Domestic Skills Research Articles

Discharge and follow-up for people with stroke: what happens and why.

To assess the quality of the process of discharge from hospital and follow-up services for people with stroke. A criterion-based process audit and basic outcome measures, combined with surveys of patients' satisfaction and staff opinion of the service. All units treating stroke patients in a health care district including an acute and a community NHS trust, and 23 participating GP practices. Process audit: documented notes of 98 stroke patients admitted and discharged over a four-month period. Patient satisfaction survey: 93 surviving stroke patients. Staff opinion survey: general practitioners, hospital doctors, therapists and nurses treating stroke patients throughout the district. A poor level of service was found. The main shortcomings were poor communication and liaison and a narrow focus of rehabilitation which concentrated on the assessment and provision of basic home care and activities of daily living (ADL) required to obtain discharge. There was a paucity of provision beyond this most basic level and little follow-up after discharge. Pass rates against agreed criteria were: communication between staff and patients/carers 47%, liaison between staff 44%, assessment of home-based needs 48%, assessment of domestic skills 15.5%. Fifty-one per cent of patients were referred for follow-up therapy and of these 72% started follow-up therapy within six weeks of discharge, only 27% had any follow-up assessment of activity levels and well-being. Patients were dissatisfied with the information, support services and therapy they received. The main reasons for the shortcomings were lack of awareness of the services provided, professionals' low expectations of patients' abilities, and limitations of community-based therapy services. Evidence from other publications suggests that these results do not indicate a service that is any worse than other districts, rather it represents the poor deal offered to stroke patients. By comprehensively assessing several aspects of the service together this methodology has been able to reveal these inadequacies and the reasons for them.

Monitoring and evaluation of women's rural development extension services in South Africa

In South Africa, rural women's extension services are frequently based on the Western, middle-class ideology of a woman's place being in the private or domestic sphere of the home. Consequently, almost all extension services have a home economics feature which advocates the teaching of Western-type domestic skills, such as sewing, crocheting, knitting, cookery and child care, to name a few. The home economics extension services offered to rural women are inappropriate and ineffective in relation to women's triple role pertaining to reproductive, economic and community managing activities. Furthermore, most of the extension services are irrelevant to the real conditions of poverty prevailing in rural areas. Much of the planning of extension services is based on the needs of rural communities as decided by policy planners. Even where participatory approaches have been adopted, the monitoring and evaluation of progress made in achieving the objectives are often neglected. This article defines the concepts of monitoring and evaluation, explains their purposes in rural extension services, identifies suitable indicators for measuring sustainability of programmes, and highlights appropriate methods for collecting, handling and analysing data. In recognition of the inadequacies of and confusion in women's rural extension programmes, the article encourages reorientation of the processes used in monitoring and evaluating agricultural and rural development extension services in South Africa.

«Maman sérieuse cherche enfants à garder... ». Petits métiers urbains au féminin

«Responsible mum offers her services as a childminder»... Small urban jobs for women Although childminders have the task of socializing infants, theirs is a small urban women's job with professional contours that remain blurred. But by observing practices, we can see the local significance in urban neighbourhoods of childminding and the many other services it provides for city-dwellers. The domestic skills of childminders and childcarers are elements of support for the public environment.

American Indians Higher Education Before 1974: From Colonization to Self-Determination

Although Europeans and Americans involved American Indians in their educational systems almost from first contact, it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the United States government made a full scale assault and took control of virtually all aspects of American Indian education, with the purpose of forcing or encouraging assimilation. This assault began with treaty-based support for education in government schools run by both federally hired schoolteachers and missionaries, paid for directly with money the tribes received for their lands. By the late nineteenth century the federal government, recognizing the failure of day schools in the assimilation process, turned to the use of boarding schools, on-reservation and off, through which Indians were trained in vocational and domestic skills and which were intended to sever children’s ties to their cultures. During this time few Indians were educated at a college level. The English and later Americans expected those who were educated to use their educations to help in the assimilation process. These educational systems, while disrupting (though not destroying) reservation life and culture, focussed almost exclusively on industrial and domestic, not intellectual, training. The quality of education provided was so low that even Indian students wishing to attend college were often academically ineligible for entrance.

