Emotional Sustenance Research Articles

Neighborhood at your Fingertips: Transforming Community Online through a Canadian Social Networking Site for Mothers

Local geographical communities have changed significantly in the last several decades due to a number of cultural factors, including women’s increased participation in the paid workforce and growing rates of single parenthood. Changing communities have resulted in increased social isolation for mothers raising young children, which often means a lack of vital social support, particularly from other mothers. The current research addresses this contemporary challenge by exploring the role of a Canadian social networking site for mothers, namely, Momstown.ca, in providing online social support to mothers. In particular, the study focuses on how the dynamic possibilities of technology mediate the experience of motherhood. Our research demonstrates that a social networking site, which facilitated a technologically mediated motherhood, enabled women to combat their social isolation through the creation of an accessible and supportive online community of mothers. The distinctive ease, convenience, and speed of online connectivity, combined with the respectfulness cultivated within this particular online community, facilitated mothers’ access to essential peer support in the forms of emotional sustenance, “appraisal assistance,” and informational resources. Mothers’ engagement with this online community was ultimately an empowering experience that speaks of the transformative possibilities of cyberfeminism.

‘My Mother…My Sisters… and My Friends’: Sources of maternal support in the perinatal period in urban India

Objectiveto explore the wide-ranging sources of support that the maternal–infant dyad need or expect throughout the perinatal period in urban India. Designqualitative interviews and ethnographic approach. Settinghomes and community settings in greater metropolitan Bangalore, South India. Participantsusing in-depth interviews of 36 mothers from different socio-cultural and socio-economic backgrounds who had given birth within the past two years in a tertiary hospital, we explored the nature of support, advice and emotional sustenance through pregnancy, childbirth and the early child rearing period available to these women. Findingsthe overwhelming importance of women's own mothers in practical and emotional terms, the connectedness to ‘native’ place or ‘ooru’, the role of the diverse, extensive female network and the more contingent role of the husband emerged as major themes. The family was a major source of support as well as distress. While the support from their own mother was a constant, women used various forms of support throughout the perinatal continuum. Conclusions and implications for practicewe call for a more nuanced understanding of what women in urban India expect and need in terms of support throughout the perinatal period. Clinicians and policy makers need to understand the various players, their different roles at critical times through the perinatal continuum and be able to identify those who are vulnerable and in need of enhanced support. Although the health sector is not a strong player in the socio-cultural milieu in the perinatal period, their role as facilitators of this support is crucial.

Diasporic Activism and the Mediations of “Home”: South Asian Voices in Canadian Drama

Critical analyses of literatures of the Indian diaspora discuss the “home” of origin as a subtext and a site to which diasporas aspire to return even though it remains an unachievable ideal that is refracted through nostalgic retellings of a space that remains at best “imaginary” (Mishra 2007). Alternatively, some critics, as Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald point out, view diasporas’ relationship with the homeland in terms of “loyalty,” obscuring in the process the antagonisms that may arise depending upon one’s circumstances, antagonisms that produce “interactions” between homes of residence and those of origin (2012). In South Asian drama in Canada, many of the concerns regarding race, multiculturalism, job discrimination and violence against women and other marginalized groups are propelled by their links to the playwrights’ “home” of origin. With attention to selected plays, this paper will analyze how the networks between home and spaces of residence in multicultural Canada come alive on theatre stages through visual motifs, actors, props, and photographic collages, which confront the different trajectories of “home” that resurface in these plays. Through live scenes of imagination that speak to spectators, several plays under discussion in this essay expose how, while providing emotional sustenance for some, the baggage of “home” may also pose challenges in the home of residence. So the questions I raise are: How does home appear? To what end? And what does returning “home” teach us about the inequalities and injustices underlying the current global order?

