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Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, a New England writer, focused on the experiences of women in her stories, depicting their struggles with poverty and patriarchal barriers. Despite her own unconventional choices, such as delaying marriage and not having children, Freeman opposed women's suffrage. In a recently recovered essay, she expressed her belief that women already had sufficient rights granted by the Constitution and that active participation in the suffrage movement would compromise their womanhood and domestic responsibilities. She also argued that women's involvement in politics and clubs would not be supported by their husbands and families. [Extracted from the article]

The caste system in India traditionally confers immense prestige to upper caste Brahmins and severely curtails the backward castes. In spite of institutional efforts to diminish caste-based discrimination, several contemporary studies underscore the invisible ways in which caste operates. The central question that this article asks is, 'How do Brahmins maintain and assert their privilege today?'. Focusing on the Brahmin residents of Deulpota (village in West Bengal) and rural Brahmin migrants in Kolkata (city), I trace their social networks to learn about how Brahmins subtly maintain their status and privilege in day-to-day life. I argue that Brahmins form and maintain social networks in ways which innocuously preserve their privileges through social capital accessed from diverse asymmetrical relations. These privileges and advantages are sustained through Brahmins' networks of the instrumental kind. Wealthy Brahmins forge these relations to preserve their social position, their family lineage and to control the subordinates while the struggling resource-poor Brahmins use their caste position to cope with impediments of their class status. As such, this study shows how being Brahmin allows for easier access to important instrumental relations (which are not merely caste-based) and resources embedded in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the identity of students at an elite high school and how it contributes to privilege and inequality. Thirty‐two students from an elite high school in Israel were interviewed to examine two main questions: What characterizes these students' identity? How does their identity impact the cultivation and fostering of privilege and inequality? The findings identify three components of the elite student identity: (1) entitlement, as a natural experience of privilege and a developed awareness of rights; (2) the emotional burden of a competitive culture, leading to pressure to attain mind and body perfection and evoking feelings of hyper‐self‐consciousness; and (3) consequences of this burden, including pursuing corrective treatments, engaging in ethical transgressions and hazardous behaviors, and internal feelings of emptiness. The discussion interprets these characteristics of the elite student's identity in the context of their learning experience at an elite school, highlighting the consequences of these characteristics for cultivating and maintaining class privilege and social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This anthropological study focuses on spatially ordered dimensions of sociocultural life in Kontula, a suburban housing estate located at the urban margins of Helsinki, Finland. With a notorious reputation since its construction in the 1960s, it has come to represent the numerous ills of contemporary urbanity, from poverty and substance abuse to failed immigration policies. Its urban transformation is explored as the entanglement of imagination and materiality, a make-believe space that privileges neither the social constructionist nor the purely materialist perspective. I study the everyday life of its inhabitants as recurring and routinized episodes, occasionally interrupted by events that disturb its embodied flow and force inhabitants to reflect upon their spatially situated practices. I argue that the everyday encounters in rapidly transforming Kontula are simultaneously experienced as absurd and ordinary, and constitute the ordering principles of its affective geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a blend of personal narrative and a survey of recent historical scholarship on gender, race and reproduction, this article asks readers to consider how our own proximity to power, privilege and oppression shapes the ways we approach the study of history. It argues that age‐old disciplinary dogmas exist for a reason and they can unintentionally limit our imaginations. It also suggests how those of us for whom the academy was never intended can help push those scholarly boundaries and perhaps even breathe new life into a disappearing discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to compare two groups of Jewish women, native-born and migrants, who reside in Brussels regarding their social integration into native-born Jewish and non-Jewish communities and the acculturation strategies they employ. It seems that Brussels is not as socially and culturally open, as perceived by the interviewees. Hence, the social networks of women in our study, as well as their acculturation patterns, differ in degree of separation between native-born Jewish women, non-Israeli immigrants and Israeli immigrants. The former maintain social networks characterized by fluid boundaries between them and the majority society, whereas non-Israeli immigrants are characterized by shared, not very dense networks with the native-born Jewish community and diasporic networks. Finally, Israeli women are characterized by almost completely closed social networks, which can be defined as a distinct "Israeli bubble." As for their acculturation strategies, native-born women are those who are more integrated among non-Jews and native-born Jews, as expected from their familiarity with the culture and their long-term interactions, despite being