for the introduction of Freedom of Information legislation. Prominent among them has been Harold Evans, Editor of the Sunday Times, and Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman. In June and July this year a Sub-Committee on D Notices of the House of Commons Defence Committee held an enquiry into the workings of the D Notice system, with members of the DPBC, as well as other civil servants and journalists giving evidence. Some, including Richard Francis, BBC director of news and current affairs and a member of the DPBC ( see box on p 39), and Windsor Clarke, editorial consultant to the Westminster Press and vice-chairman of the Committee, spoke in favour of continuing the system. It could, said Mr Clarke, be discredited within a year if sufficient journalists criticised it, but that was most unlikely, ‘as the arrangement enjoyed wide support in the press’. In a 20- page submission to the parliamentary sub-committee, Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell argue for the system's abolition. Its inception had coincided with the ‘spectacular increase in the size and power of Britain's bureaucracy, which has continued almost without check until very recently’. The DPBC had increasingly become ‘an outpost of the Ministry of Defence’ losing rather than gaining in independence. Page and Campbell analyse the contents of the existing 12 D Notices, as well as dealing with several which have been abandoned, such as the one issued in 1967 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent The Observer and Sunday Times from publishing the results of their investigations into the affair of the Soviet spy and former British Intelligence officer, Kim Philby. As in some other cases, the New Statesman journalists point out, the information was clearly known to the hostile power in question and would have been kept only from the British reader. Similarly, they describe D Notice No 9 as ‘virtually valueless’, as the British government itself publishes details of all major radio installations and the frequencies they use. ‘It is ludicrous that a D Notice is issued to prevent the British press discussing information which the government furnishes for publication overseas’. Below, we print an edited version of the evidence given to the House of Commons Sub-Committee on D Notices by Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell.

Congress argues over budget cuts, energy

The work of Congress in recent weeks has not been conducted on the floor but rather behind the scenes in corridors and committee rooms as both houses struggled to reach compromises on energy bills that have been in the works for more than a year and wrangled oyer how to balance the fiscal 1981 budget. The sudden call for a balanced budget from both the Administration and Congress comes at an awkward time. Most Congressional subcommittees already have completed hearings on the budget proposals for the agencies they oversee and many have already begun and some have completed markup of the fiscal 1981 budget authorization bills. The results, in some cases, won't help balance the budget. For example, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation has ordered reported the National Bureau of Standards' first ever authorization bill, with a budget ceiling for fiscal 1981 of $108 million, $20 million more than the Administration requested ...

The Description of Molecular Structure

With the kind permission of the chair, I dedicate this lecture to the memory of my father, Leland W. Parr, who died in December of 1973. For many years Dr. Parr was Professor of Bacteriology and Public Health at George Washington University Medical School, here in Washington. He was an accomplished research scientist and a dedicated and effective teacher. And he spent hundreds of hours in the committee rooms of the National Research Council and of the National Institutes of Health, in the service of his fellow scientists.

THE THIRD UNITED NATIONS CARTOGRAPHIC CONFERENCE FOR AFRICA ADDIS ABABA OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1972

Abstract The Conference was held in a committee room of the Africa Hall, the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Africa, whose Cartographic Adviser, Mr. Charly Antoun was Technical Secretary. Due to the short notice, only a few national reports and technical papers were available before the Conference or at the beginning; but others came through in time to be read before they were presented. There were no advanced, technical papers—it was not that sort of conference. Under the firm management of Mr. Coker (Director of Federal Surveys Nigeria and President of the Conference) and of the Technical Secretary, the actual conduct of the discussions (in English and French) was excellent. The fact that there was no splitting up into separate technical commissions and the small size of the conference (only about 80 members) made it relatively easy to start punctually and keep everyone informed of the programme. The same four interpreters functioned efficiently throughout, apd there was virtually no trouble...

Committee Integration in the Senate: A Comparative Analysis

Woodrow Wilson once noted that in session is Congress on public exhibition, while Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work.' Given the increased complexity of public affairs, Wilson's statement is certainly appropriate today. Congress in session simply cannot consider at length and in necessary detail the intricacies of contemporary problems. Gathering information and deliberating on most.issues is left to legislative committees and sub-

LABOR LOOKS AT U.S. TRADE POLICY...AND DOESN'T LIKE WHAT IT SEES

Alight cloud cover competed with the sunshine over Washington, D.C., on Monday morning, March 19, 1962. But inside the New House Office Building, in the main committee room of the House Ways and Means Committee, things were much brighter. Especially for the Kennedy Administration. Chairman Wilbur D. Mills and his Ways and Means Committee were conducting public hearings on H.R. 9900, the trade bill by which President John F. Kennedy hoped to modernize the country's 32-year-old reciprocal trade policy, launch the world into a new era of freer trade, and permit the U.S. to participate in the most ambitious round of tariffcutting negotiations the world has known—the Kennedy round. The outlook couldn't have been better. The country had chalked up an impressive trade surplus of $4.6 billion in 1960, only to follow it with a more impressive $5.5 billion in 1961. At 10 o'clock that morning, George Meany, president of the American Federation of Labor ...

On Leaving the Editorship

THE Pacific Historical Review, according to the prima facie evidence, originated in a typographical error. In 1930 the Pacific Coast Branch, after less than gratifying experience with volumes of Proceedings echoing its annual meetings, voted to launch a Pacific Coast Historical Review. Instead, what emerged in 1932 was the Pacific Historical Review. For the explanation we have to look back of the documentary record to the smoke-filled committee room. Henry Raup Wagner, for one, was adamant that the Pacific Coast or the Far West was exactly what the new journal should cover. But the committeemen in charge were westerners accustomed to thinking big. The Pacific slope was a field that Hubert Howe Bancroft had discovered and cultivated. A journal narrowed to it might be mistaken for a revival of the Academy of Pacific Coast History publications. These committeemen purposefuly shifted to the more ambitious project of encompassing the history of the entire Pacific area, the Pacific half of the world.