Richard Bates

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if French people had a parenting problem or dilemma there was one person they consulted above all: Françoise Dolto (1908–88). But who was Dolto? How did she achieve a position of such influence? What ideas did she communicate to the French public? This book connects the story of Dolto’s rise to two broader histories: the dramatic growth of psychoanalysis in postwar France and the long-running debate over the family and the proper role of women in society. It shows that Dolto’s continued reputation in France as a liberal and enlightened educational thinker is at best only partially deserved and that conservative and anti-feminist ideas often underpinned her prominent public interventions. While Dolto retains the status of a national treasure, her career has had far-reaching and sometimes harmful repercussions for French society, particularly in the treatment of autism.

Winner of the 2021/2022 People's Book Prize Best Achievement AwardHomes can be both comforting and troubling places. This timely book proposes a new understanding of Florence Nightingale’s experiences of domestic life and how ideas of home influenced her writings and pioneering work. From her childhood homes in Derbyshire and Hampshire, she visited the poor sick in their cottages. As a young woman, feeling imprisoned at home, she broke free to become a woman of action, bringing home comforts to the soldiers in the Crimean War and advising the British population on the home front how to create healthier, contagion-free homes. Later, she created Nightingale Homes for nursing trainees and acted as mother-in-chief to her extended family of nurses. These efforts, inspired by her Christian faith and training in human care from religious houses, led to major changes in professional nursing and public health, as Nightingale strove for homely, compassionate care in Britain and around the world. Shedid most of this work from her bed after contracting the debilitating illness, brucellosis, in the Crimea, turning her various private homes into offices and ‘households of faith’. In the year of the bicentenary of her birth, she remains as relevant as ever, achieving an astonishing cultural afterlife.

Added Information: 12/15/18The information presented in this research demonstrates that Englewood like too many similar African-American communities in America, has lost its ability to be economically, politically, and otherwise self-sufficient/autonomous over the years as their neighborhoods have economically deteriorated. This was due to a serious demise of businesses, middle/upper class residents, crime, gangs, drugs, poor policing, poor educational institutions, and a server loss of population in general. All of these factors have contributed to an extensive loss of revenue in these areas. This has resulted in the residents in neighborhoods similar to Englewood becoming passive participants in the essential functions of the space/location they live in. Consequently, they usually have little if any authentic or substantive control/participation within the major spheres of influence and power in this these areas. Important decisions are mainly controlled by outsiders who rarely act in the residents true economic-political-social interest. This research suggests that this situation can possibly be resolved over a period of time by implementing various proposals and models for economic, political empowerment/sustainability presented in this writing that have been successful or had some significant measure of achievement such as the Mondragon Corporation's Workers Cooperative of Basque Spain, the Black owned First Independence Bank in Detroit, Michigan, or the various Black Cooperative current day and from the past that are detailed in such literature as Collective Courage A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard, which were promoted by the renowned African-American scholar Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. Although this information is primarily focused on Englewood the suggestions put forth should be useful for other Black or non-Black communities confronted with similar circumstances. Also other crucial themes directly and indirectly related to the issues that I have researched in this book are discussed.