Lynn Abrams

A Social and Economic History of Central European Jewry.

This volume is a pioneering effort to examine the social, demographic, and economic changes that befell the Jewish communities of Central Europe after the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. It consists of studies researched and written especially for this volume by historians, sociologists, and economists, all specialists in modern Central European Jewish affairs. The era of national rivalry, economic crises, and political confusion between the two World Wars has been preceded by a pre-World War I epoch of Jewish emancipation and assimilation. During that period, Jewish minorities had been harbored from violent anti-Semitism by the Empire, and they became torchbearers of industrialization and modernization. This common destiny encouraged certain common characteristics in the three major components of the Empire, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech territories, despite the very different origins of the well over one million Jews in those three lands. The disintegration of the Habsburg Empire created three small, economically marginal national states, inimical to each other and at liberty to create their own policies toward Jews in accord with the preferences of their respective ruling classes. Active and openly discriminatory anti-Semitic measures resulted in Austria and Hungary. The only liberal heir country of the Empire was Czechoslovakia, although simmering anti-Semitism and below surface discrimination were widespread in Slovakia. While one might have expected Jewish communities to return to their pre-World War I tendencies to go their independent ways after the introduction of these policies, social and economic patterns which had evolved in the Habsburg era persisted until the Anschluss in Austria, German occupation in Czechoslovakia, and World War II in Hungary. Studies in this volume attest to continuing similarities among the three Jewish communities, testifying to the depth of the Empires long lasting impact on the behavior of Jews in Central Europe.

Knitting, Autonomy and Identity: The Role of Hand-Knitting in the Construction of Women's Sense of Self in an Island Community, Shetland, c. 1850–2000

Abstract Hand knitting of woollen clothing by women was a key economic activity throughout the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century in the Shetland islands. It integrated women into the market and enabled women to construct an identity for themselves based on their relationship with production and the wider economy. Generally regarded as a either a backward remnant of the pre-industrial economy or a traditional craft with little economic value, hand knitting does not belong to the story of womens work and independence in the modern industrial era. This article argues that hand knitting and the means by which it was produced and traded occupied a central place in the web of female relationships on the islands, helping to create a female culture characterized by an acknowledgement of women as producers with economic autonomy.

Liberating the female self: epiphanies, conflict and coherence in the life stories of post-war British women

It is generally accepted that the process of life story telling in the western developed world is essential to the construction of the self. The concept of the narrative self, the idea that the self does not precede language and that we only come to know who we are by constructing a story or narrative which coheres the different parts of our life experiences, now has broad concurrence. According to Anthony Giddens, autobiography (whether written, spoken or never consciously articulated) ‘is actually the core of self-identity in modern life’. And this late modern project of self-articulation and self-realization is reflexive – that is, it requires constant self-interrogation – and it is coherent in that the trajectory of the self from past to present is continuous and joined up. As socio-linguist Charlotte Linde has argued, ‘In order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable and constantly revised life story.’ For Linde it is the life story that enables us to express our sense of self, to ourselves and to others.

“There Is Many a Thing That Can Be Done with Money”:Women, Barter, and Autonomy in a Scottish Fishing Community in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Representations of Shetland womanhood have a place in our understanding of gender relations in this island community but not the place one might expect. Far from conforming to the image of the brazen fishwife and the exploited preindustrial handknitter, women in these occupations exhibited a degree of independence perhaps unexpected in a society so dominated by the farming-fishing economy. Yet the particular demographic characteristics of Shetland—a society in which women far outnumbered men—created a situation whereby women marked out a role for themselves that traversed both private and public domains. The sheer fact of male absence (due to seasonal fishing trips and more lengthy whaling and merchant shipping voyages) created a society with very particular labor characteristics, which gave women a degree of economic and, more significantly, cultural power. This power rested on women’s skills and endurance as domestic producers, their active role in the market as traders and marketers of goods, and their place in the community as possessors of certain kinds of knowledge or cultural capital.

Whores, Whore-Chasers, and Swine: the Regulation of Sexuality and the Restoration of Order in the Nineteenth Century German Divorce Court

This article suggests that in a society experiencing economic and political upheaval, marriage, and especially the language used to talk about marital break down, was placed at the forefront of an attempt to bolster the idea of the sexual balance of power and proper gender role division. An analysis of the depositions presented at divorce cases in one court in the Prussian Rhine Province between 1814 and 1871 demonstrates that social organization was dependent on sexual and productive categories, which in turn held the key to marital stability. Those couples who appeared in the divorce court illustrate how gender relations within marriage were being negotiated and contested around these two poles and how abusive language and violence were used to reassert or undermine power and authority within the marriage relationship.

