Teenage Daughters Research Articles

The Greatest

ABSTRACT In Mark 10:35–45, Jesus does not reject the human desire to be great but transforms it by identifying servanthood as the path to greatness. This dynamic is illustrated by the story of the author's teenage daughter, who emerged from depression when she began working with special needs children.1

Our Girls

Our Girls Alice McDermott (bio) Our girls are fair and witty. They take their vocabulary words seriously and say inexorable and obdurate in ordinary conversation. They sing—belted show tunes, bebop, Christmas songs, of late, or simply the nasal imitation of some popular hit that nevertheless strikes us (their mothers) as lovely, promising. You're as good as, we tell them. You're better than. As good as and better than we tell our girls, who play piano or field hockey, who sketch portraits and design clothes and speak French, who smile endlessly at the poor souls in the old folks home or the soup kitchen or the after school program for damaged kids. Our girls shop. They see every movie. They have boyfriends, and boys who are friends. They have lovely hair and straightened teeth and contact lenses, not glasses—except at night, at home, when their own languor and the soft pajama bottoms that drape their thin hips make glasses seem a sophisticated and lovely choice. They are sophisticated and lovely, our girls. Brilliant, we tell them. Talented, we tell them. And they are miserable, miserable, miserable. "How's Ellie?" Charlotte asks the girl's mother. Ellie of the pale skin and freckles and sturdy legs. Honor student, track star Ellie, namesake of the Eleanor, Queen of Aquitaine (adorable as a child to tell you the history of her patroness), dark hair with a royal wave to it and a sweet shy grin. "Off to college by now, I suppose." "Eleanor's doing better," comes the reply. "She should finish high school, finally, in the spring." After the depression and the addiction, Ellie's mother explains, and the truancy, and the flight to her father's apartment in another [End Page 363] city and now, finally, Zoloft and a small expensive high school where there are no more than seven in each class and talk therapy is on the curriculum. The two women share, sadly, their mutual surprise, both women recollecting what a fine student Eleanor had been, how smart and sure of herself, in sixth grade, in eighth grade. What happens to our girls, they wonder? What happened? Which well could be asked, Charlotte tells Ellie's mother (by way of commiserating) of pretty little Lizzie Nash, who was only a few years behind Eleanor in grammar school. "Do you remember Lizzie?" Face like an angel, blonde hair down her back. Sent to the best prep school where she flourished academically but took to pulling out her hair, not in single strands but in clumps. At first just in the back, underneath (Charlotte shows Eleanor's mother the back of her hairline, as Lizzie Nash's mother had shown Charlotte in the supermarket a week ago), but then at her temples and behind her ears until, finally, there were bare patches all over her head. Her parents thought it was some strange disease, something like whatever it was that other Princess, the one in Monaco, had suffered. But, no, they discovered, she was doing it herself. Which was a relief, in some ways, Lizzie's mother had said in the produce aisle, leaning on her cart. In some ways, it was even worse. A more specific disease, Lizzie Nash's mother had said, would have meant a more specific cure. "It's life," Eleanor's mother says now. "The stress. It hits the smart girls even harder." They are in the shopping mall, two weeks before Christmas. It's mid-morning and the place is filled with women. There are caravans of handsome young mothers pushing elaborate strollers that are loaded down like Hannibal's pachyderms with juice boxes and water bottles, diapers and baby wipes, Cheerios in zip lock bags. There are the mothers of school-aged children walking singly, determinedly, in the clothes they will wear to the gym, shopping bags slapping their [End Page 364] thighs. There are older mothers, like Charlotte, who have time to chat when they meet friends, who have mostly simple items on the lists in their hands, gloves or a scarf, a gift certificate or two, something for an elderly neighbor, something else for her own teenage daughter whose...