Positive Relationships Between Parent School Involvement and Public School Inner-City Preschoolers' Development and Academic Performance

Teacher ratings were used to identify the extent of parent involvement for three cohorts of predominantly low-income, urban 4-year-olds (N = 708) attending public prekindergarten or Head Start programs. The classroom edition of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales was used to measure preschoolers' language, self-help, social, motor, and adaptive development. Mastery of early basic school skills was measured by the school district's Early Childhood Progress Report. Increased parent school involvement and more active types of parent involvement were both associated with more positive development in all Vineland domains and greater mastery of early basic school skills in all subject areas. Although girls outperformed boys in all measures except four Vineland subdomains (expressive language, domestic skills, play and leisure, and gross motor skills), increased parent school involvement was associated with especially positive development and academic performance in preschool boys. Previous research had not identified a differential relationship between parent involvement and outcomes for preschool boys and girls.

A Comparative Study on Disability and Challenging Behavior in Hospital Wards and Hospital-Based Bungalows

The aim of this study was to compare the levels of disabilities and challenging behavior in hospital wards and hospital-based bungalows. Fifty clients were randomly chosen from 18 wards in one hospital and 54 clients from six hospital-based bungalows in another hospital. Clients were assessed using the Disability Assessment Schedule and the Aberrant Behaviour Checklist. Results showed that the clients from the hospital-based bungalows were significantly more capable than those on the wards in mobility, toiletting habits, washing, communication skills, domestic, handicrafts, and occupational skills. Clients from the hospital-based bungalows displayed significantly more severe challenging behavior than those from the wards. The speculative reasons included (1) clients in the hospital-based bungalows were still trying to adjust to the transition from hospital wards to purpose-built bungalows, (2) the burnout of staff in the hospital-based bungalows resulted in a low level of engagement with clients, (3) the different clinical characteristics of clients in both settings. Correlations were performed to examine the associations between challenging behavior and disabilities. The results showed that on the hospital wards, irritability, agitation and crying were correlated with age. Lethargy and withdrawal behavior were correlated with skills. Stereotypic behavior was also correlated with age. Hyperactivity and noncompliance were correlated with age and mobility. Inappropriate speech was correlated with age, incontinence, skills and repetitive symbolic activities. In the hospital-based bungalows, irritability, agitation and crying were correlated with skills. Lethargy and social withdrawal were correlated with skills and stereotyped behavior. Hyperactivity and noncompliance were correlated with skills, delayed echolalia and repetitive speech.

Octavia Hill Women Housing Managers in South Africa: femininity and urban government

Women trained in a system of housing management developed by Octavia Hill in Victorian England were employed in South Africa's Coloured and European townships from the mid-1930s. They were also involved in training South African women in this tradition which emphasized the mutual responsibilities of landlords and tenants and rested upon the formation of trusting relationships or friendships between women housing managers and the tenants. Octavia Hill's followers worked hard to make a place for women in the field of housing management and claimed that their femininity gave them special expertise in this area, especially in terms of training housewives in domestic skills and in building up the relations of trust required by Octavia Hill's system. This paper describes the implementation of this system of management in South Africa and considers the implications of the role of women in housing management for our thinking about the gendered character of the state. My main argument is that rather than being a precedent for the value of incorporating femininity and women into the state, Octavia Hill's management tradition had already incorporated both historically masculine and historically feminine practices. In so far as she and her followers (and perhaps other female reformers) played a role in shaping the nature of the state, then it could be argued the state reflected a mediation of masculinity and femininity rather than a dominant masculinity and a subordinated or segregated femininity.

