front cover of Illusions of Equality
Illusions of Equality
Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850-1950
Robert M. Buchanan
Gallaudet University Press, 1999

The working lives of Deaf Americans from the mid-1850s to the post-World War II era depended upon strategies created by Deaf community leaders to win and keep jobs through periods of low national employment as well as high. Deaf people typically sought to de-emphasize their identity as sign language users to be better integrated into the workforce. But in his absorbing new book Illusions of Equality, Robert Buchanan shows that events during the next century would thwart these efforts.

       The residential schools for deaf students established in the 19th century favored a bilingual approach to education that stressed the use of American Sign Language while also recognizing the value of learning English. But the success of this system was disrupted by the rise of oralism, with its commitment to teaching deaf children speech and its ban of sign language. Buchanan depicts the subsequent ramifications in sobering terms: most deaf students left school with limited educations and abilities that qualified them for only marginal jobs. He also describes the insistence of the male hierarchy in the Deaf community on defending the tactics of individual responsibility through the end of World War II, a policy that continually failed to earn job security for Deaf workers. Illusions of Equality is an original, edifying work that will be appreciated by scholars and students for years to come.

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front cover of Immigration and Opportuntity
Immigration and Opportuntity
Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States
Frank D. Bean
Russell Sage Foundation, 1999
The American dream of equal opportunity and social mobility still holds a powerful appeal for the many immigrants who arrive in this country each year. but if immigrant success stories symbolize the fulfillment of the American dream, the persistent inequality suffered by native-born African Americans demonstrates the dream's limits. Although the experience of blacks and immigrants in the United States are not directly comparable, their fates are connected in ways that are seldom recognized. Immigration and Opportunity brings together leading sociologists and demographers to present a systematic account of the many ways in which immigration affects the labor market experiences of native-born African Americans. With the arrival of large numbers of nonwhite immigrants in recent decades, blacks now represent less than 50 percent of the U.S. minority population. Immigration and Opportunity reveals how immigration has transformed relations between minority populations in the United States, creating new forms of labor market competition between native and immigrant minorities. Recent immigrants have concentrated in a handful of port-of-entry cities, breaking up established patterns of residential segregation,and, in some cases, contributing to the migration of native blacks out of these cities. Immigrants have secured many of the occupational niches once dominated by blacks and now pass these jobs on through ethnic hiring networks that exclude natives. At the same time, many native-born blacks find jobs in the public sector, which is closed to those immigrants who lack U.S. citizenship. While recent immigrants have unquestionably brought economic and cultural benefits to U.S. society, this volume makes it clear that the costs of increased immigration falls particularly heavily upon those native-born groups who are already disadvantaged. Even as large-scale immigration transforms the racial and ethnic make-up of U.S. society—forcing us to think about race and ethnicity in new ways—it demands that we pay renewed attention to the entrenched problems of racial disadvantage that still beset native-born African Americans.
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front cover of Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality
Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality
David Card
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
The rapid rise in the proportion of foreign-born residents in the United States since the mid-1960s is one of the most important demographic events of the past fifty years. The increase in immigration, especially among the less-skilled and less-educated, has prompted fears that the newcomers may have depressed the wages and employment of the native-born, burdened state and local budgets, and slowed the U.S. economy as a whole. Would the poverty rate be lower in the absence of immigration? How does the undocumented status of an increasing segment of the foreign-born population impact wages in the United States? In Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality, noted labor economists David Card and Steven Raphael and an interdisciplinary team of scholars provide a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits of the latest era of immigration to the United States Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality rigorously explores shifts in population trends, labor market competition, and socioeconomic segregation to investigate how the recent rise in immigration affects economic disadvantage in the United States. Giovanni Peri analyzes the changing skill composition of immigrants to the United States over the past two decades to assess their impact on the labor market outcomes of native-born workers. Despite concerns over labor market competition, he shows that the overall effect has been benign for most native groups. Moreover, immigration appears to have had negligible impacts on native poverty rates. Ethan Lewis examines whether differences in English proficiency explain this lack of competition between immigrant and native-born workers. He finds that parallel Spanish-speaking labor markets emerge in areas where Spanish speakers are sufficiently numerous, thereby limiting the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born residents. While the increase in the number of immigrants may not necessarily hurt the job prospects of native-born workers, low-skilled migration appears to suppress the wages of immigrants themselves. Michael Stoll shows that linguistic isolation and residential crowding in specific metropolitan areas has contributed to high poverty rates among immigrants. Have these economic disadvantages among low-skilled immigrants increased their dependence on the U.S. social safety net? Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes analyze the consequences of welfare reform, which limited eligibility for major cash assistance programs. Their analysis documents sizable declines in program participation for foreign-born families since the 1990s and suggests that the safety net has become less effective in lowering child poverty among immigrant households. As the debate over immigration reform reemerges on the national agenda, Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality provides a timely and authoritative review of the immigrant experience in the United States. With its wealth of data and intriguing hypotheses, the volume is an essential addition to the field of immigration studies. A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy
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front cover of In Search of Effective Disability Policy
In Search of Effective Disability Policy
Comparing the Developments and Outcomes of the Dutch and Danish Disability Policies
Jan Høgelund
Amsterdam University Press, 2004
In the Netherlands, employers are responsible for integrating disabled people into the workforce. Employers in Denmark, however, can dismiss workers with health problems, leaving the public authorities to bear the responsibility of ensuring disabled people's participation in the workforce. In Search of Effective Disability Policy combines micro-level empirical analysis with a macro-level approach to examine the potentials of these two contrasting policies. Høgelund presents a thorough and detailed investigation into how to develop an effective disability policy, and his conclusion productively compares the virtues and drawbacks of each national policy.
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front cover of In the Company of Diamonds
In the Company of Diamonds
De Beers, Kleinzee, and the Control of a Town
Peter Carstens
Ohio University Press, 2001

