Female Life Course Research Articles

The lifetime risk of maternal near miss morbidity in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America: a cross-country systematic analysis

Life-threatening maternal near miss (MNM) morbidity can have long-term consequences for the physical, psychological, sexual, social, and economic wellbeing of female individuals. The lifetime risk of MNM (LTR-MNM) quantifies the probability that a female individual aged 15 years will have an MNM before age 50 years, given current mortality and fertility rates. We compare the LTR-MNM globally to reveal inequities in the cumulative burden of severe maternal morbidity across the reproductive life course. We estimated the LTR-MNM for 40 countries with multifacility, regional, or national data on the prevalence of MNM morbidity measured using WHO or modified WHO criteria of organ dysfunction from 2010 onwards (Central and Southern Asia=6, Eastern and Southeastern Asia=9, Latin America and the Caribbean=10, Northern Africa and Western Asia=2, sub-Saharan Africa=13). We also calculated the lifetime risk of severe maternal outcome (LTR-SMO) as the lifetime risk of maternal death or MNM. The LTR-MNM ranges from a 1 in 269 risk in Viet Nam (2010) to 1 in 6 in Guatemala (2016), whereas the LTR-SMO ranges from a 1 in 201 risk in Malaysia (2014) to 1 in 5 in Guatemala (2016). The LTR-MNM is a 1 in 20 risk or higher in nine countries, seven of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. The LTR-SMO is a 1 in 20 risk or higher in 11 countries, eight of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. The relative contribution of the LTR-MNM to the LTR-SMO ranges from 42% in Angola to 99% in Japan. There exist substantial global and regional disparities in the cumulative burden of severe maternal morbidity across the reproductive life course. The LTR-MNM is an important indicator to highlight the magnitude of inequalities in MNM morbidity, once accounting for obstetric risk, fertility rates, and mortality rates. The LTR-SMO can be used to highlight variation in the relative importance of morbidity to the overall burden of maternal ill-health across the female reproductive life course, given countries' stage in the obstetric transition. Both the LTR-MNM and LTR-SMO can serve as important indicators to advocate for further global commitment to end preventable maternal morbidity and mortality. UK Economic and Social Research Council, EU Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Fellowship, and Leverhulme Trust Large Centre Grant.

Disease exposure in infancy affects women's reproductive outcomes and offspring health in southern Sweden 1905–2000

Ample evidence demonstrates that early-life adversity negatively affects morbidity and survival in late life. We show that disease exposure in infancy also has a continuous impact on reproduction and health across the female life course and even affects early-life health of the next generation. Using Swedish administrative data, obstetric records, and local infant mortality rates as a measure of disease exposure, we follow women's reproductive careers and offspring health 1905–2000, examining a comprehensive set of outcomes. Women exposed to disease in infancy give birth to a lower proportion of boys, consistent with notions that male fetuses are more vulnerable to adverse conditions and are more often miscarried. Sons of exposed mothers are also more likely to be born preterm and have higher birthweight suggesting in utero out-selection. Exposed women have a greater risk of miscarriage and of male stillbirth, but their overall likelihood of giving birth is not affected.

Sex Differences in Familial Hypercholesterolemia.

This review aims to summarize the existing research on sex differences in familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) across the lifespan. From childhood onward, total- and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels in girls are higher than those in boys with FH. By the age of 30 years, women with FH have a higher LDL-C burden than men. In adulthood, women are diagnosed later than men, receive less lipid-lowering treatment, and consequently have higher LDL-C levels. An excessive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk is reported in young female compared to male FH patients. The periods of pregnancy and breastfeeding contribute to treatment loss and increased cholesterol burden. Earlier initiation of treatment, especially in girls with FH, and lifelong treatment during all life stages are important. Future research should aim to recruit both women and men, report sex-specific data, and investigate the impact of the female life course on cardiovascular outcomes. Future guidelines should include sex-specific aspects.