From Living to Eat to Writing to Live: Metaphors of Consumption and Production in Sapphire’s Push

Wipe that look off your face or I'll knock it off. Dry up, he'd scream, eat.--Toi Derricotte, When My Father Was Beating Me (1997) In When My Father Was Beating Me, Toi Derricotte recounts the two forms of parental abuse she endured--her father's physical abuse and her mother's silence and acquiescence. She writes, hear my mother the kitchen preparing dinner. I'd hear the spoons hitting the mixing bowl, the clatter of silver falling into the drawer. I'd hear the pot lids clink and rattle. She continues, though her sounds could come to my ears, my screams and cries and whimpers, his demands and humiliations, the sounds of his hands hitting my body, couldn't pierce back the other way (13). In this instance, the image of a mother providing beautiful yet withholding emotional sustenance illustrates a view contrary to that found many black women's writing on food, cooking, and kitchens. Though many African Americans find community bonding and self-expression women's space near the stove, sink, and kitchen table, the kitchen space (and by extension, food) can also subjugate and oppress. Such is the case Sapphire's Push (1996), a novel which the protagonist, Claireece Precious Jones, has a destructive relationship with food and, like Derricotte, suffers from violence within the home. (1) Throughout her short life, Precious is raped and sexually abused; her body is exploited, misused, and beaten, and, the end, with HIM. To escape into numbness and achieve some sense of emotional safety, however illusory and precarious, Precious eats and overeats. Her unwholesome consumption of everything (everything her body ingests, digests, or absorbs, including but not limited to food, both involuntary and otherwise) is a result of a childhood and adolescence during which her sexuality is exploited and her human rights are suppressed. It is not until she stops consuming compulsively, radically alters her relationship with food, and begins (producing written words and literally producing and raising a child) that she acquires the tools needed to comes to terms with her mistreated and diseased body, and is able to achieve personal freedom. Push brutally exposes multilayered issues affecting the black community and black women particular: racism, poverty, sexual abuse, illiteracy, colorism, self-hatred, obesity, inadequate social institutions, and AIDS. Precious Jones is a victim of all of these problems. Her relationship with her body and her multiple diseases--social, emotional, and physic--all result from the brutality of patriarchal and matriarchal control over her body her home, community, and society. Precious's father, Carl Kenwood Jones, enacts sexual violence, forcing Precious to eat him, while her mother, an agent of patriarchy, forces Precious to binge: Mama give orders, Daddy porno talk me (62). Outside of the home, Precious's body continues to suffer under patriarchal rules. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes, society treats women's bodies a sexually brutal and commercially rapacious way (210). Precious fears the pain, humiliation, and dangers of sex and being sexualized, but having internalized societal standards of beauty, she still desires sexual acceptance. She describes a fantasy version of as light skinned, thereby treated right and loved by boyz, an indication of the extent to which her self-worth is dependent on male desire and beauty issues such as colorism (113). Significant to Precious's development is when she stops taking things in and them out. The exception, of course, is when she takes knowledge. Yet what her body and mind ultimately produce are the most important terms of changing the downward spiral that her life has become. In short, as Precious learns language, writes poetry, and gives birth to a son she can love and protect (unlike her first child, whom she doesn't raise), she pushes out the vileness her past and pushes out words that reject the dangerous consumption of food and sexual perversion that have entrapped her self-hatred and self-destruction. …

Mechanisms Linking Social Ties and Support to Physical and Mental Health

Over the past 30 years investigators have called repeatedly for research on the mechanisms through which social relationships and social support improve physical and psychological well-being, both directly and as stress buffers. I describe seven possible mechanisms: social influence/social comparison, social control, role-based purpose and meaning (mattering), self-esteem, sense of control, belonging and companionship, and perceived support availability. Stress-buffering processes also involve these mechanisms. I argue that there are two broad types of support, emotional sustenance and active coping assistance, and two broad categories of supporters, significant others and experientially similar others, who specialize in supplying different types of support to distressed individuals. Emotionally sustaining behaviors and instrumental aid from significant others and empathy, active coping assistance, and role modeling from similar others should be most efficacious in alleviating the physical and emotional impacts of stressors.

Bhojpuri Cinema

Using Cultural Studies as the framework, this article attempts a content analysis of selected Bhojpuri films to determine how the media help maintain the regional identity of migrants from UP and Bihar residing in Kandivali (east), Mumbai. The Bhojpuri media are closely entwined with the migrants’ everyday realities and social interactions; they reinforce notions of ideal gender roles, alleviate anxieties associated with acculturation, gratify desires vicariously and are instruments of pseudo-empowerment. Familiar images embossed in the media texts ensure continuity with folk traditions, feeding the resurgent pride of the community. The study examines how certain conventions and formulas in Bhojpuri cinema strengthen perceptions of the ‘Bhojpuriya’ identity amongst the migrants, ensuring that the cultural offerings reflect their perspectives on social and cultural issues. Media representations delve into the cultural memory of the migrants, providing them emotional and cultural sustenance in their host city.

