IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
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and gender inequality .
Susan E. Marshall criticizes Phyllis Moen's book,
Women's Two
Roles,
by claiming that "relatively little attention is given to employer
discrimination, factors which may reasonably affect women's work
commitment and assorted outcomes of maternal employment." Johanna
van Doorne-Huiskes carries this theme forward in reviewing an edited
volume,
Women and Working Lives.
She is di turbed by a finding that the
longer a husband is unemployed, the more likely his wife remains in paid
work. This allegedly "implies that they [women] are excluded from the
protection of employment and labor legislation ."
C.
Matthew Snipp
describes a rather innovative effort at studying reservation economies in
Property Rights alld Indian Economies.
We are told categorically that
"with a few exceptions, the authors know much about political choice
theory but very little about American Indians" - despite the claim by
one author that he is "now much less hopeful that the Indians will learn
anything from us. On the other hand, we have learned a great deal from
them. " David R. James criticizes Jay R. Mandie's work,
Not Slave, Not
Free
for its overemphasis on the plantation legacy argument and for its
failure to discuss residential or occupational segregation "as a possible
obstacle to African-American economic mobility."
In
Paul Luebke's laudatory review of a book called
Common Whites,
it is clear that the author understands "common" as a derogatory rather
than a descriptive category. But we are informed by the reviewer that
"the book describes the everyday life of common whites and explains
why they accepted the slave system." It is never even hinted that some
Southerners might have fought for a principle of states' rights and re–
gional autonomy, rather than against freeing black people . Instead, the
reviewer sees the common whites in the past as similar to the "white
working class culture of the contemporary South." Both express anger,
but "rarely are they involved in progressive political movements"
(whatever they are). A book titled
Th e Fortunes of Dynastic Families in
Late Twentieth Century America
is critically reviewed by Susan A.
Ostrander for its failure to include "feminist scholarship related to its
central argument that private family relations are shaped by and embed–
ded in larger public interests and concerns." The identity of this feminist
lodestone is, of course, never stated. And the final review in this segment,
by Evelyn S. Huber, on
The Power of Sentiment,
a book about Jamaican
family elites, perfectly sums up the whole section of the journal in its
conclusion: "It is essential reading for any social scientist concerned with
understanding Caribbean society in general and the problem of class,