Cervical cancer prevention and the Millennium Development Goals

Cervical cancer, a complication of HPV infection, is the second most common cancer in women, with 500 000 new cases each year worldwide, 80% of which occur in low-resource countries in Africa, Latin America and south-east Asia. More than half of women with cervical cancer will die, with deaths projected to rise by almost 25% over the next 10 years according to WHO.1 In Europe and the United States of America, a woman has a 70% chance of surviving cervical cancer whereas the chance of survival is only 58% in Thailand, 42% in India, and 21% in sub-Saharan Africa.1 In low-resource countries, only 41% of women with cervical cancer have access to appropriate treatment.1 Now that immunization against HPV is available, will it meet its expectations? In medically advanced countries, about 30–40% of women do not comply with available cervical cancer screening.2 Whether these women will encourage their teenage daughters to have the HPV vaccine is questionable and depends strongly on health insurance coverage. In addition, immunization against the carcinogenetic HPV strains 16 and 18 only prevents 70% of cervical cancers.3 Therefore, it does not exempt women from further regular cervical screening when also considering that the duration and optimal protection of the initial immunization is unknown and that boys are not yet included in the immunization programme.4 In low-resource countries where cervical cancer screening programmes and treatments are scarce or absent, HPV vaccine raises considerable expectations, but just as many objections. HPV subtypes vary between regions in the world and the strains targeted by the currently marketed vaccines may not prevail in low-resource countries where no extensive epidemiologic study of HPV-typing has been conducted. A full immunization procedure, three shots over six months, is expected to cost US$ 360.1 Such a cost is unaffordable for the one billion individuals living on less than US$ 1 per day, unless the vaccine is distributed by state-subsidized programmes. Health authorities in low-resource countries, already overwhelmed with public health demands, will have to set priorities when allocating limited resources. The same painful choices are now imposed on international agencies and private foundations with the advent of the HPV vaccine, which puts an additional burden on their available funding. Equity requires dividing the means according to the needs, provided a hierarchy can be established among those needs. Given the HIV epidemic, the devastation caused by malaria or tuberculosis, maternal mortality that is responsible for twice as many women’s deaths as cervical cancer, and the four million infants dying each year of avoidable disease, it is likely that the HPV vaccine will be given a low priority. Furthermore, considering that famine is endemic in at least 37 countries, urgent wheat, rice and millet provision competes with the supply of vital drugs. The World Trade Organization and WHO compete in spreading their endeavours with shrinking funds. If the Monterrey consensus (which was the outcome of the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development in 2002)5 pledge that urged developed countries to divert 0.7% of gross national product to worse-off populations is not fulfilled, it is very likely that the 2015 MDGs will trail away, regrettably cervical cancer prevention above all. ■

Living at the edge of one's capability: Experiences of parents of teenage daughters diagnosed with ADHD

Living at the edge of one's capability: Experiences of parents of teenage daughters diagnosed with ADHD

Dreaming the Cuban Nation: Fernando Perez's Madagascar

While Fernando Pérez is considered by many the greatest living filmmaker in Cuba at this time, his works are relatively understudied. To some extent, this is because of the highly symbolic nature of his work, as well as a deliberate ambiguity in his representation of the Revolution and the national imaginary since the fall of the Soviet Union. This article explores the use of women and spatial imagery in Madagascar, his third feature-length film and arguably his most esoteric. Through the presentation of a feminine genealogy and the diverse spaces they occupy, the director portrays the different stages of the revolution: the grandmother, whose generation dreamed the new nation; the main character, Laura, who grew up with those dreams and who now feels adrift and out of sync with them; and her teenage daughter, Laurita, who represents the younger generation searching for a new dream, as symbolized by Madagascar.

Living at the edge of one's capability: Experiences of parents of teenage daughters diagnosed with ADHD

Living with a child with a disability is often perceived as a permanent stressor to the family and it affects all aspects of family life including the well-being of family members. Since little is known about parenting teenage daughters diagnosed with ADHD, the aim of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of the main problem involved using a grounded theory approach. Interviews were carried out with 12 parents, 11 mothers and 1 father, of teenage daughters diagnosed with ADHD. The parents’ situation was conceptualized as living at the edge of one's capability with the properties having the sole parental responsibility, fighting for professional support, being on duty around the clock and trying to solve family conflicts. Parents described how their health was negatively affected by their life situation.