The Old Woman’s Farcical Rejuvenation in The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897)

Charlotte O’Conor Eccles’s The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897) is a comedic New Woman narrative in which a lonely, middle-aged, single woman gets rejuvenated after drinking an elixir. Miss Semaphore’s rejuvenation goes wrong, for she accidentally turns into an infant—not a beautiful woman in her twenties—and goes through babyfarming, which was a grave social problem in the Victorian era. At first glimpse, the text seems to make a farcical mockery of the old maid, but it also allows the aging female character to transgress Victorian gender and age norms. My goal is therefore to discuss how Eccles uses humour in letting her protagonist accidentally live backward and develop into a social activist, who testifies in court as a victim and witness of child abuse in the workhouse. Initially, the middle-class protagonist and her sister appear as old-fashioned Old Women at the beginning, but once the former unexpectedly turns into an infant, she indeed gets pushed out of a social safety net, as babyfarmers illegally adopt and abuse her. Eccles creates an ironic situation where the Old Women rejuvenate metaphorically into radical New Woman activists, who raise their own voice to fight against the given system of the world, in which unmarried women and their unwanted children are constantly marginalized. I claim that the comic rejuvenation enables the Old Woman characters to deviate from the normative women’s views and be reborn as New Women. The female rejuvenation plot bridges the gap between the New Woman and the Old Woman in a way that allows the formulation of New Woman ideals. The first part of my article will discuss Eccles’s and other New Woman writers’ critical essays on the female life course. The second part will scrutinize how Eccles’s comedic novel itself responds to the late Victorian female aging question. I ultimately argue that Eccles’s humorous New Woman narrative serves as a critique of social injustice that women and children were faced with in the late nineteenth century.

Making it work: How women negotiate labor market participation after the transition to motherhood.

The increasing participation of women in the labor market coexists with traditional gender roles and a social division of labor that reproduces the feminization of childcare and housework. Reconciling the contradictions between work and family life has become one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary female life course. In this article, I analyze the strategies through which women in Santiago de Chile negotiate their participation in the labor market after the transition to motherhood using qualitative data produced through 28 in-depth life story interviews. The findings confirm that married women from older age cohorts and middle socioeconomic status scale down paid work by working part-time, reducing their working hours, and finding more flexible and less demanding jobs that are closer to home. However, the findings also reveal that single women from younger age cohorts and lower socioeconomic status scale up on paid work by working full-time and finding jobs that are more demanding, involve longer workdays and provide better salaries and social benefits. These findings advance knowledge on the strategies through which women from different age cohorts and family and socioeconomic status negotiate paid work after becoming mothers and highlight the importance of taking a situated and intersectional approach to account for the particular ways in which women reconcile work and family life.

Female Solo Self-Employment in Germany: The Role of Transitions and Learning From a Life Course Perspective

Based on a qualitative analysis of 12 solo self-employed women’s work biographies, this article investigates the (re)structuring effects of solo self-employment on the professional and private lives of women in Germany in their mid- and late-career stages. While solo self-employment has been gaining significance in the German labour market in the last two decades, it is largely an underresearched subject from the perspective of female labour market participation. Our study shows that the transition to working solo self-employed constitutes a marked break in female work biographies with lasting restructuring effects on their life courses. Constituting a deviation from the female standard life course, this move can be understood as a coping strategy of biographical discontinuities, which translates into specific patterns against the background that women (still) assume most of the care and housework responsibilities. How the transition to solo self-employment is being prepared and managed and what role learning and risk management play in the transition process is the focus of our article. Our aim is to better understand the underlining rationalisation logics of female solo self-employment in terms of labour market participation, reconciling work and family life, and professional self-realisation. While in the German welfare system solo self-employed bear higher risks of precarity and financial old age insecurity, solo self-employment is functional as an individual strategy for action, giving women the opportunity to do justice to their (mid) life courses and intrinsic needs to pursue both professional work and freedom of choice when and how to work. This may act as a corrective for gender inequalities in the world of work, especially when it comes to working in a self-determined way.

Exploring Ageism as a Structure of Consciousness Across the Female Life Course Through the Work of Simone de Beauvoir.

Drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper considers ageism as a structure of consciousness, with important convergences with, as well as departures from, those associated with gender. Specifically, it explores the double consciousness through which the self is experienced negatively as old, at 2 points in a woman's life course, namely midlife and "old age." The first kind of ageism works through the double standard of aging and the gender hierarchy, whereby women can no longer successfully comply with the objectification of the male gaze. This is a moment of intense age consciousness, tainted by a gendered narrative of decline, working jointly from the outside in and from the inside out. The second form of ageism has its source in the social world, in the reactions of other people to old age, resulting in an uneasy dialectic between one's own sense of an ageless or youthful self and the alien view of self as old. The paper proceeds as follows. After a brief account of Beauvoir's general philosophical approach, I compare and contrast the doubled consciousness associated with aging as a woman and with aging in a more general sense as described in The Second Sex and The Coming of Age, respectively. I then flesh out this conceptual framework by drawing on fiction and autofiction written by Beauvoir herself. Together, this approach vividly illuminates the important interconnections and intersections between ageism and sexism, the way they work together, as well as separately, across the female life course.

Post-Menopausal Vampirism in “Good Lady Ducayne”

This article discusses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s depiction of post-menopausal vampirism in “Good Lady Ducayne” (1896) from the perspective of feminism. Although the story focuses on a young girl’s suffering and growth, the subplot features a post-menopausal lady who uses her elderliness as well as wealth and social standing to steal the young heroine’s blood. This article examines how the elderly female antagonist’s immense power and influence are a result of her post-menopausal liberation from conventional feminine roles arising from marriage and motherhood. In doing so, the article sitauates the old antagonist’s symbolic vampirism in the fin-de-siècle context of the evolution of both modern medicine (the rise of blood transfusion, gynecology, and eugenics) and the New Woman culture. Ultimately, it argues that Braddon’s hyperbolical depiction of the post-menopausal old woman challenges and presents an alternative to the standardized female life course in the Victorian world.

Solitary confinement and health and other life course outcomes for convict women

Many studies have linked sensory deprivation punishments to elevated risk of suicide and other immediate poor health outcomes, although there have been comparatively few examinations of the potential medium- and long-term impacts of being placed in a solitary cell. This article seeks to fill that gap by exploring the effects that the experience of solitary confinement and separate treatment had on the life courses of female convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the period 1803–1853. As a result of recent community-based digitisation initiatives, it is possible to reconstruct female convict life courses in a way that identifies the number of sensory deprivation episodes each woman experienced and the duration of each punishment. A date and cause of death are available for nearly half of all female convicts. The article uses this information to explore the ways in which the coercive actions of the colonial state may or may not have affected long-term health outcomes. It also examines the influence of different punishment regimes on family formation, shedding light on the powerful and previously under-appreciated ways in which the policing of convicts influenced the colonial birth rate.

Proteostasis in the Male and Female Germline: A New Outlook on the Maintenance of Reproductive Health.

For fully differentiated, long lived cells the maintenance of protein homeostasis (proteostasis) becomes a crucial determinant of cellular function and viability. Neurons are the most well-known example of this phenomenon where the majority of these cells must survive the entire course of life. However, male and female germ cells are also uniquely dependent on the maintenance of proteostasis to achieve successful fertilization. Oocytes, also long-lived cells, are subjected to prolonged periods of arrest and are largely reliant on the translation of stored mRNAs, accumulated during the growth period, to support meiotic maturation and subsequent embryogenesis. Conversely, sperm cells, while relatively ephemeral, are completely reliant on proteostasis due to the absence of both transcription and translation. Despite these remarkable, cell-specific features there has been little focus on understanding protein homeostasis in reproductive cells and how/whether proteostasis is “reset” during embryogenesis. Here, we seek to capture the momentum of this growing field by highlighting novel findings regarding germline proteostasis and how this knowledge can be used to promote reproductive health. In this review we capture proteostasis in the context of both somatic cell and germline aging and discuss the influence of oxidative stress on protein function. In particular, we highlight the contributions of proteostasis changes to oocyte aging and encourage a focus in this area that may complement the extensive analyses of DNA damage and aneuploidy that have long occupied the oocyte aging field. Moreover, we discuss the influence of common non-enzymatic protein modifications on the stability of proteins in the male germline, how these changes affect sperm function, and how they may be prevented to preserve fertility. Through this review we aim to bring to light a new trajectory for our field and highlight the potential to harness the germ cell’s natural proteostasis mechanisms to improve reproductive health. This manuscript will be of interest to those in the fields of proteostasis, aging, male and female gamete reproductive biology, embryogenesis, and life course health.

Collecting and analysing marriage and birth data: Women in pre-revolution Rheims, France

Based on her earlier work on the city of Rheims in Champagne, France—a Family Reconstitution study covering all social scales—the article proposes a new comprehensive classification of reconstructed female life courses from the author’s existing and refreshed nominative database (1668–1802). This fresh scrutiny of digital files will allow series of qualitative and quantitative approaches, making hopefully preindustrial urban women at last visible along their individual life-trajectory. Thanks to rich archival sources, socio-demographic trends are better known, including a general early shift to contraceptive behaviour in pre-1789 Rheims. At the end of the Ancien Régime, there was growing individual female labour migration to this major town of Western Europe. It was attracted by domestic service and the textile sector. The sex ratio became so unbalanced that many women remained single, and only a few widows remarried. Numerous women managed their living without a husband, through the many economic and sanitary crises which characterised the period.

The Biological Clock: Age, Risk, and the Biopolitics of Reproductive Time

The present article explores the social and subjective dimensions of the biological clock and its implications for reproductive time through a qualitative study based on 40 life story interviews of women from Santiago de Chile. Although the narrative of the biological clock has become a prevalent frame for addressing reproductive time in the context of late childbearing, age-related infertility, and the use of assisted reproductive technologies, few studies engage in an in-depth analysis of the biological clock—its boundaries, dynamics, and the particular ways in which it shapes women’s views and experiences of reproductive time. The present article aims to advance current knowledge on the intersection of time, reproduction, and biopolitics by arguing that the biological clock regulates reproductive time by shaping the boundaries and dynamics of female fertility through the clock. By determining reproductive time as quantitative, standardised, linear, and irreversible and by outlining the passing of time through pressure, risk, and burden, the biological clock determines when it is possible and desirable to have children and regulates reproduction, gender, and the female life course. These findings highlight the importance of critically addressing the narrative of the biological clock and its implications for women’s views and experiences of reproductive time.

Offspring sex ratios are stable across the life course in Drosophila simulans.

Within populations, adult sex ratios influence population growth and extinction risk, mating behaviours and parental care. Sex ratio adjustment can also have pronounced effects on individual fitness. Accordingly, it is important that we understand how often, and why, offspring sex ratios deviate from parity. In Drosophila melanogaster, females appear to improve their fitness by producing fewer sons when paired with older males. However, facultative sex ratio adjustment in D.melanogaster is controversial, and our understanding of how sex ratio skew affects fitness is hampered by pronounced sexual conflict in this species. Additionally, it is unclear whether maternal age or quality interacts with paternal age to influence offspring sex ratios. Here, we test whether offspring sex ratios vary as a function of maternal quality, and maternal and paternal age in Drosophila simulans, a sister species of D.melanogaster that lacks overt sexual conflict. We find that offspring sex ratios are slightly male-biased overall, but constant across the female life course, and independent of female quality, or paternal age. To really understand if, how and when females skew offspring sex ratios, we need studies linking offspring sex ratios to paternal and maternal phenotypes that are predicted to shift optimal investment in sons and daughters.

Femtech Fatale: Access to Femtech in Public Health Insurance Systems

Abstract From a smartphone ping signifying the start of a fertile window to controlling a breast pump with a few clicks in a mobile app, “femtech” has readily integrated into women's daily lives. Femtech, a term coined to describe the realm of technology catering to female health needs, encompasses a range of digital technology addressing women's health, including fertility tracking, pregnancy and nursing counseling, and online contraception provision. While femtech puts autonomy and information in the hands of its users, access to the technology is not yet equitably distributed. As insurance reimbursement can increase and equitize that access, this research examines what legal duties exist for increasing access to femtech. In analyzing how insurance schemes have integrated femtech, this research compares how select femtech products fare across reimbursement systems, using fertility algorithm, smart breast pump, and pelvic floor trainer case studies in the U.S, U.K, and Sweden. Insights reveal a duty to promote access to femtech, as well as varying degrees of integration in respective health systems. Insights also reveal which elements of the female life course are overlooked in reimbursement schemes. Key messages Femtech has the power to put agency and information in the hands of millions of women. Yet, access is not equitable given significant financial and regulatory barriers. Comparative studies of fertility algorithms, smart breast pumps, and pelvic floor trainers in international health systems demand increased advocacy to realize the duty to enable femtech access.

Interdependencies in Mothers' and Daughters' Work-Family Life Course Trajectories: Similar but Different?

Women's life courses underwent substantial changes in the family and work domains in the second half of the twentieth century. The associated fundamental changes in opportunity structures and values challenged the importance of families of origin for individual life courses, but two research strands suggest enduring within-family reproduction of women's family behavior and work outcomes. We revisit this issue by studying two complementary types of intergenerational associations in women's combined work-family trajectories. On the one hand, we examine similarities across mothers' and daughters' work-family trajectories to address the direct within-family reproduction of female life courses (intergenerational persistence). On the other hand, we examine systematic associations between work-family trajectories that are typical in each generation to address intergenerational interdependencies beyond direct reproduction that account for individual and societal constrains and opportunities that each generation faced (intergenerational correspondence). We use a within-dyad approach to sequence analysis and examine combined work-family trajectories between ages 18 and 35 of two generations of women, born in 1930-1949 and in 1958-1981, within the same family drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Overall, we find evidence of small but nontrivial persistence in work-family trajectories across generations that is partly attributed to within-family mechanisms of reproduction. In addition, we find correspondence across typical trajectory patterns of each generation, without daughters necessarily resembling their mothers' trajectories. The strength of the intergenerational associations varies by social background. Our research improves and broadens our understanding of the reproduction of female life courses across generations.

Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age by Sari Edelstein

MLR, .,   (p. ). e references to the ‘nagging question of identity and nationality’, for example (p. ); or the suggestion that Browning’s ‘polyphonic, arabesque-like’, and multilingual style anticipates aspects of modernist literary practice (p. ), could have received further elaboration with reference to recent work on Victorian literature’s ‘global’ aesthetics, and translational writing more generally. Jaouad’s book will, however, prove a useful resource to students, scholars, and admirers of Browning’s poetry, and indeed to anyone interested in the manifold networks of cultural affiliation and response evidenced by Victorian literature. Its range of reference and scholarship will undoubtedly lead to the satisfaction of Jaouad’s desire to ‘excite further interest in Browning’s life-long fascination with Eastern religion, culture, and literature’ (p. ). B C, O J H Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. By S E. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Sari Edelstein’s Adulthood and Other Fictions is a refreshing, thought-provoking excavation of age as an o-overlooked political tool that rose to power in nineteenthcentury US culture. Rather than treating age as a stand-alone discourse, Edelstein shows how age has been instrumental in the enforcement of social hierarchies, including race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. e book considers an archive of visual culture, interviews, and writings, but it centres on imaginative literature’s varied history of, on one hand, supporting and disseminating conventional notions of age and, on the other, exposing, challenging, and reimagining them. e nineteenth-century novel proves a fruitful site for Edelstein’s investigation of age owing to its structural reliance on linear development. However, unlike a large portion of literary scholarship interested in age, which focuses on childhood and the Bildungsroman, Adulthood and Other Fictions attends to middle and old age, showing all life stages to be narrative constructs—fictions that nineteenth-century writers such as Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Louisa May Alcott , Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James have reimagined to question the normative life course prescribed by capitalism, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In the first chapter, Edelstein argues that Melville’s ‘anti-coming of age novel’ (p. ), Redburn, exposes the nation’s call to grow up as a capitalist demand and nationalist project; Redburn’s refusal to mature (and Bartleby’s refusal to move) challenges the agenda of white, male coming of age that ‘is contingent not only upon oppressing oneself but upon exploiting others’ (p. ). Chapter  demonstrates, however, that age categories also functioned by exclusion: slavery weaponized age by denying enslaved people the privileges of adulthood while simultaneously corrupting childhood. Edelstein reads slave narratives by Douglass and Jacobs alongside interviews with formerly enslaved people who made claims of extraordinary longevity, showing how they seized and challenged the discourse of  Reviews ageing. e third chapter notes, without claiming a direct comparison to slavery, how the discourse of ageing also infantilized and marked the economic value of free white women. Edelstein shows how Alcott’s Little Women exposes age as ‘a core disciplinary idiom’ that women were expected to perform (p. ), while Alcott’s Work reimagines how numerical age could support a ‘female life course that does not peak in girlhood or conclude with marriage’ (p. ). Chapter  highlights the protest against a monolithic conception of old age as decline in the short fiction of Freeman and Jewett; Freeman contests this ‘pathologization of old age’ (p. ) with her contented elderly characters and Jewett theorizes a ‘temporality of old age’ (p. ) that is ‘inherently oppositional to the demands of power, capitalism, and gender’ (p. ). In the final chapter, Edelstein revisits the fiction of James, oen considered ‘the only mature American novelist’ (p. ), and shows how his work denaturalizes the association of adulthood with independence, instead registering interdependence and caregiving as forms of unacknowledged maturity. Adulthood and Other Fictions has much to offer the fields of age studies and nineteenth-century American literature but also queer theory, feminism, and disability studies. Edelstein’s intersectional approach reveals age as a missing link that invigorates established arguments about discipline and power in these fields. Furthermore, the book pushes scholars to examine our emphasis on youth (for example, the...

The genetic underpinnings of variation in ages at menarche and natural menopause among women from the multi-ethnic Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study: A trans-ethnic meta-analysis.

Current knowledge of the genetic architecture of key reproductive events across the female life course is largely based on association studies of European descent women. The relevance of known loci for age at menarche (AAM) and age at natural menopause (ANM) in diverse populations remains unclear. We investigated 32 AAM and 14 ANM previously-identified loci and sought to identify novel loci in a trans-ethnic array-wide study of 196,483 SNPs on the MetaboChip (Illumina, Inc.). A total of 45,364 women of diverse ancestries (African, Hispanic/Latina, Asian American and American Indian/Alaskan Native) in the Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study were included in cross-sectional analyses of AAM and ANM. Within each study we conducted a linear regression of SNP associations with self-reported or medical record-derived AAM or ANM (in years), adjusting for birth year, population stratification, and center/region, as appropriate, and meta-analyzed results across studies using multiple meta-analytic techniques. For both AAM and ANM, we observed more directionally consistent associations with the previously reported risk alleles than expected by chance (p-valuesbinomial≤0.01). Eight densely genotyped reproductive loci generalized significantly to at least one non-European population. We identified one trans-ethnic array-wide SNP association with AAM and two significant associations with ANM, which have not been described previously. Additionally, we observed evidence of independent secondary signals at three of six AAM trans-ethnic loci. Our findings support the transferability of reproductive trait loci discovered in European women to women of other race/ethnicities and indicate the presence of additional trans-ethnic associations both at both novel and established loci. These findings suggest the benefit of including diverse populations in future studies of the genetic architecture of female growth and development.

Practical Applications of Can Alpha Be Captured by Risk Premia?

<h3>Objective</h3> To enhance understanding of the bodily and lifestyle effects of ageing with cerebral palsy (CP) for women, with a particular focus on experiences with sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH) services in the UK and North America. <h3>Design</h3> A qualitative study underpinned by feminist disability theory and drawing on digital ethnographies to capture health and healthcare experiences for women with CP. <h3>Setting</h3> A global community of 140 women with CP, who are members of the closed international Facebook group, <i>Women Ageing with Cerebral Palsy</i> (WACP). <h3>Participants</h3> Forty-five members of WACP who were based in the UK and North America. The women were aged between 21 and 75. <h3>Methods</h3> Messages posted on WACP between January 2018 and October 2018 were collated and underwent thematic analysis to identify themes relating to effects of ageing and experiences of SRH for women with CP at different points over the female life course. <h3>Results</h3> The breadth of experiences in relation to the effects of ageing and access to reproductive and sexual healthcare for women with CP can be divided into three themes: (1) bodily effects of ageing; (2) lifestyle effects of ageing; (3) experiences of reproductive and sexual healthcare. <h3>Conclusions</h3> Giving women with CP a platform to ‘speak for themselves’ in relation to effects of ageing and SRH provides health professionals with an informed knowledge base on which to draw. This might improve treatment for this growing adult patient community whose experiences have not received attention in health discourse or services. Including these experiences in public medical and social discourse can also bring a new knowledge to girls with CP about what ageing could mean for them so plans can be put in place for their future.

What We Don't Talk about When We Don't Talk about Sex1: Results of a National Survey of U.S. Obstetrician/Gynecologists

Sexuality is a key aspect of women's physical and psychological health. Research shows both patients and physicians face barriers to communication about sexuality. Given their expertise and training in addressing conditions of the female genital tract across the female life course, obstetrician/gynecologists (ob/gyns) are well positioned among all physicians to address sexuality issues with female patients. New practice guidelines for management of female sexual dysfunction and the importance of female sexual behavior and function to virtually all aspects of ob/gyn care, and to women's health more broadly, warrant up-to-date information regarding ob/gyns' sexual-history-taking routine. To determine ob/gyns' practices of communication with patients about sexuality, and to examine the individual and practice-level correlates of such communication. A population-based sample of 1,154 practicing U.S. ob/gyns (53% male; mean age 48 years) was surveyed regarding their practices of communication with patients about sex. Self-reported frequency measures of ob/gyns' communication practices with patients including whether or not ob/gyns discuss patients' sexual activities, sexual orientation, satisfaction with sexual life, pleasure with sexual activity, and sexual problems or dysfunction, as well as whether or not one ever expresses disapproval of or disagreement with patients' sexual practices. Multivariable analysis was used to correlate physicians' personal and practice characteristics with these communication practices. Survey response rate was 65.6%. Sixty-three percent of ob/gyns reported routinely assessing patients' sexual activities; 40% routinely asked about sexual problems. Fewer asked about sexual satisfaction (28.5%), sexual orientation/identity (27.7%), or pleasure with sexual activity (13.8%). A quarter of ob/gyns reported they had expressed disapproval of patients' sexual practices. Ob/gyns practicing predominately gynecology were significantly more likely than other ob/gyns to routinely ask about each of the five outcomes investigated. The majority of U.S. ob/gyns report routinely asking patients about their sexual activities, but most other areas of patients' sexuality are not routinely discussed.

Social Aggression and Resource Conflict Across the Female Life‐Course in the Bolivian Amazon

This work explores sources of conflict among forager-horticulturalist women in Amazonian Bolivia, and applies life history theory as a tool for understanding competitive and cooperative social networking behaviors among women. In this study, 121 Tsimane women and girls were interviewed regarding current and past disagreements with others in their community to identify categories of contested resources that instigate interpersonal conflicts, often resulting in incidences of social aggression. Analysis of frequency data on quarrels (N = 334) reveals that women target several diverse categories of resources, with social types appearing as frequently as food and mates. It was also found that the focus of women's competition changes throughout the life-course, consistent with the notion that current vs. future reproduction and quantity-quality trade-offs might have different influences on competition and social conflict over resources within women's social networks across different age groups.