Female Fellow Research Articles

Millennial Men More Likely to Accept Female Leaders

Millennial Men More Likely to Accept Female Leaders

Margery Who? A biography waiting to happen

It is now almost 30 years since Dame Margery Perham, the internationally acknowledged academic expert on British colonial administration and a widely respected figure at Oxford University (Research Lecturer in Colonial Administration, 1935 and Reader 1939-48, Fellow in Imperial Government at Nuffield College, as well as being its first female Fellow, Director of the Institute of Colonial Studies and founding Director of the Oxford Colonial Records Project), died in 1982. Her work as research consultant to Lord Hailey and his team on the African Survey project (1938), her record of co-operation with the Colonial Office as a leading member of several of its committees including that set up to plan the post-war training of Colonial Service cadets (the Devonshire Courses) and her close links with a number of the new university colleges in the overseas territories, notably Makerere led to the award of the CBE in 1948.

Entrepreneurial Discovery and the Demmert/Klein Experiment: Another Attempt at Creating the Proper Context

Friedrich Hayek conjectured that the free enterprise system is the most effective in making discoveries, and Israel Kirzner refines the conjecture by saying that profit opportunities evoke entrepreneurial discovery. Demmert and Klein (2003) present the first attempt to demonstrate the Hayek/Kirzner conjecture. On the whole, Demmert and Klein (2003) classify the results as disappointing but fruitful. In contrast we argue that additional experimental evidence might yield a demonstration of the conjecture. We continued the diligence and good-faith effort started by Demmert and Klein (2003) to devise an experimental setting that would create a genuine context for entrepreneurial discovery, yet the conjecture eludes our efforts at controlling the experiment. We duplicated the experiment at a Business School in Germany, with two simple variations. First, Demmert and Klein (2003) recruited only male students. We include male and female students. Second, Demmert and Klein (2003) used a payment schedule that includes a flat rate for participation and additional earnings depending on the presented performance. We drop the flat rate and slightly reduce the earnings per unit outperformance. Our results show that overall money matters. Our results are rather like those of Demmert and Klein (2003) and do not seem to be influenced by a baseline payment. Moreover, there are gender specific divergences showing male students earning significant higher additional earnings than their female fellow students.

The emancipation of Miss Menten.

The Michaelis-Menten equation is a mathemati­ cal expression known by every chemist, biochem­ ist, and medical doctor. It is equally well-known that the equation was formulated in 1913 in a paper by the Prussian biochemist Leonor Michaelis (1875-1949) and a collaborator identified only as Miss Menten (Michaelis and Menten, 1913). The paper introduced a quantitative dimension to the study of chemical reactions, as well as (unbe­ knownst to the authors) receptor-ligand interac­ tion, and facilitated diffusion across membranes. Michaelis was Paul Ehrlich's in Berlin 1898-1899 and Director of the laboratory of the Ber­ lin Municipal Hospital 190�1922. At the age of 33, he became Professor of biochemistry at the Univer­ sity of Berlin and, in 1922, at the University of Nagoya, Japan. He emigrated to the United States in 1926 and completed his long and productive ca­ reer at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Who was Miss Menten? Standard reference works provide few answers to this question, refer­ ring to Menten simply as Michaelis' assistant or collaborator. To my knowledge no substantial biography exists of her. Yet she made a significant contribution to the biological science of the twenti­ eth century, and she was a woman. Her life raises the question of the circumstances under which the Michaelis-Menten equation was conceived, the in­ fluence of contemporary efforts in kinetics, and the influence of the joint publication on the subsequent careers of the co-authors. In addition, we may want to know more of the details of being a single, an­ glophone, female postdoctoral fellow in Berlin shortly after the tum of the century. Maud Lenora Menten was raised in Harrison Mills, Chilliwack County, British Columbia (Can­ ada). Nothing is recorded of her parents, but they

Heywood’s Adaptation of Plautus’ Rudens: The Problem of Slavery in The Captives

Heywood’s Adaptation of Plautus’ Rudens: The Problem of Slavery in The Captives Carolyn Prager Scholarly inability to localize the problem of slavery outside of anachronistic translation from the classics has resulted in a critical underestimation of Thomas Heywood’s adaptation of Plautus’ Rudens in The Captives (1624). Transported by Heywood to a contemporary European terrain, the slave elements of the play trouble the modem judgment of those prepared to accept the normalcy of chattel bondage in the world of antique Roman comedy but not in English Renaissance drama. The ab­ sence of informed perspective on the relationship of institutional slavery to the slave figure in the drama is apparent from a review of the critical writing on Heywood’s The Captives. A. H. Gilbert, the first extensively to assess Heywood’s debt to Plautus in the play, circumvents the question of slavery by ignoring it. A. C. Judson, the first modem editor of the play after Bullen, naively finds the question out of phase with the sociology of Renaissance Europe. Subsequent allusions to the slave problem follow this critical path of avoidance. A. M. Clark speaks of an “incom­ pleteness of translation into modem conditions” and G. E. Bent­ ley of the “material from Plautus . . . so incompletely adapted as to leave anachronisms in the play.”l The main plot of The Captives (poorly linked to a sub-plot which does not concern us here) centers about the rescue from prospective sale by a pimp. In Heywood as in Plautus, the girls are clearly slaves being sold into slavery in societies where trade in slaves is legitimate commercial enterprise. In each play, they fortuitously escape their owner during a storm and shipwreck. Plautus’ Greek slave girls land off the coast of Cyrene, Hey­ wood’s Englishwomen off Marseille. Palaestra, the daughter lost in infancy in either play, is rescued along with her female fellow 116 Carolyn Prager 117 slave by an unknowing father who violently opposes—though for significantly different reasons in the Roman and the English play —the procurer’s right to repossess his human property. The con­ tents of a trunk hauled from the sea in the net of a fisherman (a slave to the father in the Rudens; a countryman in The Captives) reveal the true natal identities of the girls. After the recovery by their parents, Plautus’ and Heywood’s Palaestras are joined by their lovers who have followed after them on their forced odyssey. Aside from similar mechanical contrivances of plot and char­ acter pairings, there are startling differences, mainly of moral scope, in the two plays. In the Rudens, Daemones, the father, aids the escaped girls because they have taken sanctuary in a Temple of Venus. To preserve the integrity of the sacred place, he violently rejects the attempt by the pimp Labrax to recover his slaves from the sanctuary by force. In the traditional resolu­ tion of New Comedy, Daemones frees his witty and resourceful fisherman slave (after cheating him of his money), and then in­ vites the pimp home to dine with him. Moral censure, if any, is directed against the contemporary evil of child-stealing. Chattel slavery and its moral ramifications are not controversial issues in the play. The portion of Heywood’s adaptation which so troubles modem readers—namely the enslavement, prospective barter, and redemption of the two girls—explores the contemporary abuse of slavery, a fact of life affecting Caucasians, Asians, and Africans alike in the Renaissance world.2 The father, trans­ formed by Heywood from Plautus’ lecherous recluse to a virtu­ ous English merchant, reacts with horror at the thought that Christian women might be held as common capital. Ashbume challenges their procurer with the innate right of free-bom Englishmen to freedom: “I tell thee pesant/ Englands [not] no broode ffor slaves” (11. 1536-37).3 Mildew, “a damable hee bawde” (1. 155), “ffather of ffomication,” and “duncart off dis­ eases” (1. 194), plans to emigrate from France with all his capital, including “these shee chattyles” (1. 271), the two Eng­ lish girls. A survey of the geography of most of Western Europe and its neighbors indicates that he can turn the girls, unequivo­ cally his slaves...