Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create

Review of \u3ci\u3eWriting the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women\u27s West\u3c/i\u3e Edited with introduction by Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage

This collection of twenty-nine essays, some previously published, aspires to assemble some of the most important new work on women in the multicultural West and to challenge a monocultural national narrative. The focus on the West assumes that region is a meaningful analytical category. In addition, the editors argue that the dynamic of waves of migration to contested territory could stand as a process common to the nation\u27s entire history. Because of the nature of an essay collection, the latter aspiration is difficult to sustain as a coherent argument. Nonetheless, the collection succeeds as a fairly comprehensive introduction to the recent scholarship on women\u27s history in the multicultural West. The essays, divided into seven thematic and roughly chronological parts, begin with the colonial period and end in the 1980s. Each section opens with a short introduction explaining different approaches to studying Western women\u27s ethnic, racial, class, and gender experiences. These are gems, with clear, richly-informed explanations of often complex theoretical issues. This structure does create several odd juxtapositions and uneven coverage, however. Only in the section on recent history do any essays address the urban West. African American women are discussed in the section titled Seeking Empowerment but not in the one focusing on Newcomers. To some extent this reflects the historiography of various fields. For example, Western urban history in general tends to focus on the twentieth century; historians rarely treat African Americans as migrants, except as slaves or participants in the early twentieth-century\u27s Great Migration. The division into parts based on theoretical approaches seems less useful than a straightforward chronological arrangement. With a collection this large and a review space this limited, one cannot possibly do justice to the individual essays\u27 complexity. In general, the volume works extremely well. Its editors\u27 introduction provides clear theoretical definitions of its main terms (such as West and multicultural ), observing as well that within its diversity of topics are several themes whose commonalities grow out of the collection\u27s overall focus on women: work, intimate relationships, sexuality, reproduction, and access to power. Six excellent bibliographies divide entries by ethnic subject and are sure to be invaluable teaching and research tools. Writing the Range would make an excellent text for courses in Western women\u27s history, the West, or women and multiculturalism

Book Review: Women of the Northern Plains: Gender and Settlement on the Homestead Frontier, 1870- 1930

Focusing on the history of North Dakota farm women from the years of settlement and community-building to the transition to an industrial, consumer economy, Handy-Marchello argues that North Dakota farm marriages of necessity were economic partnerships throughout this period

Discoveries in the meaning of domesticity : middle-class women and cultural change in the United States, 1870-1900

Photocopy of typescript.Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industrie