Witness in Blood and Flames

THERE had been light showers everyday in Belgrade and the sky wasovercast at night. Judging by pastexperience, NATO's planes would notcome. Just the opposite; not only did it notstop, but bombing escalated in Yugoslaviabefore the eve of NATO's 50th anniversarycelebration. On the evening of the 20th, I wasawakened by the sounds of two terribleexplosions shortly after I went to sleep. As I     

Mountains in Mist and Clouas

Wu Lizhu, 54, of Changli. Hebei Province, is a graduate of the department of traditional Chinese painting at the Central Institute of Fine Arts. Her teachers have included the famous traditional Chinese painters Li Keran, Ye Qianyu, Li Kuchan and Jiang Zhaohe. Since her graduation, she has been doing publishing work. Wu is an accomplished landscape painter. She has visited scenic spots in many parts of the country, and based on her observations and experiences, she expresses her own pure     

Onwards and Upwards? Gender and Work in Ireland

It can be argued that the Irish workforce has been revolutionised over the past 25 years, as married women entered the world of paid work in increasing numbers, bolstering the female participation rate. There have also been changes in gender roles and gender role attitudes over the period. This review will present sociological research analysing this major social change, including research that places the Irish case in a comparative European and international context. The review will mirror the main foci of the field, paying particular attention to research on gender role attitudes, occupational segregation and unpaid work. The gendering of the Irish workforce has been a complex and uneven process, involving continuities as well as changes. Overall, the sexual division of labour remains a key feature of paid and unpaid work in Ireland, and the concept has considerable explanatory power in relation to persistent gender inequalities.     

Women and Children's Health in Tibet

AS a doctor in the management of maternity and children's hygiene in the Tibet Autonomous Region for nearly 20 years, I would like to present a brief introduction of the situation of Tibetan women and children's health, as well as the related services. Prior the Liberation in Tibet, this region coveting over 1.2 million square kilometers, had few health care facilities for women and children. Such activities were carried out by three Tibetan medical institutions, a small number of folk doctors of Tibetan medicine, and a few private clinics. Under the feudal serf system in Tibet, women who gave birth were discriminated against because it was considered an obscene act. Women could not give birth in their tent homes, but were instead forced to seek shelter in cow stalls or sheepfolds no matter how severe the weather. Women and children at the time had no rights to health care. Countless women and children died of birthing complications or     

White-collar Ladies in Beijing and Shanghai

Wang Huan, assistant to the general manager, describes Beijing's tourist attractions to foreign friends at the International Tourism Business Fair in Germany.     

Children’s Relationships With Grandparents in Married and in Shared and Sole Physical Custody Families

ABSTRACT

Grandparents can be an important source of support for their grandchildren in the often difficult time during and after parents’ divorce or separation. Grandchild–grandparent relationships can be hampered or even totally lost when parents separate, however. What happens with grandparent relationships when parents break up is closely linked to postdivorce physical custody arrangements. This article focuses on the beneficial role that grandparent relationships can play after parents separate and examines how grandparent–grandchild relationships differ in shared and sole physical custody arrangements.     

Preventing Tragedy in Canada? Risk and Responsibility in Government Discourses about Alcohol Consumption and Pregnancy

The feminist analysis presented in this article interrogates the fundamental assumptions that informed the first document produced by the Canadian government about alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Our analysis shows that constructions of risk and responsibility are rooted in neoliberal principles. We argue that such ideas can reinforce a problematic notion of individualization that is at the core of the neoliberal state—one that devalues a sense of social responsibility for the public good and contributes to a highly moralized pregnancy discourse that encourages the widespread surveillance of women’s reproductive bodies and behaviors.     