El lugar de la memoria: Where Memory Lies

La memoria, la pertenencia y la continuidad a partir de que la historia, los sucesos impensables y tal vez innombrables se queden en algún lado, se recuenten, una y otra vez. Dejando que el cuentista continúe tejiendo y recuperando momentos. La memoria nos contextualiza y nos ubica en un espacio histórico y geográfico con referencias al pasado y a la vez nos planta en un presente partícipe, activo de absoluta pertenencia. Le da relevancia a mis acciones presentes. Tal vez por eso los inmigrantes volvemos a repetir nuestras milenarias costumbres con más apego, lo cotidiano se transforma en una historia que hay que contar. 
 
 Memory, belonging and continuity beginning with history, unthinkable events somehow unnamed that will remain somewhere, that will get retold, once and once again. Letting the storyteller continue unravelling and recuperating moments. Memory giving us context and place, a geographic and historical site with references to the past and, at the same time, placing us in an active present time, making my actions relevant to this here, and now, in a space of absolute belonging. Perhaps this is why we, migrants repeating our millenary customs with some sense of attachment, continue to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and so then a story must be told. This article explores the distinctive roles that memory play in the context of migration. Memory dynamic is constructed in dialogue with others, and resides in artistic expression, or what Paul Willis calls cultural penetrations. Memory contextualizes our actions and functions as emotional sustenance. For those living outside their culture of origin, by choice or forced, there is a constant tension in our daily negotiations with the surrogate country: a tension between conflicting desires and responsibilities that memory helps to alleviate. Memory and the reinvention of one's histories mediate between current geographic locations and imaginary homes by providing a sense of place and belonging. Looking at the role that memory plays for Latin American migrants in Australia, I reflect on my own experiences utilizing a bilingual mode of expression that includes personal accounts, excerpts from artists’ testimonials, and photographic documentation.

The Family in English Children’s Literature (review)

Reviewed by: The Family in English Children’s Literature Elizabeth Gargano (bio) The Family in English Children’s Literature. By Ann Alston. New York: Routledge, 2008. Well-researched and thorough, Ann Alston’s The Family in English Children’s Literature is an ambitious attempt to chart ideological assumptions about the family in the children’s literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alston persuasively contends that children’s literature is inherently conservative in its celebration of an idyllic nuclear family that serves as a haven in a disorderly and contentious world. As she argues, even when twentieth-century children’s literature graphically portrays bleakly dysfunctional families, it implicitly holds up a countervailing ideal to the chaotic reality. In general, Alston asserts, children’s literature celebrates the traditional two-parent family, the solace of a conventional home with orderly spaces and predictable routines, and the shared family meal, which serves as an emblem of familial warmth, comfort, and affection. Reflecting the structure of this argument, Alston organizes her book into three sections. The first chapter offers a brief social and theoretical history of the family, and its arguments will already be familiar to scholars of children’s literature and culture. Viewing the family as a “site of discipline” and of Foucauldian “surveillance,” this chapter traces both the gradual emergence of the nuclear family and its links to the middle class (10). Alston’s purpose here is not to explore new or original ideas but rather to provide a concise history of a specific line of argument that has been made many times before. The next two chapters examine depictions of family in children’s fiction from 1818 to 2003, emphasizing the endurance of idealized nineteenth-century conceptions of domesticity. Because she covers so much territory here, Alston must restrict herself to very brief analyses of the numerous works under discussion. While these chapters provide a valuable historical review for those new to the field, Alston risks losing those readers in search of a complex or original argument. Her historical review tends toward concise plot summaries linked with brief analyses that emphasize the enduring importance of the family as a locus of disciplinarity and a focus for didactic instruction. Alston seems to hit her stride, however, in the final section; these three chapters explore a series of themes and motifs related to family life: the conception of home, domestic space, and the family meal as an image of emotional sustenance and parental nurturing. Here, Alston develops engaging and extended analyses that shed new light on an array of recent and classic children’s texts. As she convincingly argues here, traditional housekeeping practices and family meals frequently become indices of [End Page 293] a family’s health and viability. While spatial partitioning can offer an illusion of privacy and independence in a child’s bedroom, in fact the so-called bedroom sanctuary serves as a “controlled” space, since its “ownership” is still “vested in the adult” (99). Despite its clear strengths as a valuable and concise historical review, Alston’s work occasionally suffers from an overly reductive thesis. As she repeatedly asserts, “[e]ven in the more modern texts, the traditional family is depicted as desirable,” while “families that deviate from this ideal are depicted as other” (26). Thus, for Alston, “the strict patterns of children’s literature are inescapable” with regard to domestic ideology and familial norms. Whether the families portrayed in individual novels are idealized, mixed, or dysfunctional, they always appear to reinforce the traditional nineteenth-century norms enunciated in such works as Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family or Sinclair’s Holiday House. Such an argument lacks nuance; the more interesting question involves the tension between children’s literature’s undoubted endorsement of traditional norms and its complementary tendency to stray into subversive transgressions of those norms. While it certainly holds a measure of accuracy, the danger of Alston’s thesis is that it risks equating such works as the Fairchild Family, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and the Harry Potter novels without accounting for their differing degrees of tension as they strive to resolve (or fail to resolve) idealistic familial norms and subversive subtexts. Ultimately, the presence of...

