Marietta Morrissey

The Making of a Colonial Welfare State U.S. Social Insurance and Public Assistance in Puerto Rico

Early-twentieth-century Puerto Rican women’s and labor groups advocated for public support for economically needy groups to little avail, given the fiscal limitations of the early colonial state. The exclusion of Puerto Rico from the comprehensive social welfare embodied in the Social Security Act of 1935 was rooted in U.S. Congressional resistance to statehood for selected territories. The platform of the Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic party—PPD), which merged elements of Puerto Rican nationalism with a foreign-investment-and-export-dependent development strategy, further distanced Puerto Ricans from participation in federal welfare programs. The PPD’s economic program yielded rapid initial growth followed by stagnation. Resulting unemployment and declining consumer demand led to a gradual reversal of U.S. social welfare policy toward Puerto Rico. Beginning in the 1950s, federal social insurance and public assistance programs were extended to Puerto Rico, albeit with funding restrictions not imposed on the states.

Imperial Designs: a Sociology of Knowledge Study of British and American Dominance in the Development of Caribbean Social Science

Since the 1930s, the islands of the Caribbean have constituted an extremely important social and cultural area within the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. As former slave societies created for the aggrandizement of European merchants and industrialists, class and racial subjugation have provided the focus for studies representing the major social scientific paradigms of the past century. In fact, a review of the sociological and anthropological literature on the former British West Indian societies offers a provocative overview of the varied and conflicting trends in both American and British stratification theory that is difficult to duplicate for other geographical areas.’ The racial heterogeneity of the West Indies, their colonial legacy, and the historically enduring breakdown of income and occupational groups along racial lines, have made the societies of this area appropriate settings for the testing of myriad theories on cultural and economic differentiation among classes and racial groups. However, it is not only for the discussion of recent intellectual trends in social science that an analysis of the study of the former British West Indies is of interest; it is equally important that students of the Third World

Unions’ empowerment of working‐class women: A case study

This research examines union memberships possible empowerment of unskilled women and these workers’ access to positions of power within union locals. The women worked as custodians, clerks, and cafeteria workers at a public, urban university and were members of the Communication Workers of America or the United Auto Workers unions. We found that these workers recognized the unions ability to limit the administrations power over their workforce. However, the women typically chose social commitments over union participation; gender, race, and job status also acted as barriers to workers’ achieving positions of power in their union locals. These findings suggest that unions attempting to appeal to increasing female memberships should adopt more decentralized and participatory organizational structures to attract and empower women workers.

Gender, Race, and Kinship: Searching for the Matrifocal Family

The social science study of female-headed households has generally treated their frequency in relation to variables such as poverty and ethnicity. Changing gender and kinship relations, especially in households headed by women, have less often been explored. Carol Stacks All Our Kin and Judith Staceys Brave New Families consider womens and mens positions in African-American and white working class families respectively. Though reflecting political agendas of different historical periods, they offer similar methodological models for the sociological study of gender in kinship.

Divided Against Itself: Local vs. International Union Interests in a Toledo Supermarket Strike

The paper reviews a case of local/international union conflict in the settlement of a supermarket strike and suggests that the assertion of local labor interests is central to the revival of U.S. unionism. The strike was led by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) against the Meijer supermarket chain in Toledo, Ohio in 1994. The eight and one-half week strike ended when representatives of the UFCW international accepted a contract that differed little from the companys original offer. The strike cost the international a considerable sum in benefits paid to the strikers, but the international also reportedly feared that the strike would endanger organizing campaigns in other supermarkets and in discount department stores. However, local organizers and many workers felt betrayed by what they perceived as the internationals intrusive and premature settlement of the strike. Their reactions raise the question of whether, in settling the strike, the international risked the loss of worker support within the union and in new organizing arenas.

Book Reviews : Dependence and Transformation: The Economics of the Transition to Socialism by Clive Thomas (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974

daughters to the ranks of the FSLN, are signs that the center may not hold once the dictator is removed. The parallels with Cuba in 1958 are compelling. Nicaragua is today a nation under siege by its own army. Thus Millett’s study of the history of the National Guard and its ties to the United States is both timely and useful. Nevertheless, its analysis of the roots of the contemporary crisis leaves much to be desired.

Sugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United StatesSugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States, editedby MoittBernard. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004. 208 pp.