Challenges and transformations: childbearing and changes in teens’ educational aspirations and expectations

Although much of the focus on teen childbearing has been on its potential costs to teen parents and their children, emerging research suggests that teen childbearing while challenging can be a positively transformative experience for teens. One such transformation is enhanced educational aspirations and expectations. Much of the research on the positive consequences of teen childbearing for teens’ educational orientations, however, has come from in-depth interviews with teen mothers that have methodological limitations. Using panel data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and NLSY79 – Young Adult Survey 1994 (NLSY79-YA) this study finds that over time, teens’ educational expectations and aspirations increase, on average, regardless of parental status. Nevertheless, there is significant heterogeneity in how expectations and aspirations change. Teen parents have lower odds of increasing, and greater odds of decreasing, their aspirations and expectations over a 2-year period compared to their childless counterparts. These patterns, however, shift across cohorts. Unlike the NLSY79, there are no differences in the odds of lowering aspirations and expectations between teen parents and non-parents in the NLSY79-YA. Moreover, the lower odds of increasing aspirations/expectations among mothers and white teen parents compared to fathers and black teen parents in the NLSY79 cohort are not found in the NLSY79-YA.     

Do Schooling and Work Empower Women in Developing Countries? Gender and Domestic Decisions in Sri Lanka

Our work challenges and points out the limitations of the theoretical presumptions underlying the relationship between empowerment, education, and employment that have been emphasized in both the exiting literature and the current rhetoric to empower women in developing countries. We use survey, life history, and focus group data to empirically examine the relationship between schooling, paid work, and power in domestic decision making for young, married women in Sri Lanka. We argue that the relationship between education, work, and women's control of household decisions is conditioned by the larger social context, and as such, it is likely to reflect the extent to which the division of labor and access to information and economic resources are the bases of domestic power in the society under consideration. Our results make a strong case for the need to move away from broad-based conceptualizations of women's empowerment to a consideration of the specific arenas and dimensions along which women can have power. In focusing on the domestic arena alone, we find that there are important differences in both the nature and determinants of the financial as opposed to the social and organizational dimension of power in Sri Lankan households. Women who control one of these aspects of family decisions do not necessarily control the other, and while education and employment play an important role in determining women's input in financial decisions, they are largely immaterial in determining household decisions related to social and organizational matters. Our results also demonstrate the importance of going beyong simplistic and limited measures of schooling and work to consider more fundamental structural factors involving family, social, and economic organization.     

Citizens’ Jury and Elder Care: Public Participation and Deliberation in Long-Term Care Policy in Thailand

Health care policies for the elderly are complex, multidimensional, and contextually circumscribed. While engagement of health experts, economists, health care administrators, and political leaders is generally viewed as instrumental to the success and sustainability of eldercare programs, the elders themselves are often viewed as passive recipients of care and not included in the policy processes. Experiences and expectations from users’ perspectives can be invaluable information for policy formulation and systems design. This paper examines a participatory policy process using a “citizens’ jury” to promote public engagement in eldercare policy. The process was initiated by the National Health Commission Office in Thailand to explore how a citizens’ jury as a model for civic deliberation can be utilized to provide sophisticated policy recommendations on long-term care policies for the elderly. The objectives of this paper are to (1) examine how public participation in health policy can be actualized through the citizens’ jury as an operational model, (2) understand the strengths and weaknesses of the ways the idea was implemented, and (3) provide recommendations for further use of the model. Details of how a citizens’ jury was deployed are discussed, with recommendations for further use provided at the end.     

Generation and complicity in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light

Zoë Wicomb's novel Playing in the Light (2006 Wicomb, Z. 2006. Playing in the light, New York: New Press.  [Google Scholar]) continues to address a central concern in Wicomb's earlier fiction, that of conflict between generations where the racist complicity of an older generation is addressed from the point of view of their children. Generation is, in Wicomb's work, not simply a concern for individual families but deeply connected to and reflective of the political legacy of coloured identities. ‘Playing white’ gains its particular meaning within the question of complicity – the association of whiteness with superiority, and the very real privilege granted to persons classified as white under the Population Registration Act. In the aesthetic theory of the German philosopher Hans‐Georg Gadamer the concept of ‘play’ is used to address the function of the work of art. The opposition between play and seriousness is, according to Gadamer, a result of a one‐sided focus on the player rather than the play itself as subject. The metaphorical use of play in the expression ‘play‐whites’ also suggests that the game itself is what has primacy, not the players. By addressing the issue of ‘playing white’ through a depiction of conflicts between generations, Wicomb's novel approaches history in a manner that evokes Gadamer's concept of gleichzeitigkeit (contemporaneity) whereby history becomes present in its enactment through the work of art.     