The National Minimum Dataset for Social Care — Why be interested?

(2007). The National Minimum Dataset for Social Care — Why be interested? Journal of Care Services Management: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 11-16.

On Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness

On Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness Rachel Tzvia Back (bio) Abstract In this letter to Bridges, the author summarizes her experiences at a conference in Capetown South Africa on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The conference focused on trans generational transmission of trauma and included presentations by apartheid era survivors and perpetrators as well as second-generation Holocaust survivors and perpetrators and by Eva Moses Korr, a survivor of Mengele's experiments on twins. Dear Editors: I've just returned to Israel from a conference on "Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Reflecting on Ten Years of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission" [in Capetown, South Africa, November 2006] to find your call for submissions on reconciliation and alternatives to war. How wonderful that you are devoting an issue to this theme; so much at the Capetown conference spoke exactly to that. Sadly, I don't think I'll have time to fully write of my experiences before your deadline (I came home [End Page 6] to family illnesses demanding my time and energy), so I'll just note a few names and ideas that stood out. In addition to South Africa's story (I saw video footage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the first time and kept wondering why I hadn't seen any earlier), the stories of second-generation Holocaust survivors and perpetrators were most profoundly present. Indeed, the focus on the trans-generational transmission of trauma was intense, disturbing and (of course) appropriate. Our stories have become our children's stories—our pain and prejudices have become (or will become) theirs, and I wondered throughout the four-day conference about the generations of healing necessary after each war and every horror. I gave a paper on a local initiative—Galilean Jews and Palestinians meeting to share their narratives. What bonds us in this group, its raison d'etre, is that the Jews (myself among them) live on land where a Palestinian village stood until 1948. (The people of Mi'ar, the village in question, were evacuated from their homes during the fighting of Israel's War of Independence and were never allowed to return. The village was eventually destroyed.) The Arabs of our group are all descendents of that village, and they still view Mi'ar as home. It is, as you can imagine, a powerful and emotionally charged story. As far as we know, this type of encounter between Arabs dispossessed of their land and Jews now living on that land has never before taken place. But there is hope, a hope embedded in the ability to acknowledge wrongdoings, the ability and desire to feel each other's pain, losses and fears. The initiative is small and local, but significant nonetheless, and one looks for hope where one can… (The story of Palestinians on the Israeli side of the Green Line is little known and often confused with that of Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 war. They are not the same story.) The closing plenary of the conference was delivered by Eva Moses Kor, one of the twins experimented on by Mengele. She is the subject of a new documentary, Forgiving Dr. Mengele—we viewed a brief extract of the film, which was moving and deeply provocative. A small woman, her speech still marked by her Eastern-European origins, Moses Kor spoke about the decision to forgive Mengele as a turning point in her life, as an empowering and liberating moment. What also impressed me about her was that with all she had seen and also endured, she spoke with a gentle and embracing humor. Another very interesting presentation was delivered by Ilona Kuphal, who is part of a group called One by One—they promote dialogue between descendents of Holocaust survivors and descendents of Nazi perpetrators. Similar efforts to build bridges between erstwhile enemies, and between victims and perpetrators, have become the life-work of a white South African woman, Ginn Fourie. Fourie, whose teenage daughter was killed in an ANC attack on a pub, spoke of her decision to seek out the man who ordered the attack and, together with him, found a center working toward reconciliation on both...

