Betty J. Harris

Gender Equity in Industrial Engineering: A Pilot Study

We report on findings from a pilot study focused on the Industrial Engineering Department at University of Oklahoma where gender equity has been achieved. The study identifies factors that may contribute to gender parity in engineering and science fields.

Native American women and men: Migration and urbanization

Bahr, Diana Meyers. From Mission to Metropolis: Cupeno Indian Women in Los Angeles. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. xii + 184 pp. including afterword, endnotes, and index.

Industrialisation in Swaziland

24.95 cloth. Boyer, Ruth McDonald and Narcissus Duffy Gayton. Apache Mothers and Daughters: Four Generations of a Family. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. xx + 393 pp. including endnotes, bibliography, and index.

Female Workers in Cottage Industries and Factories

24.95 cloth. Weibel‐Orlando, Joan. Indian Country, L.A. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991. xii + 354 pp. including appendix, bibliography and index.

Secondary Industrialisation in South Africa

34.95 cloth.

Conclusion: Cottage Industries, Factories and Female Wage Labour

Chapter 2 focused on the political economy of textile industrialisation in South Africa, to provide a context in which to analyse the emergence and development of Swaziland’s peripheral political economy. However, just as South Africa exhibited a different pattern of industrialisation from European countries, Swaziland has experienced a modified version of the South African process. Mining and plantation agriculture began in the former at the turn of the century. Manufacturing has been introduced in two spurts, with agricultural processing beginning in the late 1940s and textile industrialisation in the 1980s. While men figured prominently in early industrialisation, women became involved later.

A Lesotho Comparison: Elusive Industrialisation and Labour Migration

There is a paucity of literature on women and work in southern Africa. Until the 1970s, the vast majority of social science literature dealt with male labour migrancy to the South African gold mines. At that time, there was a shift of focus on to women in the family context in peripheral areas — local labour reserves within national labour reserves. However, women had participated in semi-industrial employment in some areas of the southern African periphery since the 1960s and even earlier in others. Cottage industries were the major semi-industrial employers for women in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland as well as the South African homelands. It was not until the 1980s that South African textile industries began to tap systematically into the female labour reserve. Many problems related to women and work in southern Africa still await in-depth research.

A SADCC Comparison: Regionalism and Industrial Development

Swaziland’s industrialisation process cannot be analysed without establishing the South African semi-periphery as a context in relation to which Swaziland derives its peripheral status as well as the pace and quality of its industrialisation. After establishing the mechanisms directing South African secondary industrialisation in this chapter, I will consider the Swaziland political economy in Chapter 3. However, the relationship between core and periphery will be explored with regard to the BLS countries’ relationship with South Africa via the Southern African Customs Union (SACU).

Agricultural production in Swaziland.

Industrialisation in southern Africa, as elsewhere, has been a complex process in its transformation from core to semi-periphery to periphery. It has initiated the formation of a hierarchy of political economies which have considerable complementarity. To analyse the periphery, the core and semi-peripheral contexts must be established.

Achieving Parity of the Sexes at the Undergraduate Level: A Study of Success

In Chapters 2 and 3, the semi-periphery-periphery relationship between the political economies of Swaziland and South Africa was established to provide a context for analysing women and textile industrialisation. This chapter is devoted to an analysis of the Lesotho political economy for purposes of interperipheral comparison. In some of the literature on Swaziland, it has been suggested that instead of comparing it to Botswana and Lesotho a more apt comparison is Zimbabwe.1 Certainly, Swaziland’s sizeable European population distinguishes it from Botswana and Lesotho. However, there are historical similarities among these countries.