Occupational stress, social and family difficulties and job contentment of working women:

It was a practice that women would principally do the household tasks, bringing up families and men would work to impart financial supports to the families. But in course of time due to declining population, education, economic welfare and women liberation movement, that convention has changed gradually. Women now seek out careers for livelihood and earning money as well as for identification, development and self-actualization and self esteem. They do not focus on just supplementing the earnings of their family but also feel like to make a fuller use of their talents and skills to secure for themselves and their family members the best of nourishment, education and cultural life. However, although the recent practice of women working bring financial independence, it also exalts difficulties and stresses to the working women’s lives in terms of various elements of the job situation such as lack of job security, social protection, interpersonal relations at work, responsibility conflict and uncertainty, lack of autonomy and participation at work, organizational arrangement and atmosphere, career prospects, work and family balances issues, disproportionate work load, health and safety risks, low wage etc. The present study contains the information and situation on working women, the hazards and occupational strains they face at work and in family life in many developed and developing countries including Bangladesh. Besides, this study has also tried to illustrate where the difficulties are and how far these for working women can be solved by giving them emotional sustenance, voicing against the long standing harassment of women and advocating equality for them.

Psychosocial problems in families of children with cancer

The aim of this study is to assess the effect of diagnosis of cancer on the parents, to study the coping response adopted by the child and the family and to evolve counseling strategies. Prospective questionnaire based. Thirty-four parents of children suffering from cancer were included, of which 15 belonged to joint families and 19 to nuclear families. The family support played an important role in giving emotional sustenance, besides shared care of the child, the sibling and the household. Emotional and psychological impact was maximum on the mothers. Siblings of the cancer child were also affected both by way of behaviour problems and school performance. Behaviour problems in the cancer child included temper tantrums, as also verbal and physical abuse of mothers. Group therapy was useful for sharing emotional trauma and exchanging day to day problems of childcare. Positive outlook helped in better care of the cancer child. The family structure was the foundation for emotional and psychological security. Psychological support by professional tumour support group would enhance this.

Caivam - a religion among Tamil speaking refugees from Sri Lanka

Caivam (Shaivism, Shivaism) is what gives Tamil speaking refugees from Sri Lanka in India and in Western countries their psychological and emotional sustenance, allows them a connection with their culture and traditions and the ability to resist assimilation and create a separate ethnic identity while giving them the strength to deal with the loss of their rightful place in their own country. A Tamil speaking refugee is a political refugee who as the first generation in a foreign country is constantly on the edge of returning – waiting for successful peace negotiations or a realisation of the ultimate aim, the foundation of an independent state called Tamililam (Tamil Ealam). Caivam is an expression of these hopes, symbolised, above all, by two gods, Vinayakar and Muruka., sons of Civa., who act as liberating deputies. The element of resistance is turned not only against the Sri Lankan government, but also against political Buddhists promoting an ethnonationalist Sinhala-Buddhist ideology. Tamil speaking Caivas have suspended former rivalries with Tamil speaking Christians, but the relation to the Tamil speaking Muslims is disturbed on institutional level by political, not religious, dissent. Caivas have established a division of labour with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) on the basis of a common aim which is vaguely given as viṭutalai, ‘liberation’. The two gods mentioned are regarded as the foremost liberators in refugee Caivam. The involuntary refugee situation turns conservative Caivam gradually into a theology of liberation. The role of women in this process should be noticed.