Beliefs about cervical cancer and human papillomavirus (HPV) and acceptability of HPV vaccination among Chinese women in Hong Kong

Objective To assess the knowledge and beliefs on cervical cancer and HPV infection and to evaluate the acceptability of HPV vaccination among Chinese women. Methods Seven focus groups were conducted with ethnic Chinese women aged 18–25 ( n = 20), 26–35 ( n = 13), and 36 and above ( n = 16) in a community women's health clinic in Hong Kong in 2006. The discussions were audio taped, transcribed and analyzed. Recurrent themes related to cervical cancer, HPV infection and vaccination were highlighted. Results Diverse conceptions on likely causes of cervical cancer were noted, covering biological, psychological, environmental, lifestyle and sexual factors. Most women had not heard of HPV and its mode of transmission. The participants had difficulties understanding and accepting the linkage between cervical cancer and the sexually transmitted HPV infection. HPV infection was seen as personally stigmatizing with significant adverse impact on self-esteem and significant relationships. Participants favored HPV vaccination both for themselves and their teenage daughters if authoritative endorsement was provided. Conclusion Inadequate knowledge and misconceptions on cervical cancer and HPV were common. Most participants welcomed and favored having HPV vaccination. Apart from promoting HPV vaccination, cervical cancer prevention should also include strategies to promote knowledge and minimize the stigmatizing effect of a sexually transmitted HPV infection.

Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture Ralph LaRossa Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters and Postwar American Culture. By Rachel Devlin . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 272. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). In Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters and Postwar American Culture Rachel Devlin, an associate professor of history at Tulane, investigates "the unprecedented scale of interest in the father–adolescent daughter relationship during the war and postwar era, the sexual themes that informed its representation, and the decline in any detectable caution, particularly on the part of psychoanalysis, in espousing the benefits of the female adolescent's Oedipal attachment to her father" (2). Devlin's interest is in the culture rather than the conduct of father–adolescent daughter relationships. Thus, rather than rely on documentary sources (sources that might provide insights into how fathers and daughters behaved on a daily basis), she primarily draws from "imaginative literature" such as plays, films, and novels. Included among the works she examines—and this is but a sample—are Junior Miss (a 1941 play), Kiss and Tell (a 1943 play and a 1945 film), Janie (a 1942 play and a 1944 film), Member of the Wedding (a 1950 novel, a 1950 play, and a 1952 film), Father of the Bride (a 1948 novel and a 1950 film), Lie Down in Darkness (a 1951 novel), Rebel without a Cause (a 1955 film), The Wild One (a 1955 film), Imitation of Life (a 1959 film), Peyton Place (a 1956 novel and a 1957 film), and Lolita (a 1955 novel, published in the United States in 1958). Every now and then Devlin introduces other literatures (for example, articles from Seventeen Magazine and Ebony), but mostly and unabashedly she focuses on fictional works. "It is perhaps telling," she notes, "that the more traditional sources on fatherhood and family life . . . had less to say about fathers and daughters than did playwrights and novelists" (14). The central thesis of Relative Intimacy is that, contrary to the belief that the 1940s and 1950s were decades when adolescents tried to distance themselves from their parents and the perception that the era was a time when social and sexual conservatism went unchallenged, the culture of parenthood during and after the war actually "fostered a father-daughter relationship characterized by new forms of psychological intimacy and tinged with eroticism" (back cover). That is, if we look at popular fictional texts at the time, we discover that "seductive exchanges" between fathers and their teenage daughters were a recurring theme. Lolita, of course, is a well-known example, but who would have guessed that a Broadway play with the innocuous title Junior Miss would be seething with sexual tension? Devlin walks us through the play's script—a script she says "inaugurated the father-daughter dynamic that would become ubiquitous in the 1940s [End Page 141] and 1950s" (84)—and demonstrates how the story of a thirteen year old's coming of age (symbolized, in part, by getting her first high heels) and a father's role in that process (her dad is the one who bestows the gift, over his wife's objections) reflected the preoccupation that playwrights and other artists had with father-daughter intimacy. What's especially interesting is the contrast in how father-daughter and mother-son relationships were culturally represented in the wake of the war. Whereas an emotional attachment between a mother and son often was condemned (too close a connection was viewed as "maternal overprotectiveness" and as the root cause behind a boy becoming a "sissy"), an emotional attachment between a father and daughter was celebrated. Why was there a preoccupation with father-daughter intimacy at this historical moment? Devlin highlights four factors. The first, she says, had to do with the war and its aftermath. The absence of men who were called to serve overseas and the difficulties associated with their return renewed a discussion about the role of men in America's families. Often the question was asked, What special contribution do fathers make to family life? The answer that the experts arrived at—one that combined "sex role sociology" with "Freudian ideas...

