Vicky Randall

Childcare Policy and Local Partnerships under Labour

This article is concerned with explaining the relatively disappointing results of the Labour governments National Childcare Strategy to date, with particular emphasis on the role of the EYDCPs (Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships). After briefly describing and assessing childcare policy under Labour, it suggests that limited outcomes partly reflect the constraining legacy of previous policy and provision, but must also be related to the way childcare has fitted into the wider government agenda, and ‘third way’ discourse. This has affected not only policy content but the chosen means of implementation. In this context the article focuses in particular on the local EYDCPs: both their rationale and the part they have played in practice.

Using and abusing the concept of the Third World: geopolitics and the comparative political study of development and underdevelopment

This article argues that, while the notion of a ‘Third World’ retains relevance and usefulness in the context of geopolitical analysis, generalisations about Third World politics are no longer helpful or justifiable. It begins by reviewing the historic rationales for the notion of the Third World together with criticisms made of these arguments. It then considers reasons why the term may retain some value at a geopolitical level: in signalling a major axis of inequality, providing a symbolic basis for collective action and, possibly, as an alternative to less attractive perspectives. The article then turns more specifically to the field of comparative politics, suggesting that in the past the notion of a Third World could be justified pragmatically as a response to the insularity of Western political science and because there was, up to a point, a common paradigm of Third World politics. Such justifications have been undermined by the growth in specialist knowledge of individual Third World countries or regions together with increasing differentiation among them.

Feminism and Child Daycare

This article explores some of the main reasons why feminist mobilisation around the issue of child daycare in Britain has been so limited and its impact so modest. It describes this mobilisation, comparing it with experience in other countries and with mobilisation on other issues. It suggests that the modest achievement to date is largely attributable to factors other than the lack of feminist pressure. Indeed feminist reservations were partly a realistic response to these external constraints. But they were also a consequence of the particular character of second wave feminism in Britain and of the questions posed by the issue of childcare for feminists. These questions included the nature and proper role of the state, motherhood, the value of paid employment for women, social class and the tension between short and long-term strategies for social change.

Women and the left in Western Europe: A continuing dilemma

Feminism in Europe: Liberal and Socialist Strategies 1789–1919. By Maria Mies and Kumari Jaywardena. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1983. Pp.208. Sisters or Citizens? Woman and Socialism in France Since 1876. By Charles Sowerwine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp.248. £16.40. Enquete sur les femmes et la politique en France. By Janine Mossuz‐Lavau and Mariette Sineau. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983. Pp.280. Fr. 90. German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature. Edited by Edith Hoshimo Altbach, Jeanette Clausen, Dagmar Schultz and Naomi Stephan. New York: State University of New York Press, 1984. Pp.389.

The media and democratisation in the Third World

12.95 (paperback);

Political Parties and Democratic Developmental States

39.50 (hardback). Unfinished Democracy: Woman in Nordic Politics. Edited by Elina Haavio‐Mannila, Drude Dahlerup, Maud Eduards, Esther Gudmundsdottir, Beatrice Halsaa, Helga Maria Hernes, Eva Hanninen‐Salmeljri, Bergthora Sigmundsdottir, Sirka Sinkonnen and Torild Skard. Translated by Christine Badcock, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985. Pp.206....