Transmitted Trauma and "Absent Memory" in James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney

Transmitted Trauma and "Absent Memory" in James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney Jennifer Lemberg There are multiple reasons why the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust studies and American Indian literary studies have maintained a cautious distance from each other. Wary of critical paradigms that might further “racialist tropes of vanishment,” scholars of American Indian literature have hesitated to embrace a discourse of trauma based in Western theoretical models, while Holocaust studies has only recently opened up to broader explorations of the meanings of the event in relationship to other genocides (Vizenor 96; Rothberg 1240). Yet the fields share a central concern with the effort to understand how genocide is understood and represented as “a catastrophic originary event and a recurrent condition” (Sanyal 3).1 In this essay, I argue for their potential to be mutually illuminating through a reading of James Welch’s 1979 novel, The Death of Jim Loney. The Death of Jim Loney chronicles the life and death of Loney, the son of a Gros Ventre woman and a white man, who becomes overwhelmed by the need to remember his past in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Living in Harlem, Montana, abandoned by his parents, and lacking ties to the Gros Ventres, Loney feels “like an amnesiac searching for the one event, the one person or moment, that would bring everything back” so that he can “see the order in his life” (20). On a quest for memory he will not find, he spends night after night attempting to “think of all the little things that added up to a man sitting at a table drinking wine” (20). With no community to help him in his task and his few remaining family members meeting his efforts with silence or denials, Loney’s memory is continuously [End Page 67] deferred. He remains burdened by its traces, the continual presence of an absence, like the vision of the dark bird he sees when he is drunk or tired, the meaning of which he cannot discover. The book ends as Loney dies on the Fort Belknap Reservation in what is essentially a suicide: worn down by the larger as well as the quotidian losses he suffers, he is shot by Quinton Doore, a schoolmate of Loney’s now distinguished by “a kind of cruelty” and employed by the reservation police (161). Discussions of Jim Loney trace some of the boundaries of American Indian criticism, where American Indian literature is often evaluated according to whether it offers what Gerald Vizenor calls narratives of “survivance” (15), or intellectual and emotional sustenance, and where depictions of the recovery of cultural memory, rather than its depletion, are praised for furthering the project of American Indian cultural renewal. Paul Eisenstein writes that the “omitted history” of Welch’s 1974 Winter in the Blood creates a “void” in the narrator’s “historical consciousness” that functions by “setting the stage for recovery and . . . becoming,” but it is uncertain whether Loney’s amnesia can be said to work in a similar fashion (12, 6). Comparing Jim Loney to other American Indian novels published at the time, such as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), critics have argued either that, like the protagonists of those works, Loney participates in a ritual that restores him to his tribe (albeit through his death) or that in denying Loney the memory he seeks Welch challenges generic conventions favoring a more optimistic conclusion.2 At stake in these debates is whether Loney’s death should be seen as the active choice of a contemporary warrior, or the tragic passing of a stereotypical “breed.” Critics who object to Loney’s character, such as Louis Owens, go so far as to say that he is wholly “deracinated,” deprived of any recognizably Indian qualities (150). Others, like John Purdy, discover the presence of distinct, if subtle, references to Gros Ventre practices in the novel, while Robert Nelson argues that in Welch’s early works, including Jim Loney, identification with the Montana landscape takes place “independent of the mediation of any specific cultural tradition” but consistent with Indian tradition (95). With Nelson, I view...

Work-supportive family, family-supportive supervision, use of organizational benefits, and problem-focused coping: Implications for work-family conflict and employee well-being.

Employees (n = 230) from multiple organizations and industries were involved in a study assessing how work-family conflict avoidance methods stemming from the family domain (emotional sustenance and instrumental assistance from the family), the work domain (family-supportive supervision, use of telework and flextime), and the individual (use of problem-focused coping) independently relate to different dimensions of work-family conflict and to employees' affective and physical well-being. Results suggest that support from one's family and one's supervisor and the use of problem-focused coping seem most promising in terms of avoiding work-family conflict and/or decreased well-being. Benefits associated with the use of flextime, however, are relatively less evident, and using telework may potentially increase the extent to which family time demands interfere with work responsibilities.