After the 1925 discovery of diamonds in the semi-desert of the northwest coast of South Africa, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. virtually proclaimed its dominion over the whole region. In the town of Kleinzee, the company owns all the real estate and infrastructure, and controls and administers both the town and the industry.

Peter Carstens’s In the Company of Diamonds draws a stark and startling portrait of this closed community, one that analyzes the power and hegemonic techniques used to acquire that power and maintain it.

As a prototypical company town, Kleinzee is subordinated to the industry and will of the owners. Employees and workers are variously differentiated and ordered according to occupation, ethnic variation, and other social criteria, a pattern reflected most markedly in the allocation of housing. Managers live in large, ranch-style houses, while contract workers are lodged in single-sex compounds.

As a community type, company towns like Kleinzee are not entirely unique, and Professor Carstens successfully draws a number of structural parallels with other closed and incomplete social formations such as Indian reservations, military bases, colleges, prisons, and mental hospitals.

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front cover of In the Name of Women's Rights
In the Name of Women's Rights
The Rise of Femonationalism
Sara R. Farris
Duke University Press, 2017
Sara R. Farris examines the demands for women's rights from an unlikely collection of right-wing nationalist political parties, neoliberals, and some feminist theorists and policy makers. Focusing on contemporary France, Italy, and the Netherlands, Farris labels this exploitation and co-optation of feminist themes by anti-Islam and xenophobic campaigns as “femonationalism.” She shows that by characterizing Muslim males as dangerous to western societies and as oppressors of women, and by emphasizing the need to rescue Muslim and migrant women, these groups use gender equality to justify their racist rhetoric and policies. This practice also serves an economic function. Farris analyzes how neoliberal civic integration policies and feminist groups funnel Muslim and non-western migrant women into the segregating domestic and caregiving industries, all the while claiming to promote their emancipation. In the Name of Women's Rights documents the links between racism, feminism, and the ways in which non-western women are instrumentalized for a variety of political and economic purposes.
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front cover of The Inclusive Corporation
The Inclusive Corporation
A Disability Handbook for Business Professionals
Griff Hogan
Ohio University Press, 2003
Because of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the enormous market of aging adults coping with impairments, disability has become an important issue for all businesses. The Inclusive Corporation is the first book to address comprehensively this issue of disability as it relates to all of the areas critical to effective business management.

The Inclusive Corporation succinctly presents disability-related information and resources that business managers need, and does so in a way that is highly readable and easy to use. The book is respectful and understanding of business requirements, while at the same time conveying a comprehensive knowledge of disability issues.

Matters of legal compliance, social responsibility, recruitment, diversity, employee supervision, customer service, product design and marketing — all are dealt with in The Inclusive Corporation. The result of the author's many years of experience working with businesses to improve their ability to include disabled people both as customers and employees, The Inclusive Corporation will be welcomed by people with disabilities and by business professionals nationwide.
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front cover of Increasing Faculty Diversity
Increasing Faculty Diversity
The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students
Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber
Harvard University Press, 2003

In recent years, colleges have successfully increased the racial diversity of their student bodies. They have been less successful, however, in diversifying their faculties. This book identifies the ways in which minority students make occupational choices, what their attitudes are toward a career in academia, and why so few become college professors.

Working with a large sample of high-achieving minority students from a variety of institutions, the authors conclude that minority students are no less likely than white students to aspire to academic careers. But because minorities are less likely to go to college and less likely to earn high grades within college, few end up going to graduate school. The shortage of minority academics is not a result of the failure of educational institutions to hire them; but of the very small pool of minority Ph.D. candidates. In examining why some minorities decide to become academics, the authors conclude that same-race role models are no more effective than white role models and that affirmative action contributes to the problem by steering minority students to schools where they perform relatively poorly. They end with policy recommendations on how more minority students might be attracted to an academic career.