Perception of service needs by parents with intellectual disability, their significant others and their service workers

It is well recognized in the literature that parents with intellectual disability require support and social services. There is growing interest in these services being responsive to parent-identified concerns, particularly as it has been suggested that parents’ concerns may differ from those reported by service workers, family members, or friends. In the Australian study reported here, the views of parents with intellectual disability, their significant others and service workers were sought on parents’ service needs on 20 items incorporating child care, social and community living, and domestic skills. There were significant differences in the perceptions of the parents, workers, and significant others on the help parents needed. Several gaps in services were also identified. From the parents’ perspective, their greatest unmet needs were in the community participation area, specifically with help to explore work options, to know what community services are available and how to access these, and to meet people and make friends.

The Undomesticated Nature of Feminism: Mary Austin and the Progressive Women Conservationists

THE UNDOMESTICATED NATURE OF FEMINISM: MARY AUSTIN AND THE PROGRESSIVE WOMEN CONSERVATIONISTS Stacy Alaimo University of Texas at Arlington In no national movement has there been such a spontaneous and universal response from women as in this great question of conservation . Women from Maine to the most western shore of the Hawaiian Islands are alive to the situation, because the home is woman's domain. She is the conserver of the race. Whatever affects the home, affects the very life of the Nation. —Margaret Russell Knudsen1 It is a common weakness of human nature to think of itself as idealistic when it is merely unimaginative. —Mary Austin2 At the start of the twentieth century, during a time of rampant racism , xenophobia, and gender anxiety, when women such as Margaret Russell Knudsen of the Progressive Conservation Movement were exalting white women' s mission to conserve natural resources in order to protect "the home" and enshrine "the race," Mary Hunter Austin saw nature not as a repository of resources for household use, but as an undomesticated, potentially feminist space. Austin, social critic, feminist , and nature writer, challenged the "Municipal Housekeeping" ideology of the Women's Progressive Conservation Movement, which adhered to a utilitarian conception of nature and promoted women's domestic skills as their qualification for conservation work. Austin disentangles women from domestic ideologies by invoking nature and releases nature from the grip of utilitarian philosophies by casting it as a woman. In Cactus Thorn and in other stories in which the desert appears as a seductive mistress, Austin takes the historically entrenched image of a feminine nature and turns it against itself, contesting discourses that position women and nature as resources for exploitation. Austin's startling creation of a sexual but not maternal land offers women a figure ofidentification outside the law by depicting nature as a force that exceeds and resists mastery. 74Stacy Alaimo Austin's desert mistresses seem particularly unruly and heretical when set against the gospel ofefficiency and the exaltation ofthe home then sweeping the United States. "Efficiency" impelled both the methodical mastery of nature through conservation and the management of the home through the emerging field of domestic science. Domestic science was one answer to the "problem" of the home, which became a major political issue at the turn of the century.3 Writers, clergy, and politicians railed about the sanctity of the home, and motherhood, not surprisingly, became an extraordinarily potent ideological nexus. What is perhaps most remarkable about Austin' s feminist perspective is the extent to which she was able to counter her time's omnipresent rhetoric, ideology, and politics of motherhood. As Molly LaddTaylor states of the Progressive era, "Virtually every female activist used motherhood rhetoric, and virtually every male politician appealed to motherhood." Teddy Roosevelt insisted that "woman must bear and rear the children as her first duty to the state," lest "the whole social system collapse;" the National Congress of Mothers, devoted to maternal ideals, not gender equality, boasted nearly 200,000 members; and the maternalist social reformers intervened in the domestic practices of immigrant women in order to naturalize the threat of cultural diversity and to ensure that good, Americanized citizens would issue from these homes.4 Though many women activists sought to radically redefine the domestic realm, they frequently invoked maternal ideals to forge their positions. Jane Addams, for example, celebrated women's motherly talents both within the family and as an important resource for social reform. Charlotte Perkins Gilman glorified motherhood, even as she denaturalized women's responsibility for housework and childrearing and advocated taking the kitchens and nurseries out of houses in order to free mothers to be "world-servant[s] instead of houseservant [s]."5 In contrast to Gilman, Addams, and other early New Women of her generation, Austin turned from maternal ideals in order to interrogate accepted notions of womanhood and the nature of gender. But unlike feminist modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein who were also overturning the "naturalness" of gender, Austin's writings do not repudiate the "natural" by depicting " 'unnatural' worlds and unstructured situations beyond the threshold of conventional order."6 Countering the ideologies ofmotherhood, the home, and woman...

Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870-1939 (review)

BookReviews 127 original, but American readers will nevertheless be interested in how this European takes his stand on many ofthe most important issues on German and Jewish history. Traverso is widely read in the French and German language literature on the subject and makes occasional references to the Anglo-American discourse. Few of his references are in his native Italian, and none are in Hebrew. He maintains that in German society Jews were never genuinely assimilated. Either they were pariahs, like the novelist Joseph Roth, or parvenus, like the industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau. His selection ofthese two figures as his models allows him to make his case rather easily. Much of his argument follows that ofHannah Arendt, to whom he readily acknowledges his debt. His [mal two chapters deal with the post-Holocaust period, not so much addressing new relationships between Germans and Jews, but as an exercise in the interpretation of history and ofmemory. He articulatesjust why he prefers the term "Shoah" to "Holocaust." He spells out the "functionalist" vs. "intentionalist" approaches to explaining the Nazi genocide of the Jews. He describes the Historikerstreit. The reunited Germany, he concludes, still "is far from having overcome its past" (p. 161). Though he does not use the term "eliminationist antisemitism" coined by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in describing Germany, one feels that he might well agree with the approach which that term implies. His essay would have been strengthened ifhe had noted that, in spite ofthe Shoah, the new Germany has attracted a growing Jewish population. These are not former "German citizens ofthe Jewish faith" and their descendants who are returning to the fatherland. They are largely Jews from Eastern Europe, now given the freedom to come westward to Germany, who are seeking opportunity and security if not full-scale assimilation. Though this reviewer does not have access to the French original for comparison, the translation by Daniel Weissbort, professor ofEnglish at the University ofIowa, appears quite serviceable. His "translator's foreword" adds important insights to the' book. Unfortunately there were flaws in the final editing, which created some embarrassing typographical errors (Chancellor "Khol" and "Paul" Hilberg). In all, the book is a useful contribution to the ongoing conversation on the issue of Germans and Jews. Gordon R. Mark Department ofHistory Purdue University Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870-1939, by Lara V. Marks. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 320 pp. $53,00. In her study Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London. 1870-1939, Lara Marks explores the "visions ofJewish women as good mothers 128 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 with robust children" (p. 1). Admired for their low infant mortality rates, Jewish women received credit for excellent domestic skills, remaining at home with their babies, and breast-feeding them. Some women, as Marks notes, failed to live up to this image, especially single mothers and prostitutes. Marks views her work as connecting, heretofore disparate fields, the history ofmaternal and infant welfare and immigration to Britain. She analyzes the extent and quality ofservices for pregnant Jewish women and mothers in East London and the degree to which high quality maternal and child welfare services offset the deprivations associated with poverty. Between 1885 and 1895 iilfant mortality rates in Jewish areas were higher than in nonJewish , becoming lower than other East London neighborhoods after 1895. Marks concludes that despite terrible poverty, overcrowding, and insanitary surroundings, Jewish infants were more likely to survive than the children ofnon-Jews, indicating that "Jewish infants had certain advantages over non-Jewish infants" (p. 55). Certain Jewish rituals, the emphasis on hygiene, and dietary laws contributed to Jewish health, especially to reducing infantile diarrhoea, a major cause of infant deaths. Contemporaries believed breast-feeding was common among Jewish mothers, but, notes Marks, the practice was "said to be common among Irish immigrants, and was very prevalent among the general workingclass " (p. 69), suggesting the importance offactors other than breast-feeding. Marks contends that Jewish religious, cultural, and social behavior allIed to healthier offspring. Mothers breast-fed longer and provided a better diet, rich in vitamin D, and few families spent scarce resources on alcohol. Generally, experts believed...

“Is It a Good Thing?”