Bloodred Beauty: A Meditation on Mel Gibson's Midlife Allure

He and Mel Gibson are not the same. Gibson is a real person whose work in film, primarily as an action hero, has made him one of the most famous men in the world. Mel is an intimate and epic individual, a fetish and fixation that serve mechanisms of displacement, projection, and transference. These beauties and functions do not differ from those of other movie stars, except that Mel has provided me with a psychic, emotional, and intellectual sustenance that no other fantasy figure derived from popular culture figure has.

Family as source, user, and builder of social capital

Family as source, user, and builder of social capital

But Is It History?: World of Our Fathers as a Historicized Text

Let me open with a caveat, because the title of my essay divulges its thesis-that we must be skeptical about World of Our Fathers as a work of history. During his tumultuous life as a public intellectual, Irving Howe had his share of triumphs and embarrassments. One of those triumphs, the publication of World of Our Fathers, commands our attention in this issue of American Jewish History. As for the embarrassments, Howe found himself in the agonizing position of having to reflect on his failure to understand and morally engage two of the critical events of his time, which were for Jews the critical events of recent history: the battle against Hitler and the establishment of Israel. This failure rested on a stunning lack of historical sense, an Achilles' heel that would hobble him again when he moved from criticism to the craft of history writing. While this essay will try to explain why World of Our Fathers is problematic from a scholarly viewpoint, I do not want to detract from the book's well-deserved reputation as a vivid and spirited portrait offering emotional sustenance to several generations of American Jews. The question posed to the contributors to this issue of American Jewish History was this: How did World of Our Fathers influence your scholarship on American Jews? On the one hand, when I was preparing the doctoral dissertation that became my first book, I found myself relying only slightly on World of Our Fathers. When I wanted an authoritative source on Eastern European Jewish immigrants to New York City at the turn of the century, I turned to Moses Rischin's meticulously researched The Promised City. On the other hand, as an undergraduate at Amherst College at the time World of Our Fathers appeared, I had gone out of my way to hear Howe speak and to buy his book. Like most students, I rarely bought a new book that was not required for a course, and I attended no other public lectures concerning Jewish affairs, so Howe's appearance stands out in my memory of those [End Page 495] years. I recall that some friends of mine who took to Black Nationalism suggested I read Howe's book in order to get in closer touch with my "roots." Mixing our leftist principles with the new symbolic ethnicity, we all played a part, whether large or small, in what sociologist Orlando Patterson critiqued in his contemporaneous Ethnic Chauvinism. We were also responding, I think, to the symbolic remnants of exclusiveness at a Potted Ivy League school such as Amherst. Howe's book is one of the few in my library that harks back so many years, and its formidable dimensions, in relation to its neighbors on the bookshelf, continue to exert a psychological influence. Rather than probe the thematic defects of World of Our Fathers-for example, its inattention to religion and preoccupation with socialism-this essay will measure Howe's book against standards of historical writing. In doing so it will juxtapose World of Our Fathers with Moses Rischin's The Promised City, the first comprehensive history of the Eastern European Jewish immigration to New York. Rischin's book was alive when Howe undertook his effort. Therefore, we must be curious about what the latter sought to correct, amend or improve in the former, at least in that portion of Howe's volume that replicated Rischin's topic, the Lower East Side from the 1870s to 1914. Because Howe was probably less intent on revising Rischin's picture than on presenting his own larger landscape for a broader public, we should also consider briefly the differences between popular and academic histories. Not everyone can write on physics or philosophy, but anyone with a pen and some documents can write a history. Academic historians occupy a special place because of the intensive training in methods and criticism they undergo, but...

