Working-class Home Research Articles

Andrew R. Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the “Social Question” in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. vii + 238 pp. $45.00 cloth.

The dramatic transformations wrought by industrialization and the accompanying demographic shifts made nineteenth-century European cities veritable factories of contagion and disease. Contaminated water supplies, inadequate sewer systems, overcrowded housing, and poorly ventilated workplaces ensured the spread of typhoid fever, diptheria, tuberculosis, and cholera. Like their counterparts in other industrializing countries, French government officials recognized that the “social question,” common parlance for the political and social problems caused by poverty and general working-class discontent, constituted their most formidable domestic political challenge. But according to Andrew R. Aisenberg, the French state, unlike its European counterparts, was faced with a unique predicament: How could a government rooted in a political tradition that established the family as the “inviolable site” of individualism and liberty, justify intervention in the home in the name of the public welfare? In other words, how could the state address the “social question” if the home—especially the working-class home, the very locus of poverty and its attendant problems—was politically off-limits?

Modernity and the Self

Modernity and the Self

Working-Class Home Ownership in the American Metropolis

Working-Class Home Ownership in the American Metropolis

The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams writes of how, after a boyhood in a Welsh village, he came to the city, to Cambridge, only then to hear townsmen, academics, an influential version of what country life, country literature, really meant: a prepared and persuasive cultural history (6). This odd double movement, this irony, in which one only begins to understand the place one has come from through the act of leaving it, proved to be one of the shaping forces of Williams's career-so that, some 35 years after having first gone down to Cambridge, he was still to ask himself: Where do I stand . . . in another country or in this valuing city? (6) A similar irony, I think, describes my own relations to the university. I was raised in a working-class home in Philadelphia, but it was only when I went away to college that I heard the term working class used or began to think of myself as part of it. Of course by then I no longer was quite part of it, or at least no longer wholly or simply part of it, but I had also been at college long enough to realize that my relations to it were similarly ambiguous-that here too was a community whose values and interests I could in part share but to some degree would always feel separate from. This sense of difference, of overlap, of tense plurality, of being at once part of several communities and yet never wholly a member of one, has accompanied nearly all the work and study I have done at the university. So when, in the past few years, a number of teachers and theorists of writing began to talk about the idea of community as somehow central to our work, I was drawn to what was said. Since my aim here is to argue for a more critical look at a

Impact of maternal postnatal depression on cognitive development of young children.

Ninety four women and their first born children took part in a longitudinal study of maternal mental health during pregnancy and after delivery. The children's cognitive functioning was assessed at age 4 using the McCarthy scales, without knowledge of the mothers' psychiatric history or current health. As expected girls performed slightly better than boys and children from middle class and professional families did better than children from working class homes, as did children whose mothers had achieved at least one A level at school. Significant intellectual deficits were found in the children whose mothers had suffered with depression, but only when this depression occurred in the first year of the child's life. Marital conflict and a history of paternal psychiatric problems were independently linked with lower cognitive test scores; together with a working class home background these were the only factors that contributed to the deleterious effect of maternal postnatal depression.

The Commonwealth Labour Party in Northern Ireland, 1942–7

The Commonwealth Labour Party (Northern Ireland), hereafter referred to as the C.L.P., came into existence on 19 December 1942. Its birth was the result of a split in the ranks of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (N.I.L.P.). This split centred on the personality and the political outlook of the man who had led the N.I.L.P since 1932, and who was to be leader of the C.L.P during its five-year lifespan: Harry Midgley.Midgley (1892-1957) was, by the time of the formation of the C.L.P., one of the best-known and most controversial politicians in Northern Ireland. Born into a working-class protestant home in north Belfast, he acquired an early political education as a youth through the medium of the Independent Labour Party organisation in the city. He was close, at least initially, to William Walker, the most outstanding labour leader produced by the north of Ireland during the early troubled years of the labour movement. In addition, he met and listened to some of the most eminent spokesmen of British labour, most notably Keir Hardie. Midgley served his time as a joiner in the Workman Clark shipyard (where his father was a labourer) before spending a brief period in America in 1913 and 1914. After serving in the Ulster division in the First World War, he returned to Belfast in 1919 and quickly got himself a job as a trade-union organiser with the Linenlappers’ Union.

Recommodification and Working-Class Home Ownership

Abstract The paper examines recent shifts towards recommodifying state housing in South Africa. The reasons for these changes are discussed. The consequences for those who are presently state housing tenants are explored, and various approaches to the political significance of home ownership re-examined. The paper concludes by sketching the new terrain of struggle over the housing question in South African cities.

Sydney John Folley, 1906-1970

Sydney John Folley was born on 14 January 1906 into a working-class family in Swindon, Wilts. He died on 29 June 1970. His father, Thomas John Folley of 75 Graham Street, Swindon, who died in 1950 at the age of 83 years, was for more than 40 years an engine fitter in the Great Western Railway Running Shed at Swindon. His mother, Katie Folley (née Baggs), died in 1938 at the age of 67 years. John Folley, as he was always known, had an elder sister, but was an only son. He was twice married, first, in 1935, to Madeline Kerr of Altrincham, Cheshire, and, then, when this marriage was dissolved in 1947, to Mary Lee Muntz (née Harnett) of Reading. There were no children of either marriage. Folley was proud of the railwaymen in his family and he was fascinated by trains. His maternal grandfather and his paternal great-grandfather both worked in one capacity or another for the Great Western and his paternal grandfather was a well known passenger driver on that railway. He recalls that his childhood circumstances were those usual in households of the skilled artisan class, but that his parents had a great respect for and were fully aware of the value of education. They were anxious to make it possible for both their children to take full advantage of every educational opportunity and were prepared to make considerable sacrifices to this end. ‘Perhaps the number of books in my home, when I was a child, was unusual for a working class home at that time. Probably, many of them were school books of my sister who was 8 years my senior and had received a secondary education after winning a scholarship. From an early age I had a passion for reading and took full advantage of these books’.

Working-class Home Conditions in London

Working-class Home Conditions in London