Constance A. Nathanson

Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence.

Acknowledgments Part I: Introduction 1. Sexuality and Social Control Part II: Private Behavior as a Public Problem 2. Setting the Stage, 1960-1972 3. Making the Revolution, 1972-1978 4. Countermovements, 1978-1987 Part III: American Womens Adolescence in Historical Context 5. The Transformation of Womens Adolescence, 1850-1960 6. Rescue Work to Social Work: Management of the Sexually Unorthodox Girl 7. Social Movements for Sexual Control, 1885-1920 Part IV: Aspects of the Contemporary Scene 8. Contemporary Models of Sexual and Reproductive Control 9. The Limits of Professional Power: Medicine as an Agency of Moral Reform 10. Private Behavior and Personal Control: Contraceptive Management Strategies of Adolescent Women Part V: Conclusion 11. Sexual Social Control and the Management of Social Change Notes Bibliography Index

Social Movements as Catalysts for Policy Change: The Case of Smoking and Guns

Social movements organized around perceived threats to health play an important role in American life as advocates for change in health policies and health behaviors. This article employs a framework drawn from social movement and related sociological theories to compare two such movements: the smoking/tobacco control movement and the gun control movement. A major purpose of the article is to identify specific social movement ideologies and actions that are more or less likely to facilitate achievement of the movements health policy objectives. The article concludes that the success of health-related social movements is associated with (1) the articulation of a socially (as well as scientifically) credible threat to the publics health, (2) the ability to mobilize a diverse organizational constituency, and (3) the convergence of political opportunities with target vulnerabilities.

Collective Actors and Corporate Targets in Tobacco Control: A Cross-National Comparison

Cross-national comparative analysis of tobacco control strategies can alert health advocates to how opportunities for public health action, types of action, and probabilities for success are shaped by political systems and cultures. This article is based on case studies of tobacco control in the United States, Canada, Britain, and France. Two questions are addressed: (a) To whom were the dangers of smoking attributed? and (b) What was the role of collective action—grassroots level organization—in combating these dangers? Activists in Canada, Britain, and France moved earlier than the United States did to target the tobacco industry and the state. Locally based advocacy centered on passive smoking has been far more important in the United States. The author concludes that U.S.-style advocacy has played a major role in this country’s smoking decline but is insufficient in and of itself to change the corporate practices of a wealthy and politically powerful industry.

The Marmot Review: Social revolution by Stealth

“Rise up with me against the organisation of misery” is the epigraph chosen by Sir Michael Marmot for his deceptively bureaucratic report to Britain’s Secretary of State for Health on the policy challenge of health inequalities. Those words, from the poet and icon of the left, Pablo Neruda, are a reasonably accurate summary of the report’s underlying message: “the fundamental drivers that give rise to [social inequalities in health are] inequities in power, money and resources”(Marmot, 2010, p.16), and serious engagement with those inequities requires that power and resources be redistributed from those at the top to those lower down on the social ladder (Marmot, 2010, p.151). Epigraph not withstanding, this message is otherwisewell disguised in an almost mind-numbing recital of statistics, tables and graphs documenting the social gradient in everything from mortality to use of public parks to children’s bedtime hours, followed by detailed recommendationsdheavily documented and illustrated with case studiesdon what should be done and/or is being done to level the gradient. This is revolution without revolutionaries and politicsdfor many of the report’s recommendations will be politically contentiousdwithout politicians. Readers of Social Science & Medicine (as opposed, perhaps, to readers of the Financial Times) will probably find little to disagree with in recommendations for one year’s paid parental leave following childbirth and a minimum living wage for everyone (among many others). The key question, and the one to which we will devote the bulk of this essay, isdabsent politicians and/or revolutionariesd how are these radical changes to come about?

Confronting the Sorry State of U.S. Health

President Obama should convene a National Commission on the Health of Americans to address the social causes that have put the U.S.A. last among comparable nations. In January 2013, the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) and Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health, a stunning depiction of how, over the past four decades, the comparative health status of Americans has declined (1). The report applied a term, commonly used to describe the relative deprivation of social groups, to the nation as a whole: the “U.S. health disadvantage.” How can this be explained and what is to be done?

Problems, Crises, Events and Social Change: Theory and Illustrations

This paper proposes a theory-based approach to the understanding of social change and illustrates that theory with examples from the history and politics of public health. Based in large part on the work of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (see in particular his Islands of History published in (1985) William Sewell Jr. has proposed an ‘eventful sociology.’ In this work ‘event’ is a term of art meaning occurrences in human affairs that result in social change. Sewells approach and that of Charles Tilly are in many respects complementary, a major difference being Sewells far greater emphasis on meaning and interpretation by engaged actors as essential to understanding of how historical processes unfold. In this paper I further elaborate Sahlins’ and Sewells ideas, first by showing their connection with concepts that may be more familiar to sociologists and, second, by examining the contingent character of social change. Drawing on my own research on the history of public health, I argue that the transformation of ‘happenings’ into events and of events into meaningful social change are highly contingent on the social and political context within which these events occur. More generally, I hope to show that ‘eventful’ sociology is an exciting and productive approach to sociological analysis.

Revisiting labeling theory and health: a commentary on Aronowitz.

One of the most interesting questions raised by Aronowitz’s article ‘‘Framing Disease: An Underappreciated Mechanism for the Social Patterning of Health’’ (2008) concerns the editors’ decision to publish it as e I assume e new and original work. Its subject matter is the labeling of bodily processes and activities as sickness or addiction e and, more specifically, as asthma, obesity, migraine, cancer, and the like. Its central thesis is that labeling is a social process. Labels do not inhere in the bodily processes to which the labels are applied. They are social and cultural productions, the outcome of human action. (Although ‘‘framing’’ and ‘‘labeling’’ are related concepts, the latter captures more closely the actions described in this paper and aligns these actions with the sociological literature most relevant to their explication.) These ideas are hardly new. They have long been the bread and butter of medical sociology. A few examples will serve to make this point. Eliot Freidson’s monograph, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge, published in 1970, is among the foundational works of medical sociology. The third of his four sub-sections is titled ‘‘The Social Construction of Illness.’’ Building on what Conrad and Schneider (1980) called the ‘‘labeling-