Older Hispanic Women and Breast Cancer Screening: Do Cultural Factors Matter?

High morbidity and mortality cancer rates among older minority adults underscores the importance of identifying and addressing health disparities related to age and cultural factors that may influence participation in cancer screening and early detection of disease. Disparities for Hispanic women exist in part due to behavior, including lower participation in cancer screenings. Using data from the 2008 wave of the Health and Retirement Study, this study investigated the relationships among cultural factors, time orientation, and uncertainty avoidance among Hispanic women. Results indicate that time orientation and uncertainty avoidance predicted older Hispanic women’s participation in breast cancer screening services.     

‘Doing Something Meaningful’: Gender and Public Service during Municipal Government Restructuring

Research on the gendered dimensions of workplace restructuring often focuses on management strategies and their structural consequences. Less attention is paid to employees’ gendered practices. In this article, we analyse material from in‐depth interviews with front‐line public‐sector employees following a major reorganization of their jobs and workplaces. Our study makes three contributions to theory and research on gender and organizational change. Firstly, it highlights the micro‐level dynamics at the heart of restructuring by showing how workers engaged with an ideal that was central to their understanding of public‐sector work — the public‐service ethic — which they believed was threatened. Secondly, it highlights the importance of gendered meanings and identities in shaping how workers engaged with the public service ethic. Thirdly, the study shows that front‐line employees did not passively accept management plans for change but struggled to resist or transform them in gendered strategies for dealing with organizational change.     

Nutrition and Fertility in Bangladesh: Breastfeeding and Post Partum Amenorrhoea

From 1975 to 1980 a prospective study a nearly 2,500 married, fertile women was conducted in Matlab, Bangladesh at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. Women were interviewed at monthly intervals to collect information on nutritional and reproductive status, in order to study the factors associated with natural fertility. The median duration of amenorrhoea for women with no child deaths was 15.5 months, with older women and those of higher parities recording longer durations than younger women or those of lower parities. Median duration of amenorrhoea for women with six or more years of education was 8.4 months compared to 16.4 months among women with no education. When classified by weight at pregnancy termination, average duration of amenorrhoea of women weighing less than 38 kg was 17.6 months compared to 13.6 months among women weighing more than 44 kg. Proportional hazards analyses show that mother's education, parity, month of birth, supplementation practices and nutritional status were significantly associated with the probability of resuming menstruation.     

A Sociology of Race/Ethnicity Textbooks: Avoiding White Privilege,Ahistoricism, and Use of the Passive Voice

Despite the centrality of the study of race and ethnic relations within the discipline, few studies have analyzed the relative merits of race/ethnicity textbooks on the market today, nor how well they represent the current state of the research. This article addresses this problem through a content analysis of the five best-selling race/ethnicity textbooks in the field. The findings suggest that these sociology texts generally avoid the issue of white privilege, are often ahistorical, and usually adopt the use of the passive voice in accounting for racism. I argue that these problems not only fail to reflect recent developments in the sociology of race/ethnicity accurately, but they also interfere with a student's ability to understand race as a social construction and to place contemporary racial inequalities in an historical context. Additionally, by utilizing the passive voice in their discussion of racism in the United States, textbooks often fail to implicate the perpetrators of racism, generally whites, reinforcing the dominant ideology that American society reflects what Bonilla-Silva (2006 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, 2nd, Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield.  [Google Scholar]) has termed “racism without racists.”     

Book reviews

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Ira Berlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1998. x, 497pp. $29.95. ISBN 0–674–81092–9.

More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. xi, 341 pp. £14.99 (paper). ISBN 0–253–21043–7.

From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. Seymour drescher. Foreword by Stanley L. Engerman. London: Macmillan. 1999. xxv, 454pp. £55.00. ISBN 0–333–73748–2.

Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Shane White and Graham White. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 1998. xv. 301pp. £23.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–80143179–4.

Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 1998. 269pp. $25.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–674–74711–9.

Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan. John W. Quist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1998. xi, 562pp. £45.90. ISBN 0–8071–2133–9.

Frccdpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860–1900. Jeffrey R. Kerr‐Ritchie. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina press. 1999. xv, 345 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8078–2460–7; 0–8078–4763–1.

The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans. Barry A. Crouch. Austin: University of Texas at Austin Press. 1999. xix, 187pp. $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–292–71219–7.

Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. B.W. Higman. Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies. 1998. xv, 384pp. £20.00/$35.00. ISBN 976–640–039–3.

In Place of Slavery: A Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laborers in Suriname. Rosemarijn Hoefte. Gainsville: University of Florida Press. 1998. xii, 275pp. $49.95. ISBN 0–8130–1625–8.

Writing West Indian Histories. B.W. Higman. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. 1999. xiv, 289 pp. £15.50 (paper). ISBN 0–333–73296–0.

Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues. Edited by Tom Brass and Marcel Van Der Linden. Bern/Berlin/Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang. 1997 (International and Comparative Social History 5). 602 pp. £52.00. ISBN 3–906756–87–4.

Servicing the Master. Slavery and Society in Nineteenth Century Morocco. Mohammed Ennaji. Translated by Seth Graebner. London: Macmillan, 1999. xix, 166pp. £35.00. ISBN 0–333–75477–8.

Servants of Allah. Sylviane A. Diouf. New York: New York University Press. 1998. vii, 254 pp. $18.50. ISBN 0–8147–1905–8     

Anomic suicide: A Durkheimian analysis of European normlessness

ABSTRACT

According to Durkheim (1897), periods of economic, social, or political change result in a state of anomie or normlessness. Anomic periods lead to deregulation of desires and suffering. Durkheim hypothesized that, as an expression of suffering, societies and groups experience an increase in suicide rates. This paper provides two formal tests of Durkheim’s (1897) theory of anomie - a behavioral aggregate analysis and an attitudinal individual-level analysis - on the backdrop of the 2008 economic crash. The first analysis assesses the relationship between unemployment and suicide in the European Union between 2000 and 2010. Results provide conditional support for Durkheim's theory: suicide rates increased following the crash and decreased once economic stability resumed in 2010 for males only. A second attitudinal analysis identified factors contributing to the gendered relationship between anomie and suicide. Results indicated that traditional Durkheimian regulatory mechanisms, such as marriage and divorce, contributed to the gender-specific results.     

The Gender Gap in Physical and Life Sciences: Masculinity,Femininity, Occupational Values,and Chilly Climate

Abstract

Although women have advanced considerably in science achievement, course taking, degrees earned, and professional positions held over the past four decades, most of this growth in female representation within the sciences has been confined to the life sciences while women's representation in physical, engineering, and mathematical (PEM) sciences remains recalcitrantly low. Many studies of this problem emphasize that life sciences are more compatible with stereotypical feminine personality characteristics, while PEM sciences are associated with traits understood to be culturally masculine. Operationalizing masculine and feminine personality traits with the Bem Sex Role Inventory, we test a series of hypotheses addressing the extent to which masculine and feminine personality characteristics explain why female STEM majors are less likely to be enrolled in a PEM science major compared to a life science major with a sample of 425 STEM majors drawn from a large, public, STEM-oriented university.