'People and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense’? Locating the tenant’s voice in Homes in High Flats

ABSTRACT In recent years, the social research of Pearl Jephcott has been subject to scholarly reappraisal on the grounds that it displays an early commitment to the unmediated reporting of ‘the authentic voice of her participants’. This article investigates the extent to which this claim holds for Jephcott’s seminal 1971 study Homes in High Flats. It suggests that, although Homes in High Flats sought to investigate ‘people and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense’, the study’s ability to realise this aim was complicated by the social distance obtaining between researcher and researched. Based on re-analysis of the study’s archived research materials, the article explores how this distance mediated the researchers’ interpretation and re-presentation of the tenant’s voice, deepening understanding of the epistemological premises of Jephcott’s work.

Isolated and dependent: women and children in high-rise social housing in post-war Glasgow

ABSTRACT In 1971 Pearl Jephcotts Homes in High Flats, the culmination of her groundbreaking research into high rise living in Glasgow, revealed the problems faced by young mothers on the new high rise estates in the city. This article interrogates two connected factors, social isolation and economic dependence, which characterised the experience of many women who were rehoused to high flats in the postwar decades. Drawing on evidence collected by Jephcotts research in the form of qualitative questionnaires with high rise tenants as well as ethnographic observation and action research with residents, we argue that the experience of many women of managing everyday life in a high rise flat with young children was frustrating, often lonely and unsupported, at a time when the home was still conceptualised as central to womens lives. Jephcott asserted that high rise housing had socially negative consequences for women and children. We do not disagree but argue that in the particular context of the postwar settlement, womens financial and welfare dependence on top of their particular housing circumstances in high rise flats constrained their opportunities rather than producing contentment thereby demonstrating the value of revisiting social research data.

Aspiration, agency, and the production of new selves in a Scottish new town, c.1947–c.2016

Narratives of deindustrialization, urban decline and failing public housing and the negative outcomes associated with these processes dominate accounts of post-war Scotland, bolstering the interpretation of Scottish exceptionalism in a British context. Within these accounts working people appear as victims of powerful and long-term external forces suffering sustained and ongoing deleterious vulnerabilities in terms of employment, health, and housing. This article challenges this picture by focusing on the first Scottish new town which made space for working peoples aspiration and new models of the self manifested in new lifestyles and social relations. Drawing on archival data and oral history interviews, we identify how elective relocation fostered and enabled new forms of identity predicated upon new housing, new social relations, and lifestyle opportunities focused on the family and home and elective social networks no longer determined by traditional class and gender expectations. These findings permit an intervention in the historical debates on post-war housing and social change which go beyond the materialistic experience to deeper and affective dimensions of the new town self.

Slum clearance and relocation: a reassessment of social outcomes combining short-term and long-term perspectives

Abstract Housing research rarely takes a long-term view of the impacts of short-term housing changes. Thus, in studies of post-war relocation, narratives of ‘loss of community’ and ‘dislocation’ have dominated the debate for decades. This paper combines a ‘re-study’ methodology with oral histories to re-examine the experience of relocation into high-rise flats in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s. We find that both the immediate and longer term outcomes of relocation varied greatly; while some people failed to settle and felt a loss of social relations, many others did not. People had agency, some chose to get away from tenement life and others chose to move on subsequently as aspirations changed. Furthermore, relocation to high-rise was not always the life-defining event or moment it is often depicted to be. Outcomes from relocation are mediated by many other events and experiences, questioning its role as an explanatory paradigm in housing studies.

Finding the Female Self: Women’s Autonomy, Marriage and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Germany

In 1850 the 15-year-old marriage of Bertha and Christian Traun was dissolved in the Hamburg courts. To all outward appearances their relationship had been a ‘picture of happiness and contentedness’ and with their six children the ‘whole family represented a picture of an upright, bourgeois and moral life and household’. They had never had a serious argument, not even a hot-tempered exchange of words.1 But all had not been well in the Traun marriage. Bertha, the daughter of a successful self-made businessman in Hamburg, Heinrich Meyer, was the victim of an arranged marriage — not an unusual occurrence within this urban social stratum — with a man some fourteen years her senior who was employed in her father’s business.2 For Bertha the spiritual relationship of the pair was not satisfactory; their characters did not suit one another and her husband found his wife’s religious awakening troublesome. Around 1846 Bertha became a member of the Protestant dissenting or free deutschkatholische Kirche, a movement her husband regarded as fanatical, eccentric and politically suspect. Certainly the Deutschkatholiken stood for a society based on principles anathema to conservative Christian teachings: egalitarian marriage based on free choice; women’s education and emancipation. Bertha’s participation in this new religion had disturbed the peace of their marriage, and Christian appealed to her to return to the family home — she had left with two of their daughters — so that an orderly and bourgeois household could be re-established.