Women And Children Last

In Keeping Women and Children Last, Ruth Sidel shows how America, in its search for a post-Cold War enemy, has turned inward to target single mothers on welfare, and how politicians have scapegoated and stigmatized female-headed families both as a method of social control and to divert attention from the severe problems that Americans face. She reveals the real victims of poverty--the millions of children who suffer from societal neglect, inferior education, inadequate health care, hunger, and homelessness. In this new edition, focusing on the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Sidel reevaluates our social policy, assessing the impact of the "end of welfare as we know it" on America's poor, especially its women and children.

Comparing the affluent U.S. of today to the Titanic (which, as a luxury liner, nevertheless lacked lifeboats for steerage women and children), Sidel contends in this realistic appraisal that despite the women's movement, social and economic trends of the last 20 years, especially the divorce rate and mechanization of industry, have reduced to bare survival hundreds of thousands of already impoverished women and children. Many are older women, battered wives or female heads of families, asserts Sidel (who interviewed several of them), and they are often victims of sex and racial discrimination in the workplace or of government cutbacks in human services. Following Sweden's example, the U.S., she argues, should develop policies to strengthen family life through universal entitlements; should pay women better wages, provide family planning, maternity leaves and prenatal care, along with day and after-school care.

A sea voyage in the nineteenth century was not for the faint-hearted. The hazards were many and accidents commonplace. Of the ways a ship might meet its end, destruction by fire was perhaps the most feared. Wooden sailing vessels were particularly vulnerable and without breathing apparatus it was next to impossible to fight a fire below decks. The period saw a number of catastrophic shipboard fires, but that involving the New Zealand-bound emigrant ship Cospatrick was certainly the most destructive. When she burned and sank off the coast of Southern Africa in 1874, nearly 500 people lost their lives. There was a desperate battle to quench the fire, a huge death toll as the vessel was being abandoned, and acts of cannibalism in the one lifeboat that remained afloat. This book is based on research carried out in Britain, New Zealand and Australia. While it relates the story of the Cospatrick and the nightmare survival of only three people, it also looks at the larger picture of safety at sea.

"It is 1912. Against all odds, the Titanic is sinking. As desperate hands emerge from the icy water, a few lucky row boats float in the darkness. On the boats are four survivors. Reg, a handsome young steward working in the first-class dining room; Annie, an Irishwoman travelling to America with her children; Juliet, a titled English lady who is pregnant and unmarried, and George, a troubled American millionaire. In the wake of the tragedy, each of these people must try to rebuild their lives. But how can life ever be the same again when you've heard over a thousand people dying in the water around you?"--Page [4] of cover.