Growing Up in the Old Left: An Intergenerational Tale of Silence and Terror

This essay explores the intergenerational transmission of trauma that arises from political repression. Using mine and my family’s experiences of the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, I explore the psychic effects of the political terror and silencing that accompanied my growing up as a Red Diaper Baby and the profound internal shifts that occur when the social surround becomes a place of danger. I look at my family’s experience in the left during the 1950s and I consider the fear that couldn’t be registered, our unexpressed grief and loss, and the multiple contradictions against which our silence defended. Viewing my personal history through a psychoanalytic lens (e.g., Freud, Gerson, Butler, Puget), and considering a clinical example, I explore the ways the social surround of state-imposed terror during the 1950s was elaborated internally from my earliest years, shaping and shaped by my interpersonal experience and intrapsychic fantasy. I also consider the pre-McCarthy era family history that gave nuance to our experience in the 1950s and the emergence in my clinical work of my history of having been terrorized and silenced by the state. Finally, I briefly reflect on the interweaving of political repression and gendered silence.     

Wife's Education and Urban Family Size in India: The Form of the Relationship

Abstract

The paper examines the net relationship between wife's education and completed family size based on data on 48,5 women, ages 40–49, from one city in India. The results indicate that wife's education has a curvilinear (inverted U) relationship with completed family size. Up to a threshold level of 4.4 years, an increase in wife's education results in larger completed family size; beyond this point it has a depressing effect on family size.     

Male Infertility: Integrating an Old Psychoanalytic Story with the Research Literature

Male infertility, different from female infertility, is characterized by anxiety about sexual adequacy, potency, and manliness. This assault on a man's sense of self revives feelings of competition, castration, and experiences of developmental trauma. In this article we review the literature on male factor infertility and its relationship to psychogenic impotence and to psychological fertility in the larger sense. We also discuss spermatogenesis, sperm donation, and the emotional implications for men of the new reproductive technologies. Finally, we consider the effect on the couple relationship and the value of psychological treatment.     

Beyond "banking for the poor": credit mechanisms and women's empowerment

This article describes some strengths and limitations of credit programs for women in developing countries. It is urged that development planners recognize the importance of the selection of the type of credit mechanism in the long term. Ethical issues should be decided upon before the credit mechanism is operable. Organizations should make clear what level of commitment there is to empower borrowers. Most organizations give loans to women and assume empowerment will take place without devising strategies to ensure empowerment. Credit mechanisms include credit for the poor and credit by the poor. A sound financial portfolio and 100% repayment are not the appropriate criteria for securing the empowerment of women. Empowerment of women is related to "building the capacity of borrowers to manage and control decision making." UNICEF's framework of gender equality and women's empowerment identifies levels of empowerment as "welfare, access, conscientisation, participation, and control." Development planners should be aware that provision of credit also has the potential to increase a poor family's debt. Delinquency may be hidden by overlapping loans that trap borrowers. Fewer installment payments increase the chances of a debt trap. Reducing the number of installments may reduce administrative costs and conform to production processes, but may also lead to a debt trap. There is now considerable emphasis on investing in low-income women entrepreneurs as a highly efficient means of achieving social and economic objectives. Credit programs aim to support the growth of small, self-sustaining businesses, to improve women's opportunities, and to provide alternatives to exploitation by local money-lenders. This article describes the following credit mechanisms: bank guarantee systems, government credit schemes, intermediary projects, direct lending projects, banks for the poor, credit unions, and village-based banks.     

The Heart of the Story:

No abstract available for this article.     

The Mother-in-Law Mystique: A Tale of Conflict,Criticism and Resistance

While women have been described in various disciplines as the kin keepers of family relationships, empirical data show that the greatest rivalry in newly constructed heterosexual families exists between two women: the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. Numerous rituals are employed across cultures in order to ease the expected tension between these two rival women. Yet, the topic seems to have been overlooked by feminist and family therapy research alike. Inspired by Bowen's (1978) concept of differentiation of self and Linn's (1998) and Gilligan's (Linn & Gilligan, 1990) ideas of the resisting self, the present study examines these female rivals as moral critics in the war zone of the family. The study sample consists of 14 mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, and sons/husbands, belonging to five Israeli families of diverse cultural origin. Gilligan's Listening Guide was used to assess how participants saw the dilemmas of their situation, adopted a critical distance, and formed an authoritative moral voice.     

The Tale and the Novel: Pasternak and the Politics of Genre

This paper examines Soviet regional periodicals for women from their beginning as special stranichki in newspapers to the end of the 1930s, when they became instruments for publicizing mass campaigns. In the 1920s—when these periodicals were subject to market mechanisms and had to be profitable in order to survive—they presented a vibrant blend of practical advice, fashion, and emancipatory promises. With the advent of the First Five-Year Plan, the contents of women’s magazines changed dramatically and came to include an ever greater emphasis on the Party leadership and the latest propaganda campaigns. However, a close examination of the periodicals also reveals that the transmission of information, tropes, language, and images from the centre to the periphery was not always smooth or unidirectional. Local periodicals could initiate campaigns, delay publicizing them, and sometimes virtually ignore them.     

The making of the "women's physician" in American obstetrics and gynecology: re-forging an occupational identity and a division of labor

After struggling as a surgical specialty, obstetrics and gynecology initiated its "women physician" program in the 1970s. This program officially defined the mostly male obstetricians and gynecologists at that time as women's primary care physicians. Using archival data, this article explains this development as a response to the specialty's dishonored position within the medical division of labor. Whatever else it was intended to be, the women's physician program, in its most developed form, aimed to galvanize the various interests within obstetrics and gynecology behind a strategy to restructure the medical division of labor serving women so that obstetricians and gynecologists controlled both the upstream positions responsible for their own case referrals and the downstream positions to which they referred their difficult cases. The article illustrates the importance of integrating insights from both macro-institutional and intra-occupational explanatory frameworks in accounting for significant developments in medicine.     

The Material Value of Color: The Estate Agent's Tale

This article is based on research of estate agents' advice to residential vendors and landlords in inner London. The article discusses the point when the potential value of the property is geared up for realization. In this process the value is assessed by the agent as lying in the “presentation” of the property. This is paradoxical in that the materiality of the dwelling where much of its agency lies, is idealized as “neutral.” Color devalues, or at least impedes the velocity of property exchanges. This article seeks to dissect the historiography of “neutrality,” the erasures and dematerialization it represents, and its effect on property as commodity and as fetish.     

Protestant women in the late Soviet era: gender,authority, and dissent

At the peak of the anti-religious campaigns under Nikita Khrushchev, communist propaganda depicted women believers as either naïve dupes, tricked by the clergy, or as depraved fanatics; the Protestant “sektantka” (female sectarian) was a particularly prominent folk-devil. In fact, as this article shows, women’s position within Protestant communities was far more complex than either of these mythical figures would have one believe. The authors explore four important, but contested, female roles: women as leaders of worship, particularly in remote congregations where female believers vastly outnumbered their male counterparts; women as unofficial prophetesses, primarily within Pentecostal groups; women as mothers, replenishing congregations through high birth rates and commitment to their children’s religious upbringing; and women as political actors in the defence of religious rights. Using a wide range of sources, which include reports written by state officials, articles in the church journal, letters from church members to their ecclesiastical leaders in Moscow, samizdat texts, and oral history accounts, the authors probe women’s relationship with authority, in terms of both the authority of the (male) ministry within the church, and the authority of the Soviet state.