Fusion and Heterosexual Women's Friendships:

This paper will discuss the phenomenon of fusion in heterosexual women's adult relationships; first as it emerged clinically in my treatment of women in group therapy; next as it hsa been discussed in the literature and finally as it emerged in my study of healthy women's friendships. There, the most differentiated and autonomous women in my study reported experiencing fusion in their closest female friendships. The paper then explores the meaning of fusion in women's relationships and calls for a transformed view of adult development which admits women's experiences of fusion with their strong sense of self. Finally, I suggest that fusion in adult friendships need not be seen as regressive nor pathological but may play an important role in women's experiences of self-differentiation.     

Coping with work and family: How do dual‐earners interact?

Juggling the demands of both work and family has become increasingly difficult, especially for dual‐earner households; nevertheless, families have developed strategies to deal with work‐family challenges. This paper uses couple level analyses (APIM models) with 100 dual‐earner couples to provide insight about partners' mutual influence on the use of work‐family coping strategies. The results show that women's use of coping strategies is more associated with work‐family conflict and work‐family enrichment than men's coping. In addition, using partner coping, having a positive attitude towards multiple roles, using planning and management skills and avoiding having to cut back on professional responsibilities is associated with better outcomes (more enrichment and less conflict). Surprisingly, the use of childcare facilities is associated with women's conflict and partner effects were only found concerning the use of management and planning skills. These skills, however, have distinct effects for men and women's outcomes: their use by men reduces their own conflict but increases their wives', while their use by women decreases their own conflict and increases their own and their partner's enrichment. These results point to the fact that gender roles continue to be a hallmark of work‐family issues. Our design and results point out the need for new interventions that take couple interdependences into account.     

Some demographic,personality, and role variables as correlates of women's well-being

This study examined the contributions of some demographic (age and education), personality (extraversion and neuroticism), and role variables (role occupancy and role quality) as predictors of happiness and symptoms of psychological distress in a sample of employed and non-employed English women (N= 145). Using multiple regression analysis, the results showed that personality variables accounted for the largest proportion of explained variance in the well-being measures. The results, however, did not support the predictions made by the transactional model of stress and that the three sets of predictor variables (demographic, personality and roles) combined additively in their effects on women's psychological well-being. Finally, the results showed that happiness and distress, though related, had different correlates. These findings are discussed in relation to current issues within the literature on women's work and family roles in relation to their well-being.     

Toward a Theory of Creativity in Diverse Creative Women

ABSTRACT: Little is known and limited research has been completed about creative women, their creative processes, and the decisions they face about their own creative productivity. Few books or even articles suggest how creativity can be better developed, enhanced, or increased in a diverse population of girls and women. The social and political movement focusing on women during the past five decades has provided some understanding of women's creative processes as well as the creative roles that women have played in our society and the forces that shape those roles. In this article, current research is analyzed, focusing on the development of women's creativity and the classification of this research into major themes. Internal and external blocks to creativity in women are discussed, as is current research on these blocks, and an explanation is suggested for different types of creative productivity exhibited by women. A theory is proposed regarding the diversion of women's creativity into multiple areas in their lives, including relationships, work related to both family and home, personal interests, and aesthetic sensitivities. This diversion of creative efforts may result in different levels of creativity applied to work, as well as the existence of very different patterns of creative productivity in creative women.     

Women's Occupational Choices and Lifetime Work Rhythms: Are We Still Making Progress?

This article reviews women's present and expected future place in the world of work. It considers two issues that grow out of changes that have taken place in women's economic roles: (a) expansion of the range of occupations in which women engage; and (b) work structure flexibility that responds to the intertwined nature of work and family lives. The article recommends a number of initiatives to ensure that social changes that have occurred will result in more life satisfaction rather than just more life complexity.     

Breadwinner and caregiver: A cross‐sectional analysis of children's and emerging adults’ visions of their future family roles

Participants were 150 school‐age boys and girls, 58 high school students, and 145 university students drawn from communities in the Southeastern United States. In this cross‐sectional study, family role attitudes and expectations were examined across development. Parental work traditionality (occupational prestige and traditionality, and employed hours) predicted daughters’ social role attitudes and plans for future family roles, such that daughters’ envisioned families resembled that of their parents. Sons’ and daughters’ own attitudes about adult family roles predicted their plans to work or stay home with their future children; however, mothers’ work traditionality predicted daughters’ future plans over and above daughters’ own attitudes. The only exception to this was in the case of university daughters, where university women's attitudes about social roles fully mediated this relationship. It may be that, as young women approach adulthood and the formation of families, they adjust their vision of their future self to match more closely their own attitudes about the caregiving role.     

Chapter 2. Single Mothers' Transition to Self-Sufficiency

SUMMARY

In this chapter, I review the literature in four sections central to my research questions. First, I review the socio-historical context of trends that have had an impact on single mothers in transition from economic assistance to self-sufficiency. Next, I present research that focuses on poor women's interactions with barriers to work versus self-sufficiency. Then I examine the reported interactions between work, family role strain, and the psychological well-being of low-income women during their transition to work. Finally, I introduce related literature that reflects studies and reports on the outcomes of TANF after 1996.     

Striving for God's Attention: Gendered Spaces and Piety

This article looks at the inadequacy of space available to women in the two most holy sites for all Muslims: Masjid al‐Haram in Makkah and Masjid an‐Nabawi in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. I argue that religious discourse, shaped by geopolitical factors, has framed piety for women primarily in terms of modesty, such that a woman is often considered a good Muslim if she is visible only within her female community but invisible to the larger society. Furthermore, I argue that the allocation of meager space affects not only the perception of women's religious standing in society, but also women's own perception about their moral selves. The article claims that by being relegated to small sections within religious spaces, women's collective worship is evident neither to the community at large nor can it be fully experienced by individual women, thus placing obstacles in women's path to seek to closeness to God.     

Investigating Religion and Inequality through Women's Work-Family Pathways

This project investigates the relationship between religious involvement and women's work and family pathways in the United States. I identify five work-family configurations using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and latent class analysis. These configurations incorporate cohabitation histories, timing of family formation, and maternal employment. Then, I analyze how adolescent religiosity and personal and family characteristics are associated with subsequent work-family pathways. Affiliation with an evangelical Protestant tradition is associated with women who form families early, while Catholic affiliation is tied to later family formation. Importantly, family background characteristics such as living with both biological parents and higher parental education, as well as race/ethnicity and the respondent's educational attainment, are the most consistent variables associated with work-family configurations. These results suggest that religious involvement, when considered alongside family background, contributes to women's unequal work-family pathways in adulthood. The close links between religion, family, and stratification are evident in the study of women's work-family experiences.     

Consumption and community: choices for women over forty

• Women in their 40s face a range of issues regarding how they choose to present themselves to the world; often these choices involve forms of consumption. We talked to two groups of British women and discussed how they felt about themselves and the pressures upon them. We present a discussion which aims to synthesize some of the key features of how these women face their futures and suggest potential theoretical positions to help encapsulate women's present and future selves. We suggest that there are a number of pressures that may engender alternative consumption choices and these are often set within a wider sense of female community. The concept of community should prove useful for further theorising on women's future consumption choices.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Feminist Organizing in Rural Nicaragua: Assessing a Psychosocial Process to Promote Empowered Solidarity

This study examines a psychosocial process linking women's involvement in a grassroots women's organization with skills and experiences to promote empowered solidarity. Empowered solidarity is described as a process of increasing the sense of connection and capacity to create social transformation among a group of people united by interest in addressing a social issue. Data collected and analyzed for this research were 298 quantitative surveys conducted with two groups of women living in rural Nicaragua. One group of women were members of a grassroots feminist organization, and the other group lived in nearby communities where the organization did not offer programs. Findings document higher levels of leadership skills and sense of community, and lower levels of powerlessness among members of the organization. Additionally, tests of a process model using structural equation modeling provides support for a model that links involvement in the organization to women's increased interest in, capacity and experience in working to support women, broadly. Overall findings from this research are valuable to both community psychologists and groups seeking to enhance social justice and uphold feminist values of equity and community well‐being.     

A Republican Housewife: Marie‐Jeanne Phlipon Roland on Women's Political Role

In this paper I look at the philosophical (and sometimes personal) struggles of one eighteenth‐century woman writer to reconcile a desire and obvious capacity to participate in the creation of republican ideals and their applications on the one hand, and on the other a deeply held belief that women's role in a republic is confined to the domestic realm. I argue that Marie‐Jeanne Phlipon Roland's philosophical writings—three unpublished essays, published and unpublished letters, as well as parts of her memoirs—suggest that even though she adopted a Rousseau‐style rural republicanism that relies on complementarity of men and women's virtues, she somehow succeeds in proposing a less sexist picture of the republican family, one that makes it possible for men and women to take an equal part in family business and politics.     

Beauvoir on Women's Complicity in Their Own Unfreedom

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are often complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom. But why women become complicit remains an open question. The aim of this article is to offer a systematic analysis of complicity by focusing on the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's account. I begin by evaluating Susan James's interpretation of complicity qua republican freedom, which emphasizes the dependent situation of women as the primary cause of their complicity. I argue that James's analysis is compelling as far as it goes, but that it implies complicity is the inevitable outcome of women's current existence and fails to adequately account for Beauvoir's claim that women actively embrace their own unfreedom. I then draw out the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's analysis, demonstrating how this enables us to systematize Beauvoir's account of women's oppressive situation with her claims regarding the active role women can play in reinforcing their own unfreedom. I argue that this approach preserves the strengths of the republican interpretation, but provides a better account of cases where complicity may not be inevitable and yet some women still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom.     

Triple Roles,Worship, and “Period Shaming”: How Muslim Women Maintain Belonging and Connection in Ramadan

Ramadan is a time when Muslims experience an increased connection to God and an increased sense of belonging through communal acts of worship, but Muslim women are often excluded from many acts of worship due to religious restrictions while they are menstruating. This study innovatively applies concepts of “religious citizenship” and women's “triple roles” drawn from lived religion and feminist literature to a new context of Muslim women and their everyday practices. Based on research with more than 60 culturally diverse Melbourne Muslims who kept anonymous diaries before, during, and after Ramadan 2021, this analysis shows how Muslim women's understandings of religious belonging and connection in Ramadan are shaped by their own reconfigured approaches to worship and socialization alongside their everyday workload. It provides a unique opportunity to investigate the invisible challenges faced by Muslim women in worship and devotion during Ramadan.     

Is parenthood a desirable adult role? An assessment of attitudes held by contemporary women

The purpose of this study was to explore contemporary women's perception of parenthood. The attitudes toward parenthood of 213 undergraduate females enrolled in family or women's studies courses were measured by an 11-item Likert-type scale. Major findings include (a) the expectation that parenthood will be among the subjects' adult roles, but will be delayed; (2) a rejection of the idea that motherhood is a prerequisite to women's happiness and fullfillment; (3) a confused perception of the effect of parenthood on the male; and (4) a suggestion that although these young women intend to parent, they assess their preparation to do so as limited.     

Women's bodies,rebirth, and Shin Buddhism: Insights and challenges for Christianity

In this article, I examine a traditional Shin teaching on women and women's bodies as they relate to rebirth in Amida's Pure Land and ask how that teaching might inform Christian doctrines on women's bodies. After an analysis of the role of women's bodies in the broader Shin teachings around Amida's compassion and rebirth in the Pure Land, I conclude by raising questions for Christianity this analysis invites and suggest further lines of inquiry that might help open up more positive understanding of women and women's bodies in contemporary Christianity.     

Nontraditional gender roles and the sexual experiences of heterosexual college students

The purposes of this study of heterosexual college students were (1) to specify gender differences and similarities in sexual beliefs and experiences, (2) to determine the prevalence of women enacting traditional male roles in dating and sexual interactions, and (3) to examine the relationship between women's enactment of traditional male roles and their sexual experiences. Findings for this predominantly Caucasian sample indicated that there were no significant gender differences in age of first intercourse, frequency of intercourse, oral sex participation, prevalence of coitus and anal sex, rating of how often sex partners satisfied their sex needs and desires, and reactions to recent intercourse. Although less than men's frequencies, sizable proportions of women acknowledged they had multiple sex partners and sex without emotional involvement. Support for an increased proportion of females engaging in the traditional male roles of initiating sexual involvement and dates and paying date expenses was also found. Findings also suggested that there are no simple patterns between women's sexual experience and nontraditional roles but that this association depends on the specific role as well as the status and quality of a woman's current sexual relationship. Findings were discussed in terms of their potential to contribute to women's sexual decisions.     

The health of employed women and men: work,family, and community correlates

Research into clarifying the relationship between social roles and health has increasingly focused on studying the particular circumstances in which occupying multiple roles may enhance or diminish well‐being. This study examined the association between a general measure of well‐being—self‐rated health—and the perceived quality of work, family and community in a sample of employed urban‐dwelling Canadians in a mid‐size city, and whether the nature of the association differed for men and women. Few gender differences were found in the perceived quality of work, family and community. However, men and women differed significantly in the specific type of quality measures associated with general health. For women, satisfaction with one's partner/spouse and in the money available to meet basic family needs had a stronger association with self‐rated health. For men, the significant correlates were satisfaction with family relationships (other than one's partner) and the community physical environment. For both women and men, a more socially cohesive community was associated with better self‐rated health. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recasting Gendered Paradigms: An Indonesian Cleric and Muslim Women in the Malay World

This essay examines the ideas of a prominent Indonesian cleric, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah (Hamka), about the place of women in Islam and in Southeast Asian Muslim societies. I argue that Hamka was engaged in the project of “recasting gendered paradigms,” which involves reinterpreting, reconceptualizing and reconfiguring various dominant understandings about the roles, functions and responsibilities of women in Islam as reflected not only in the Qur'an and the adat (traditional customs), but also in modern discourses about women's empowerment. I show that Hamka's commitment to advocating for women's rights and critiquing prevailing ideas about the place of women in religion and society was a product both of his personal experiences and of the profound social and intellectual shifts that characterized his day and age.     

Work and its place in the lives of immigrant women: Garment workers in New York City's Chinatown

Working wives and mothers are traditionally considered secondary wage earners, and employment is not automatically accompanied by occupational attainment of individual workers. For immigrant women, the double burden is compounded by lack of English, transferable education and skills, and knowledge of the larger economy. In this article, we have illustrated the special meanings of immigrant women's work in the context of ethnic enclave employment and family responsibility. Based on census data and fieldwork in the garment industry in New York's Chinatown, we have found that the particularly high rate of immigrant Chinese women's labor market participation is largely accounted for by the availability of jobs provided by the ethnic enclave economy, that those women are overrepresented in low-wage menial jobs, and that they tend to perceive their work as meaningful, despite of low wages, long working hours and poor working conditions. These findings suggest that survival is more important for immigrant Chinese women than their own rights in the workplace, at least in the earlier stages of immigrant adaptation, and that their wage labor is an indispensable part of the collective family effort for social mobility. The results imply that, for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, it is difficult to achieve long-term social mobility merely through individual efforts. Therefore, policies dealing with those groups mired in poverty and confined to survival at the margins of society should put more emphasis on community development in connection to the promotion of individual education and job training.