Historiography and social science research on the Caribbean are exceptionally strong. The works of C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and George Beckford among others are known beyond the region and outside of Caribbean Studies programs. A new scholarly collection on the sugar economies of the Caribbean, their relationships to colonial metropoles, their use of slave labor and the politically intentional responses of slaves to bondage is anticipated with enthusiasm. One that includes treatment of English, French and Spanish-speaking areas, as well as analyses of relevant literary texts, is especially welcome. The incorporation of essays on sugar economies in other parts of the world would seem an added bonus. However, the burden of the region’s exemplary scholarship sets a bar that is hard to reach, particularly for a volume with additional agendas of crossregional comparison and analysis of cultural representations. Bernard Moitt’s collection, Sugar, Slavery and Society, offers several strong contributions to the literature, yet fails finally to provide the integrated, innovative and significant theoretical and empirical advances we have come to expect from scholarship on the region. Moitt’s Introduction sets the stage for the theoretical gaps that follow. There he raises critical questions regarding the “decline thesis” in some detail. Yet none of the essays that follow engage this debate. More significantly, while Moitt presents a useful chronology of important moments in the cycle of Caribbean sugar production, he gives the reader little idea of the theoretical issues that define these moments as meaningful. The most notable missed opportunity in the Introduction and in the anthology as a whole is a failure to explain why the non-Caribbean cases (i.e., India, Mauritius and Réunion) are relevant either to the Caribbean or the global sugar industry. The latter weakness is evident again in the two essays that treat non-Caribbean cases. B. S. Baviskar’s discussion of sugar production in India, the contemporary world’s largest sugar producer, overstates the dominance of the plantation in global sugar production historically. Indeed, a positioning of Indian sugar production in comparative perspective is all together missing. Joyce Leung’s very interesting essay, “Awakening, Resistance, and Empowerment: The Slave Protagonist in the Cane Literatures of the Caribbean and the Mascarenes,” provides thoughtful interpretations of slaves’ agency as depicted in several Francophone novels set in sugar cane producing areas. However, the author reveals little about the relationship of these literary texts to the evolving global sugar industry or to the place of French planters and other colonial actors in its many transitions. The most compelling essays in the anthology are Moitt’s piece on marronnage in the French Caribbean, Anton L. Allahar’s essay on annexationist politics in mid-nineteenth century Cuba, and Richard Follett and Rick Halperson’s offering on changing labor systems in late nineteenth-century Louisiana. All three describe complex class structures both within slave and other labor communities and among planters. They also treat the state as an agent of complicated class and national interests that had a profound effect on the ways in which sugar was cultivated and sugar-based prosperity moved from one country and region to another. This combination of themes might have formed the theoretical motif of a more highly integrated and theoretically provocative collection. Other essays explore more narrowly focused themes. Bernard Moitt and Horace L. Henrique’s “Social Stratification and Agency in a Sugar Plantation Society: Enslaved Africans, Free Blacks, and the White Planter Class in the Guiana Colonies and British Guiana, 1700–1850” offers a useful summary of the evolution of Guyanese sugar planting and the changing roles of slaves, freed men and women and planters. However, the opening consideration of Goffman’s “total institution” as an inappropriately applied concept in earlier literature on slavery adds little to the historical or theoretical discussions.

65.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8130-2779-9.

wave of organized conservative protest got under way. Its earliest targets were new Sunday school curriculums, a Prayer Book revision, and a new Confession of Faith. More recently, conservative efforts have focused on defeating proposals to ordain practicing homosexuals. The Remnant Spirit is an account of this second wave of conservative protest. The author, a sociologist who spent 10 years as a mainline Protestant minister, examines the largest and most influential of the numerous conservative reform movements in four mainline bodies, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and the United Church of Canada. Relying on interviews, conversations, and a host of “documentary artifacts,” he focuses on what Eyerman and Jamison call the “cognitive praxis” of conservative reformers, namely the manner in which they frame their public utterances in an effort to mobilize popular support. He joins Eyerman and Jamison in rejecting the “chimera of objectivity” and in asserting that “at some level, the sociologist must identify— either positively or negatively—with her object of investigation.” He announces that his own perspective is that of an “unrepentant liberal.” In view of his perspective, it is not surprising that he finds fault with much of the cognitive praxis of religious conservatives. For instance, their repeated references to “orthodoxy” and “historic Christianity” betray ignorance of the “interpreted, constructed nature of theology” and of the fact that “there is no such thing as Christianity per se.” Moreover, they continue to proclaim, despite evidence to the contrary, that the exodus of disgruntled conservatives explains the steep decline in mainline church membership that began around 1965. The author has little to say about the cognitive praxis of religious liberals, so the reader is left to wonder whether their praxis has intellectual shortcomings too. One suspects he would find that liberals have the better arguments. The strenuous efforts of conservative reformers have achieved few victories in their battles to stem the liberal tide. The author offers no explanation for why they have done so poorly, but the text contains material that might be useful in constructing one. For one thing, liberals are in firm control of the command posts of most mainline denominations. In 1988, for example, the General Council of the United Church of Canada refused to ask the regional presbyteries or local congregations to ratify its decision to open the door to homosexual ordination for fear it would be overturned. Two years later, after the General Council confirmed its 1988 decision by a lopsided vote, conservatives complained that the delegates to the Council had been “hand-picked” by the liberal establishment. Another reason for the conservatives’ poor track record seems to be the apathy of a large sector of the laity and a widespread distaste for conflict. Still another might be that most mainline lay people hold liberal views on many issues. They may not want gay ministers but they may doubt the exclusive truth claims of Christianity and they may be “pro-choice” on the matter of abortion. In this connection, it is instructive to note that abortion is rarely a focal issue in the campaigns of mainline conservatives. The author mentions it only in passing and the subject does not appear in the Index. The Remnant Spirit lacks an overarching theoretical framework, but it contains a large amount of interesting and useful information, including several richly detailed case histories of the fights that conservatives have picked.

The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean

In recent years my research and writing have focused on gender in comparative, historical perspective. I have been especially interested in gender relations in Caribbean slavery and the relationship between womens work and family organization in Latin America and the Caribbean. The following paper is part of an on-going search for ways to conceptualize gender and womens position in research that is heavily influenced by Third World nationalist and feminist politics. These latter views have an increasing if still indirect impact on American sociology. They will, in time, I believe, contribute to the transformation of the discipline and thus to a more meaningful feminist sociology.

Feminist Sociology: Methodology and Politics in Disciplinary Change***

nothing about the Absolute (which led Engels to make his remark). The Comment itself is mostly written in that same mystical and pretentious style in which Hegel wrote. This is definitely not a personal-level criticism. In fact, the Comment writer appears to have the potential to be a very good writer (since he or she has a fine style otherwise and also possesses some sense of humour). It is an important political criticism, however, to point out that most of the writers in the idealist tradition on the Left (such as the Frankfurt school and some of the Telos group) cannot write simple English. All of their sentences are horribly convoluted and complex (a fetishism of language?). The Comment, for example, contains the following wonderful sentence: