UD Fulbright Spring Lecture Series

In Beyond Medicine, Paul V. Dutton provides a penetrating historical analysis of why countless studies show that Americans are far less healthy than their European counterparts. Dutton argues that Europeans are healthier than Americans because beginning in the late nineteenth century European nations began construction of health systems that focused not only on medical care but the broad social determinants of health: where and how we live, work, play, and age. European leaders also created social safety nets that became integral to national economic policy. In contrast, US leaders often viewed investments to improve the social determinants of health and safety-net programs as a competing priority to economic growth. In his lecture, Dutton will compare the US to three European social democracies—France, Germany, and Sweden—in order to explain how, in differing ways, each protects the health of infants and children, working-age adults, and the elderly. 

During the 19th and 20th centuries some women were at the center, if not in the lead, of struggles against the imposition of colonial rule and for political independence in Gold Coast/Ghana. Yaa Asantewaa waged a last fight against the British from among the Asante; later Hannah Cudjoe and other women mobilized support for the Convention People’s Party and Mabel Dove Danquah served as the first woman member of parliament, followed by 10 more women under one of Africa’s first electoral gender quotas. Women’s roles in formal political office diminished under military rule during which, however, Ghana (like Nigeria) experienced femocracy and the First Lady Syndrome (via the 31st December Women's Movement), both of which rely upon some mobilization of women for political purposes. Since the transition to democracy, Ghana has moved from center to bottom in terms of women’s representation in parliament, though women’s presence in cabinets has been higher. This lecture focuses on the Fourth Republic and some factors working against women’s election to parliament (cost of politics, politics of insult, weakness of parliament, among others), and some factors potentially working for women’s selection to cabinet. Echoing the women’s advocacy organization NETRIGHT, it is suggested that interventions by political parties and officeholders like the president could make a significant difference in enhancing women’s representation in government. Using a feminist institutionalist approach to discern the formal and informal rules surrounding the parliamentary election process and the cabinet appointment process, this study is based on ongoing research, including dozens of interviews with MPs, ministers, party leaders and women activists.