Early Women's Newspapers and Magazines in China

WOMEN'S newspapers and magazines began to appear in China almost a century ago, during the Constitutional Reform and Modernization (1898), which is also referred as the Reform Movement of 1898. When the western bourgeois democratic ideology was introduced to China at the end of the 19th century, the Chinese bourgeoisie, influenced by the thought of equality of the sexes, initiated the women's movement. This movement was mainly characterized by promoting women's education, the abolition of foot-binding and the founding of publications for women.     

HEALTH: Women and Children in China

IN terms of both time period and implementation, China has accomplished nearly 50 percent of her goal for decreasing the 1989 mortality rate of infants and children below the age of five by as much as one-third by the year 2000. According to the Ministry of Public Health (MPH) statistics released in August, 1996, China's maternal mortality rate decreased from 94.7 per 100,000 in 1989 to only 39.2 in 1995. Figures for rural     

Birth Control and Family Planning in China

THIS year, Women of China asked two 30-year-old women from the Yimeng mountain area in Shandong Province about their chosen methods of birth control. Both women reported using intrauterine devices (IUDs), which they had placed by local gynecologists at the hospital 40 days after giving birth. Are these women aware of other contraceptive methods? Some rural women tell us they know of other methods such as oral contraception, contraceptive implants and tubal ligation.     

Marriage and Spouse Selection in Present Shanghai

RECENTLY, 1,456 people in Shanghai were investigated for their marriages. The result was that the reason for marriage, age and the way of seeking partners has changed. The Reasons for Marriage According to the investigation, most people in Shanghai married first for reproduction purposes, so as to continue the family line and to further society. In     

Maternity and Child Care in Yinan County

YINAN is a poor county in the Yimeng Mountain Area in Shandong Province. It has a population of 900,000, over 80 percent of whom live in rural areas and about 600,000 of whom are women and children. Protecting the health of women and children is not only important to reach the goal "Everyone Enjoys Health Protection by the year 2000" and the goals set out in the "Program for Chinese Children's Development in the 1990s," but also has a crucial influence on the     

Living in Sin? Religion and Cohabitation in Britain 1985–2005

Frequency of cohabitation among 13,703 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985–2005 peaked at around 26–30 years of age and increased significantly over the period of study. Cohabitation frequency was compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates who (a) attended church at least once a month, (b) attended church but less than once a month, and (c) never attended church. Active Christians were 3.2 times less likely to cohabit than nonaffiliates, and rates of cohabitation have remained stable over time in this group. Christian affiliates who never attended church were 1.2 times less likely to cohabit than nonaffiliates, suggesting that even affiliation without attendance may indicate greater affinity to Christian moral attitudes compared with nonaffiliates.     

Examining cultural and gender similarities and differences in college students’ value of communication skills in romantic relationships

This study assessed and compared the communication skills that native Chinese and native American college students value in the context of romantic relationships. A total of 319 Chinese and 262 American college students responded to questionnaires that assessed the values they placed on six different communication skills. The results showed that the American students valued four of six communication skills more than the Chinese students (i.e. conversational, informative, listening, and narrative skills). The men and women in both cultural groups valued affective communication skills more than instrumental communication skills. In both cultural groups, women placed greater value on affective communication skills than men. The findings also showed a significant mediating effect of gender orientation (masculinity and femininity) on the value placed on communication skills and a significant effect of self-construal, which mediated between nationality and the value assigned to communication skills.