Prozac, Enhancement, and Self-Creation

Marina's history is notable for significant childhood neglect. After her parents split up when she was four, her father became distant and mostly uninvolved and her mother suffered from depression and a borderline case of alcoholism. Although involved in Marina's day-to-day life, she was inconsistently available on an emotional level. Because Marina was the oldest child and apparently her shit together, she was often called on to help out with her younger sister and two brothers, who had a variety of problems ranging from depression to juvenile delinquency to significant obsessive-compulsiveness. Due to the distraction of other family members' more dramatic struggles, many of Marina's own needs were never met. However nurturing this parentified child was, she never felt nurtured. Although by her own account she had a troubled adolescence--doing less well than she wanted in school, flirting with drug use and reckless sexual encounters--she managed to get accepted to a good university. Settling down considerably, she excelled in college and got into a top business school, where she continued her academic success. Throughout this period, her primary source of emotional sustenance came from several close friendships. Although these relationships were generally strong, Marina sometimes bristled from perceived putdowns and betrayals by those she held dear. Her family's demands for advice and assistance persisted, but coming to understand how her overreaching family oppressed her, she established some reasonable boundaries with her mother and siblings, an achievement made easier by living in a different city. Her romantic life she considered a failure. Her intense work ethic afforded little time for dating, and the men she wound up with tended to be distant, rejecting, and sometimes emotionally abusive. Marina has also always been somewhat obsessional. She has been disturbed by thoughts about death since adolescence and overly concerned with the possibility of tragedy befalling her or her family, although these thoughts occur fleetingly and do not disrupt her functioning. For many years, her recurring sexual fantasies have featured powerful older men. She is troubled and disgusted with herself when these fantasies drive her to consume late-night hours pursuing the half-hearted titillation of sex-oriented internet chat rooms. As she approaches age thirty, Marina is rather successful in nearly everyone's estimation: She is a well-paid manager for a large computer company, she has close friends, and she has several pastimes that she genuinely enjoys (especially bicycling and guitar). Yet Marina finds herself brooding and pensive, wondering about her life and its direction. She seeks out a psychiatric consultation, which takes place over four sessions, and accepts the psychiatrist's conclusion that she has no diagnosable disorder. When he suggests that psychotherapy might nevertheless be of help to her, she is inhibited by the prospect of paying for many sessions out of pocket (since her HMO will not cover them). Still, she wants changes. At work, she feels overly tentative, unsure, too prone to worry about possible errors. In her social life, she hates how she endlessly interprets the latest transactions with friends and the way she is attracted to men who are bad for her. She feels alienated by her obsessional thoughts, considering them ridiculous and bothersome even if not very harmful. After extended periods of introspection, fueled by her impending birthday and the discussions that took place in the psychiatric consultation, Marina decides that she wants to become more outgoing, confident, and decisive professionally; less prone to feelings of being socially excluded, slighted, or unworthy of a good partner; and less obsessional generally. She calls the psychiatrist who provided the consultation, whom she likes, and explains that she has heard that Prozac sometimes produces transformations like the ones she seeks--and more quickly and less expensively than could be expected from therapy. …

Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relations between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution

The author of this text, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is regarded by many as one of the leading intellectuals in the women's movement in the US from 1900 to 1920. Yet by the mid-1960s she was nearly forgotten, and "Women and Economics" was long out of print. Revived here with a new introduction, the text anticipates many of the issues and thinkers of 1960s. Gilman's ideas represent an integration of socialist thought and Darwinian theory and provide a disruption of the nearly all-male canon of American economic and social thought. She stresses the connection between work and home and between public and private life; calls for extensive childcare facilities, parental leave policies and wages for housework; and argues for new housing arrangements with communal kitchens and hired cooks. She contends that women's entry into the public arena and the reforms of the family would be a win-win situation for both women and men as the public sphere would no longer be deprived of women's particular abilities, and men would be able to enlarge the possibilities to experience and express the emotional sustenance of family life.

Realities and Feelings in the Work of Primary Heads

ABSTRACT This article examines the affective nature of day‐to‐day primary school headship. The author points to differences in the kinds of tasks that heads do each day and suggests that these determine their prevailing feelings. A distinction is made between work that merely keeps the school operating and work that helps the head to shape the school. It is argued that the former provides few satisfactions for heads, while satisfactions gained from the latter are often transient. Spending time with children is an aspect of ‘personal work’ that provides heads with their most deeply felt satisfactions. One effect of the government's reforms is to intensify those features of heads’ work that offer little emotional sustenance, while eroding those that do

Family Support Inventory for Workers: A new measure of perceived social support from family members

AbstractA measure of family social support for workers was developed, and initial investigations of its psychometric characteristics were conducted. Data from several samples endorse the internal consistency of the support dimensions of emotional sustenance and instrumental assistance, and confirmatory factor analysis findings reinforce the bidimensional structure of the instrument. Lack of a relationship with social desirability, correlations with life and job satisfactions, and gender differences in perceived instrumental assistance afford preliminary validity evidence. Exploratory multiple regression analyses revealed significant three‐way interactions suggesting that the level of emotional sustenance from family members may be important to job satisfaction for employed women. Furthermore, empirical evidence was generated to assess the viability of the instrument relative to other existing measures of social support. Results supported convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity.