Search

Social science research shows that contemporary women endorse feminist goals at rates similar to women in the 1970s. However, generations may differ in some aspects of their relationship to feminism. This study of 333 university alumnae examined expressions of feminism across three generations. We provide the first empirical evidence to support Stewart and Healy's (1989 ) prediction about the impact of social events experienced in childhood; only the youngest cohort recalled holding feminist beliefs as children. Additionally, each cohort identified feminist influences from the period coinciding with their own identity-forming adolescence as most important, although feminism was related to other beliefs in a similar way for each cohort. The Women's Movement appears to be internalized differently depending on developmental life stage.

From conception to the grave, girls and women face competition with others. In this chapter, I focus only on competition with other females: in the womb, the fetus’s needs compete with her mother’s and any sister’s; after birth, she competes throughout her life: with her sisters, other female relatives, and unrelated female competitors for social status or mates. Although seldom as overt as male–male competition, female–female competition is equally serious in terms of lifetime impacts and may occasionally become violent. Here I follow a female lifetime, exploring the kinds, intensity, and impact of female–female competition.

This article analyzes Janine Niepce's photographic documentation of the lives of French women, situating it in historical, sociological, and biographical contexts. It argues that for over 50 years she was the only photo-journalist to devote sustained attention to French women and the French women's movement. Drawing on her writings, 3 interviews, close readings of her photographs, and study of her contact sheets, the article offers a summary of her work, an interpretation of its meaning, and an assessment of its contribution.

This paper consists of a critical reflection of a research study carried out by a white researcher documenting black Muslim women’s experiences of victimisation and the management of their personal safety. It is argued that whilst some aspects of the researcher’s subjectivity can be linked to marginalised, outsider positions, which helped to produce oppositional knowledge, other aspects of her self‐identity served to maintain and re‐produce dominant racial and cultural discourses and power relations.

Stories about sewing machines are not usually the stuff of geographies, although stories and narratives offer potential as a geographic method. In this article, I examine the ways that story telling is a reflexive representational strategy, becoming a text for analysis that can be complemented by field research methods. I examine a story about sewing machines to suggest how it can be an analytical tool for postcolonial research, conveying what may be called the ‘real’ effects of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization in the lives of the women I researched in northern Pakistan. This method of representation makes more transparent the extent of women's participation in constructing ‘my’ narrative and research.

This book is a heartfelt cry of dissent. The editors and contributors, development practitioners and academics, express and illustrate their concern that currently, dominant systems for managing ai...

Violence in the book of Judges is a function of the lawless era it describes, but it is also intertwined with the lives of women. The women in the book are both perpetrators and victims of violence; the relationship between violence and women's lives is a surprisingly intimate one.

Research has generally suggested that positive life circumstances may help alleviate the distress brought on by breast cancer. Little attention has been paid to the effects of negative life circumstances on women's adjustment to the disease. In this study, 110 women answered in writing an open-ended question about life circumstances (positive, negative, or both) that they perceived to have influenced their experience with breast cancer. Many women described both positive and negative circumstances, but negative circumstances were reported more commonly. The women described 28% of the negative circumstances as more salient or more distressing than breast cancer; these circumstances were coded as “negative distracting” circumstances. Exploratory regression analyses found that positive circumstances were associated with better adjustment and negative circumstances were associated with poorer adjustment. In addition, distracting circumstances were associated with better adjustment. Findings suggest t...

Chris Coulter. Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women's Lives Through War and Peace in Sierra Leone. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8014-7512-2. This is a carefully crafted contrib...

An oral history project involving interviews with Croatian women intellectuals and artists will be presented. In the course of the project everyday lives of women intellectuals are being analyzed, especially exploring how they combined their personal lives and intellectual endeavors in a society that traditionally assigned them domestic and nurturing roles. The project’s aim is to question did they feel different from the other women because of their intellectual interest, and to what extent were their personalities and ways of life shaped by themselves, and how much they think they have succumbed to the pressures and norms of the society? Croatia and the rest of Europe are facing retraditionalization, which disrupted women’s lives and women’s history. The younger generations of women often embrace conservative trends uncritically, while at the same taking feminism’s outcomes for granted, unaware of the fact that the women’s rights once gained are not irreversible but depend on the fragile socio-political circumstances. This can be challenged by the use of oral history. Younger women could feel empowered by the older women’s struggle for equality and more fulfilled lives. The private struggles – especially those of educated women outsiders – have the capacity to overcome the generational differences and make real changes. In order for the younger women to get “guidelines” to more emancipated lives, women’s past lives have to be narrated (as autobiographical texts or interviews), archived and seriously analyzed, so that they could be publicly presented and reach them.

Although regular exercise has important health benefits, women's physical activity participation remains low. Addressing the gender- and generation-specific barriers in an intervention may help women become more physically active. Fifty women (mean age = 45 years) participated in a six-session cognitive-behavioral intervention. Baseline, post-intervention, and follow-up data were collected. Total physical activity levels increased from baseline to post-intervention and were maintained at long-term follow-up. This research suggests that participation in a comprehensive, cognitive-behavioral, and empowerment-based physical activity intervention, tailored to address women's distinct constraints and pressures due to sociopsychological experiences, can facilitate increased physical activity among white, middle-aged women.

In an idyllic canyon near Santiago, a group of twelve women were electric with emotion from sharing personal stories and experiences, and, of course, from singing. Deep bonds were forged among participants, few of whom knew each other prior to the workshop. They were there to compose women-identified songs in a setting that alternated between individual and group composition.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Women listeners were the key daytime audience for the BBC during the inter-war years. Within months of the BBC’s formation, talks aimed specifically at women were an integral part of the daily schedules; the first regular series for women, Women’s Hour (not to be confused with today’s Woman’s Hour) began in May 1923. Although rarely overtly feminist, these talks of the 1920s and 1930s aimed to empower women as mothers, citizens and home-makers. Prior to the Second World War, four women Talks Assistants had responsibility for their programming: Ella Fitzgerald, Elise Sprott, Margery Wace and Janet Quigley. In addition, Hilda Matheson, the BBC’s first Director of Talks, 1927-1932, played a pivotal part in expanding and broadening this gendered output. This chapter will consider the roles of these five women and how their understanding of the audience, their personal style and particular interests were reflected in the programmes they made.

Part 1 Social history: jam and Jerusalem - the acceptable face of feminism? Maggie Morgan the culture of femininity in women's teacher training colleges 1914-1945, Elizabeth Edwards. Part 2 Political history: women in the British Union of Fascists, 1932-1940, Martin Durham an Austrian refugee in wartime Manchester, Hanna Behrend. Part 3 Cultural history: ...A Fair Field and No Favour?... - women artists working in Britain between the wars, Katy Deepwell Chloe, Olivia, Isabel

Based on interviews with 37 women with HIV infection, this paper explores women’s perceptions of HIV/AIDS in relation to other traumatic life events. Employing a biographical disruption framework, this paper demonstrates how women reconstruct the meaning of HIV infection in light of other disruptive life situations. Findings indicate that despite initial disruption, in retrospect, many of the sample women did not consider HIV to be the most devastating event in their lives. Rather, violence, mother-child separation, and drug use were deemed more disruptive than HIV infection. Several factors, including race, drug use and abuse histories, social support and diagnosis, were central to women’s differential assessment of HIV in relation to other disruptive events. Results are discussed in terms of the practical and theoretical implications of the analysis.