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front cover of Independent Women
Independent Women
Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920
Martha Vicinus
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Martha Vicinus's subject is the middle-class English woman, the first of her sex who could afford to live on her own earnings 'outside heterosexual domesticity or church governance.' She wanted and needed to work. Meticulous, resonant, original, triumphant, Independent Women tells of the efforts and endurance of this Victorian woman; of her courage and the constraints that she rejected, accepted, and created. . . . The independent women are the 'foremothers' of any women today who seeks significant work, emotionally satisfying friendships, and a morally charged freedom."—from the Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson

"Feminist insight combines with vast research to produce a dramatic narrative. Independent Women chronicles the energetic lives and imaginative communal structures invented by women who 'pioneered new occupations, new living conditions, and new public roles.'"—Lee R. Edwards, Ms.

"Vicinus is to be congratulated for her brave and unflinching portraits of twisted spinsters as well as stolid saints. That she stretches her net up into the '20s and covers the women's suffrage momement is a brilliant stroke, for one may see clearly how it was possible for women to mount such an enormous and successful political campaign."—Jane Marcus, Chicago Tribune Book World

"Vicinus' beautifully written book abounds in rich historical detail and in subtle psychological insights in the character of its protagonists. The author understands the complexities of the interplay between economic and social conditions, cultural values, and the aims and aspirations of individual personalities who act in history. . . . A superb achievement."—Gerda Lerner, Reviews in American History

"Martha Vicinus has with intelligence and energy paved and landscaped the road on which scholars and students of activist women all travel for many years."—Blanche Wiesen Cook, Women's Review of Books

"Independent Women can be read by anyone with an interest in women's history. But for all contemporary women, unconsciously enjoying privileges and freedoms once bought so dearly, this book should be required reading."—Catharine E. Boyd, History

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front cover of Indian Work
Indian Work
Language and Livelihood in Native American History
Daniel H. Usner Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2009

Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.

Officials, reformers, anthropologists, and artists produced images that exacerbated Indians’ economic uncertainty and vulnerability. From Jeffersonian agrarianism to Jazz Age primitivism, European American ideologies not only obscured Indian struggles for survival but also operated as obstacles to their success. Diversification and itinerancy became economic strategies for many Indians, but were generally maligned in the early United States. Indians repeatedly found themselves working in spaces that reinforced misrepresentation and exploitation. Taking advantage of narrow economic opportunities often meant risking cultural integrity and personal dignity: while sales of baskets made by Louisiana Indian women contributed to their identity and community, it encouraged white perceptions of passivity and dependence. When non-Indian consumption of Indian culture emerged in the early twentieth century, even this friendlier market posed challenges to Indian labor and enterprise. The consequences of this dilemma persist today.

Usner reveals that Indian engagement with commerce has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.

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front cover of Indigenous Women and Work
Indigenous Women and Work
From Labor to Activism
Edited by Carol Williams
University of Illinois Press, 2012
The essays in Indigenous Women and Work create a transnational and comparative dialogue on the history of the productive and reproductive lives and circumstances of Indigenous women from the late nineteenth century to the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Canada. Surveying the spectrum of Indigenous women's lives and circumstances as workers, both waged and unwaged, the contributors offer varied perspectives on the ways women's work has contributed to the survival of communities in the face of ongoing tensions between assimilation and colonization. They also interpret how individual nations have conceived of Indigenous women as workers and, in turn, convert these assumptions and definitions into policy and practice. The essays address the intersection of Indigenous, women's, and labor history, but will also be useful to contemporary policy makers, tribal activists, and Native American women's advocacy associations.
 
Contributors are Tracey Banivanua Mar, Marlene Brant Castellano, Cathleen D. Cahill, Brenda J. Child, Sherry Farrell Racette, Chris Friday, Aroha Harris, Faye HeavyShield, Heather A. Howard, Margaret D. Jacobs, Alice Littlefield, Cybèle Locke, Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Kathy M'Closkey, Colleen O'Neill, Beth H. Piatote, Susan Roy, Lynette Russell, Joan Sangster, Ruth Taylor, and Carol Williams.

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front cover of Indigenous Women, Work, and History
Indigenous Women, Work, and History
Mary Jane Logan McCallum
University of Manitoba Press, 2014

front cover of Investment in Women's Human Capital
Investment in Women's Human Capital
Edited by T. Paul Schultz
University of Chicago Press, 1995
How are human capital investments allocated between women and men? What are the returns to investments in women's nutrition, health care, education, mobility, and training? In thirteen wide-ranging and innovative empirical analyses, Investment in Women's Human Capital explores the nature of human capital distributions to women and their effect on outcomes within the family.

Section I considers the experiences of high-income countries, examining the limitations of industrialization for the advancement of women; returns to secondary education for women; and state control of women's education and labor market productivity through the design of tax systems and the public subsidy of children.

The remaining four sections investigate health, education, household structure and labor markets, and measurement issues in low-income countries, including the effect of technological change on transfers of wealth to and from children in India; women's and men's responses to the costs of medical care in Kenya; the effects of birth order and sex on educational attainment in Taiwan; wage returns to schooling in Indonesia and in Cote d'Ivoire; and the increasing prevalence of female-headed households and the correlates of gender differences in wages in Brazil.
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