Martha Stewart Omnimedia is a tremendously successful enterprise disseminating homemaking advice through books, magazines, newspaper columns and television programmes. In the tradition of works like Janice Radway’s feminist analysis of women’s romance novels, a study that privileges audience voices, this article examines a popular culture form aimed at homemakers. Relying on interviews with five homemakers who watch Martha Stewart on television or read the Martha Stewart Living magazine, I explore Stewart’s influence on these individuals’ domestic skills acquisition and on their perceptions and practices of homemaking. Centrally, I consider homemakers’ interpretations of Martha Stewart’s depictions of domestic labour, depictions which they consider as escapism. I ask, as Janice Winship does in her discussion of a woman’s magazine and its interconnections to consumption and capitalism: “..why these fantasies, this escape...?” (1983: 45).

Social and living skills of new long-stay hospital patients and new long-term community patients.

The study assessed differences in social behavior skills and everyday living skills in two groups of psychiatric patients: hospital inpatients with stays of between six months and five years (new long-stay patients) and discharged patients who had resided in the community for a similar length of time (new long-term patients). In a cross-sectional study based on a point prevalence survey in an outer London psychiatric hospital, 23 new long-stay and 23 new long-term patients were rated using the Social Behaviour Scale (SBS) and Basic Everyday Living Skills (BELS). Mean scores on both scales indicated significantly poorer functioning in the new long-stay group. Ratings on the BELS self-care and domestic skills subscales also indicated poorer functioning in that group. No significant differences between groups were found for the subscales measuring community and social relations skills. Significant gender differences emerged in ratings of domestic skills; men's scores indicated more impairment in the new long-stay group than in the new long-term group, while women's scores were comparable between the groups. Developing, enhancing, and maintaining skills among new long-stay patients, especially self-care and domestic skills, may facilitate their discharge into supported community settings.

Reversing past stereotypes: Skilled NESB women in Australia

Australians erroneously depicted migrant workers as having peasant origins, poor English and little education. Their domestic skills were highlighted over professional skills and they were thought of as occupying manufacturing or service-sector position. This stereotype may have been partially true in the 1970s, but it will be less so in the 1990s.

Ellen Ettlinger, 1902–1994

The death of Ellen Ettlinger deprives the Folklore Society of one of its oldest and most devoted members. Although age and ill-health had kept her away from meetings in recent years, she maintained her strong interest in the subject; it is fitting that the last of the many reviews she wrote for this journal appears elsewhere in this issue. Born Ellen Rathenau, she came of a Jewish family highly distinguished in German history and politics, but one which, for that reason, attracted Nazi persecution--an older cousin, who had served as Foreign Minister, was assassinated as early as 1922. Ellen, with her two young children, took refuge for some years in a remote part of Bavaria, where she was delighted by the picturesque folk art, customs and beliefs of the area. Even so, she eventually had to flee and arrived in Oxford in 1938, only to be classified as an enemy alien once the war broke out. With huge determination, she mastered English, acquired domestic skills, worked for the Red Cross, and found herself a niche in the intellectual life of Oxford.

Will Resources for Elder Care Be Scarce?

One of the major issues in the debate about the future of care is how to keep costs under control while meeting growing demands for care. Addressing that, especially on an international scale, is far from easy How are we to determine what the demands for care will most likely be? Even if it is not possible to estimate the future number of dependent elderly persons with any precision, it is hard to ignore the most probable scenario: a substantial increase in the number of the oldest old. What factors--demographic, cultural, economic--will shape the future use of care services, and how much reliance should policy-makers place on long-term projections of population, status, and need for services? What instruments are available to different societies and governments to control the cost of care? These are the sorts of questions we must try to answer in determining whether, and to what extent, we face a growing scarcity of resources as the elderly population grows. Countries participating in the project Ethics and the Care of the Elderly have totally different care systems. The Western European welfare states (the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands) have a mixed system of government regulation and free market elements, while the Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic and Hungary) are rebuilding their care systems in the post-communist era. And the United States is looking to reform its strongly market oriented care system. Yet despite substantial differences among the participating countries, we can identify various conceptual frameworks of factors that determine the use of care services. But a single, generally accepted theory about the use of services is not available so far. This sets limitations on the possibilities of predicting the future needs for services. For this reason, projections of service utilizations are often limited to demographic projections. These kinds of projections will be presented for the Netherlands and Sweden. The outcomes are discussed in terms of trends in utilization patterns and government policies. A Conceptual Framework for the Use of Health Services There is a long tradition of research aimed at explaining the use of care. In these studies a wide range of factors was found to influence service use on both the demand side and the supply side. The most important determinant of service utilization is status, both as perceived by the individual and as revealed by diagnoses. On the demand side of service use the central questions addressed by these studies are: what factors (apart from status) influence the use of services, and why does one person with a problem visit a professional caregiver while another person with the same problem does not? Different studies assess the importance of secondary variables differently. Depending on the approach taken by a particular study, the relevant factors pertain to any of four domains: the demographic (age, sex, socioeconomic status, income), the social-psychological (motivation, personality, medical knowledge, attitudes toward health, satisfaction with caregivers, the health belief model), the sociocultural (norms and values in one's own group, religion, nationality, and ethnicity), and the financial-economic (health insurance system, out-of-pocket payments).[1] Often factors from several areas are combined into one model, which may also include factors on the supply side of service use, such as ratios of personnel to patients or distance to service location. The aim is to explain as much variance in service utilization as possible.[2] By taking into account both services and social services it appears that the most important variables on the demand side of service use are: age, sex, household composition, education, income, housing, social network, domestic skills, development of technologies to enable care recipients to live independently for longer, and attitudes toward and illness. …

A Review of Individual Service Plan Goals for Learners with Challenging Behaviours

Individual Service Plans (ISPs) are often used to guide habilitative services for persons with intellectual disabilities. In the present study, we reviewed the types of goals included in the ISPs for 20 nonverbal individuals with severe disabilities and challenging behaviours from a large residential centre in Australia. Most goals focused on reducing challenging behaviour, teaching self‐care and domestic skills or described assessment and referral activities. Relatively little emphasis was given to increasing communication/language, recreation/leisure or community living skills. Behaviour management goals included strategies to suppress challenging behaviour and increase adaptive alternatives, as well as various ecological and physiological approaches. Habilitative services might be improved by including more goals on communication/language, recreation/leisure and community living skills. It is also recommended that behaviour management goals be based on a more thorough assessment of the variables controlling challenging behaviour.

An isolated missionary: the domestic subjects teacher in england, 1870-1914

Abstract In England's developing elementary school system domestic subjects teachers had a singular position. Part of a wider domestic subjects movement intent on the professionalisation of traditional domestic skills as a means of raising women's social status, these women assiduously promoted the practical domestic work of cooking and cleaning as part of the school curriculum. The period 1870-1914 saw both the elementary class teacher and the domestic subjects teacher moving towards professional status, but from an examination of their background, their training and their working conditions it can be seen that the struggle for the promoters of domestic skills was unique. Paradoxically they reinforced home-centredness and individual private domestic work from a public position as educators that increasingly required collective, standardised action to promote the movement's aims.

An isolated missionary: the domestic subjects teacher in England, 1870-1914

Abstract In England's developing elementary school system domestic subjects teachers had a singular position. Part of a wider domestic subjects movement intent on the professionalisation of traditional domestic skills as a means of raising women's social status, these women assiduously promoted the practical domestic work of cooking and cleaning as part of the school curriculum. The period 1870-1914 saw both the elementary class teacher and the domestic subjects teacher moving towards professional status, but from an examination of their background, their training and their working conditions it can be seen that the struggle for the promoters of domestic skills was unique. Paradoxically they reinforced home-centredness and individual private domestic work from a public position as educators that increasingly required collective, standardised action to promote the movement's aims.

From Achievement to Happiness: Girl Scouting In Middle Tennessee, 1910s-1960s

From Achievement to Happiness: GiW Scouting In Middle Tennessee, 1910s-1960s Elisabeth Israels Perry Girl Scouting, a recreational and framing program for young girls, was founded in the United States in 1912. Its popularity rose steadüy. By 1963,2,835,633 girls were Girl Scouts—one out of every seven girls between the ages of seven and seventeen; 720,250 adults were also in the program, serving as troop leaders, board members, or administrators.1 The size of this membership—a total of over three and a half million people in 1963 alone—indicates that over the course of the twentieth century Girl Scouting has interpreted, transmitted, even shaped sodet/s ideals of womanhood for a significant proportion of the American population. Despite Girl Scouting's popularity, few historians of women have analyzed its influence on partidpants.2 In 1990, when Girl Scout offidals from the program in Middle Tennessee asked for my help in preparing an historical exhibit for their new headquarters, I resisted the topic. Since I assodated the program's annual cookie sale, patriotic exercises, wearing of uniforms and badges, and emphasis on female propriety with an uncritical conformity to prevailing norms for women, I did not see the topic as opening new scholarly territory. Despite my reluctance, the offidals persuaded me to accept the assignment; it was not long before my view of Girl Scouting's influence underwent revision. I approached the project through both Middle Tennessee and national materials. Although the original Girl Scout program had, in fart, conformed to many of the gender norms that prevaüed before the resurgence of American feminism in the 1960s, in some ways it had also broken new ground. The first Girl Scout handbook blended late Victorian values and norms with those assodated with the turn-of-the-century "new woman."3 Thus, at the same time as it inspired girls to be modest and chaste, the program also trained them to "achieve" along lines usually reserved for boys. Using an incentive system of badges, pins, and ranks, it helped girls become self-reHant, informed about the world, and capable of surviving chaUenges and emergendes. Further, although it stressed the overriding importance of women's perfecting of domestic skills in the private realm, it also encouraged women to express their talents and abilities in pubHc. In the early 1930s, however, reflecting the larger culture's drift away from the ideals and rhetoric of the first woman's movement,4 national Girl Scout administrators changed the focus of the program. From emphasizing "achievement," they shifted the program's focus toward "happiness." © 1993 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 5 No. 2 (Fall) 76 Journal of Women's History Fall Although achievement remained a goal, teaching girls what to do to be happy took priority over showing them how to reach high levels of proficiency and become self-reHant. Moreover, the program's early thematic emphasis on the pubHc expression of women's talents disappeared. The resulting program, which remained in place for many decades, offered participants more activities that were "fun" but demanded less of them in terms of concrete accomplishment. My dose study of local Middle Tennessee materials revealed, however , that despite the revisions of the 1930s not aU opportunities to "achieve" through Girl Scouting had vanished. Local materials highHghted two key ways in which such opportunities persisted. First, the personahties of individual troop leaders turned out to be a significant variable in local implementation and experience of the program. Given considerable independence to define their own activities, the individuals who led troops—their ambitions, depth of commitment, and conception of program goals—profoundly influenced the appHcation of Girl Scout prindples. Documents from Middle Tennessee show that highly motivated leaders, women for whom Girl Scouting was not just an opportunity for casual volunteer work with girls but a "philosophy of life," achieved results surprisingly in keeping with the program's original intent. Second, as a female-run organization, Girl Scouting offered local women opportunities for leadership rarely available to them in other agendes. Single women benefitted most from these opportunities, but married women as weU found important roles to play in the organization. Minority women, in particular...

Age and the self-perception of ability: a twin study analysis.

Two thousand nine hundred seventy-four adults, including 678 monozygotic and 547 dizygotic twin pairs, aged 27-86 years, self-rated ability on 6 factors: Interpersonal Competence, Workplace Skills, Trade Skills, Intellectual and Cultural, Domestic Skills, and Athletic Competition. Age accounted for no more than 2% of the variance on any factor, and, although there were significant gender effects, no significant Age X Gender interactions were observed. Twin similarity did not vary significantly with age, and biometrical variance component estimates were statistically homogeneous across age with talent factor variance being apportioned approximately equally to genetic and nonshared environmental factors. Consistent failure to find age effects as well as consistent observation of significant heritability support the conclusion that self-concept crystallizes early in adulthood and reflects genetically influenced psychological characteristics.