partially marginalized as minority. Migrant women are less integrated and more separated from both native-born Jews and – to a larger extent – from non-Jews; so are Israelis. Social networks which gradually become communities are mainly created by women and maintained by them over the years. Therefore, the study of social networks, their structure and construction through daily interactions, and their contribution to the ethnic-diasporic community building have become the source of women's strength in the host country – as immigrants and as a native-born minority group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship demonstrated the major role of inheritance and kinship for elite's power reproduction, particularly among noble families. In the absence of monarchic and court structures, ruling classes that enjoyed privileges and engaged in social closure could become the functional equivalent of a nobility. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the power of Swiss patrician families in the three major Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) since the end of the nineteenth century and assess whether urban oligarchies endure in the twentieth century and what role kinship ties play in the reproduction of power structures. Building on a systematic database of 5,199 urban elites who hold power positions in the main economic, political, academic, and cultural institutions, we describe the evolution of Swiss patrician families between 1890 and 1957. Using social network, kinship, and sequence analysis, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the Swiss patrician elite's evolution at both the individual and the family level. Our analyses show a general decline of patrician families' presence in urban positions of power, however with significant variations according to both the cities and the spheres of activity. Furthermore, we identify distinct trajectories of families who have either lost their access to power positions, managed to access again or have remained in urban power positions according to different survival strategies. Beyond the Swiss case, we contribute to the literature on power and kinship through an interdisciplinary approach combining historical and sociological perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between Whiteness and Mestizaje–the idea of a 'race made of the mixture of other races'–in the context of Mexican public administration. It argues that Mestizaje promotes a raceless or 'color-evasive' narrative that has historically prevented the discussion of race and ethnoracial inequalities in Mexico; sustains Whiteness in public organizations, and creates the conditions for White supremacy, as an uneven distribution of social privileges and penalties along ethnoracial lines benefitting White people. Ultimately, these three aspects of the Mestizaje ideology and its connection with Whiteness could be preventing the advancement of social equity in Mexico. Moreover, the reflections presented here are potentially insightful for other contexts in which raceless and/or color-evasive narratives are prevalent as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender pay gap or gender gap is a relative disparity between women and men which is reflected in a variety of sectors in many societies. This difference exists in many countries and industries and is often related to factors such as occupational segregation, and differences in education and experience. The gender gap must also be considered in the context of gender inequality. The focus of this paper is to analyse the gender pay gap and gender inequality in participation in the labour market in Albanian society. Albanian society is committed to and has made significant progress towards gender equality policies. However, the gender gap is still present. The paper aims to analyse and interpret indicators of the Albanian gender pay gap in the context of culture of gender roles. Cultural values and socio-cultural conditions of one's society significantly impact the gender gap. The paper will highlight the sources of the gender gap in Albania as cultural and socio-economic. Understanding the gender inequality in Albanian society requires a complex analysis that examines the impact of socialisation, cultural norms and values, the division of gender roles, access to public life and the social privileges that gendering creates asymmetrically for men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioethics increasingly recognizes the impact of discriminatory practices based on social categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation or ability on clinical practice. Accordingly, major bioethics associations have stressed that identifying and countering structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations is a professional obligation of clinical ethics consultants. Yet, it is still unclear how clinical ethics consultants can fulfill this obligation. More specifically, clinical ethics needs both theoretical tools to analyze and practical strategies to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations. Intersectionality, a concept developed in Black feminist scholarship, is increasingly considered in bioethical theory. It stresses how social structures and practices determine social positions of privilege and disadvantage in multiple, mutually co-constitutive systems of oppression. This article aims to investigate how intersectionality can contribute to addressing structural discrimination in clinical ethics consultations with a particular focus on mental healthcare. To this end, we critically review existing approaches for clinical ethics consultants to address structural racism in clinical ethics consultations and extend them by intersectional considerations. We argue that intersectionality is a suitable tool to address structural discrimination within clinical ethics consultations and show that it can be practically implemented in two complementary ways: 1) as an analytic approach and 2) as a critical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do affluent people drive used cars, elite chefs praise basic ingredients, and upper‐middle couples arrange backyard weddings? What makes senior professors feel comfortable dressing down and allows men to bring their kids into the office? This article takes a formal sociological approach to explore the cultural phenomenon of "Status Downplay"—a paradoxical type of status display, where more social status is signaled through a subtraction of status symbols. The trans‐contextual analysis of diverse manifestations of status downplay uncovers the inverted cultural presumptions of "doing" and "being" and the hierarchical classifications underlying such parodical presentation of self. The proposed semiotic model articulates the social privilege of unmarked actors' performative flexibility: the social license of those considered "normals" to deviate from the performative norm. Under this asymmetrical structure, status underdoings are revealed as markers of cultural dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to highlight the extensive tradition of Psychology in social intervention, as well as its relevance in both the public and private spheres. It is important to highlight this circumstance because the new generation of social services laws, and other regulatory texts linked to them, are generating a series of changes in the structure and functioning of primary care teams, privileging the discipline of Social Work in relation to Psychology and Social Education. The figure of the reference professional linked exclusively to Social Work represents in fact an inadequate and unfair reserve of activity and is endangering interdisciplinary and comprehensive care for the user. Furthermore, psychology professionals are disappearing from areas of care where they have traditionally worked. We think that a law regulating the professions of social intervention could be the opportunity to address the problems that social intervention currently has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How important is atheism for Jewish history and Jews for the history of atheism? Modern Jewish histories have tended to focus on Jewish secularization rather than atheism, and historical surveys of atheism in the West have tended to neglect the Jewish experience which is subsumed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is possible to make the case that the secularization narrative privileges social change over Jewish intellectual engagement with non-belief, and that just as Jewish and Christian conceptions of theism differ, so do their atheisms. Jewish historical attitudes towards atheism are complicated and have shifted over time. Here, skeptical tendencies, that is, attitudes and ideas that would be associated later with atheism, will be considered alongside claims about atheism per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the history of attempts to institute compulsory voting in the U.S. during the Progressive Era and presents pro-democracy and reformers' arguments on compulsory voting. Topics discussed include Colonial Era statutes imposing fines for non-voting, legislative and academic efforts to institute compulsory voting, compulsory voting proposals from the 1930s to the present, right to vote as a privilege or duty, voter turnout and state enforcement of compulsory voting.

In the book "Freud's patients: a book of lives" by Borch-Jacobsen, the author explores the lives of Freud's patients beyond the famous case studies. The book provides factual accounts of 38 patients who sought psychoanalysis due to significant suffering, offering new findings based on expanded archival access. The author presents sketches and short portraits of the patients, allowing readers to glimpse into their lives and understand their reasons for seeking help. The book also sheds light on Freud's practice and attitudes, including his connections with patients from similar social classes and his daughter Anna Freud's role in controlling historians' narratives of psychoanalysis. Overall, the book offers a cautionary tale about the hazards of applying a meta-narrative to others and highlights the importance of considering diverse perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

In the book "Privilege and Prophecy: Social Activism in the Post-War Episcopal Church" by Robert Tobin, the author explores the tension within the Episcopal Church between its English heritage and its desire to establish itself as genuinely American. The church has historically been associated with a privileged elite, appealing to the educated and aesthetically sensitive. However, a post-war generation of leaders dedicated themselves to progressive social reform, sacrificing the prestige and unity of the church. The book examines the challenges faced by clergy from privileged backgrounds claiming the role of prophets, as well as the church's shift towards extreme liberalism during the 1960s. The author also offers a challenge to the Church of England, cautioning against following the path of the Episcopal Church. [Extracted from the article]

The book "Gentrifications: Views from Europe" is a collective work by Marie Chabrol, Anaïs Collet, Matthieu Giroud, Lydie Launay, Max Rousseau, and Hovig Ter Minassian. The authors, who are PhD students from different countries, examine gentrification in various contexts and argue for commonalities behind these phenomena. They analyze the structural, policy, and social aspects of gentrification, emphasizing the complexity and multidimensionality of the process. The book's strengths include its longitudinal perspective, diverse research methods, and rejection of simplistic dichotomies. However, the authors' tendency to impose their own interpretations on research subjects is criticized as a methodological fallacy. Overall, the book contributes to the understanding of gentrification and its social implications in different European cities. [Extracted from the article]