Set in Stone (review)

Reviewed by: Set in Stone Elizabeth Bush Newbery, Linda Set in Stone. Fickling/Random House, 2006 [368p] Library ed. ISBN 0-385-75103-6$18.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-75102-8$16.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 Fourwinds boasts the grace and charm of du Maurier's Manderley—and the tortured inhabitants as well, as young artist Samuel Godwin discovers when he accepts a position as tutor to Ernest Farrow's teenage daughters. The elder, Juliana, is demure almost to the point of shyness, a sharp contrast to younger, outgoing Marianne, who incidentally suffers from bouts of sleepwalking and outbursts of terrified concern over a carving of the West Wind that is missing from one side of the house. Governess Charlotte Agnew seems to know more than she's telling, but as the story unwinds through the alternating narration of Charlotte and Samuel, it's clear that she's just piecing together the mystery as well, and occasionally getting it entirely wrong. Newbery charges ahead hurling red herrings, surefooted on this well-trodden Gothic turf, and she nearly pulls off a cinema-worthy tale that, back in the day, would have likely involved Leslie Howard or Ray Milland. Instead, she crashes to a close with an overload of elements drawn from one too many identifiable sources: a fortunetelling scene (Jane Eyre, with a passing mention of a character named Brocklehurst, no less); evidence dredged from a pond (Sherlock Holmes); revelation of incest, followed by the marriage of the artist to the governess (Angels and Insects); bastard child farmed out to avoid family embarrassment (take your pick). Thrilling ultimately gives way to trite and tawdry, but if readers are able to live with the destination, they might enjoy the twists and turns of the ride. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Mothers and Daughters: The Challenge of Communicating

The developing adolescent girl presents a range of emotional moods, resulting in confusion and bewilderment for her mother. The source of the mood fluctuations is the adolescent's normal psychological and physiological rollercoaster of pubertal development. Often both the mother and daughter lack understanding of each other's behavior. Their resulting frustration fosters the verbal clashes so typically described by the angry adolescent and mystified mother. Tension and conflict is more common between mothers and teenage daughters than mothers and their sons (every 2.5 days compared to every 4 days). Ironically, despite the frequent conflicts, teenage girls perceive their relationship with their mothers as close, supportive, and important. The combative stance is one way the adolescent attempts to connect, although it often has the opposite effect. Rather than engage in another diatribe the mother distances herself, and so the ritual mother-daughter dance begins. The dyad comes together in apparent harmony only to be wrenched apart by a trivial comment by the mother that sends her daughter off in a rage.

“Because she’s a woman”: Myth and Metafiction in Carol Shields’s Unless

IN THE CANADIAN POSTMODERN (1988), Linda Hutcheon observes the inherent conflicts between postmodernism and feminism. But Carol Shields succeeds brilliantly in combining her feminism and postmodernism in (2002). Her last novel, is her most explicitly feminist and her most intensely postmodernist text. She remarked, think I was the last feminist wake up in the world: (1) She was braver about expressing her feminist beliefs in because she did not think she would be alive read the reviews. The narrator of echoes these sentiments: am willing blurt it all out, if only myself. Blurting is a form of bravery. I'm just catching on that fact. Arriving late, as always. (2) As Wendy Roy writes, Unless is Shields' most explicitly feminist (125). (3) Shields's feminism embraces egalitarian liberalism, however, not radical, militant feminism. For example, Shields and her heroine both practise bean-counting--noting the exclusion of women from lists of the modern world's greatest thinkers and writers. (4) In her Playwright's Note her play Thirteen Hands (1993), Shields asserts her commitment the redemption of women artists and activists and her desire reclaim these women, to valorize those lives. Shields's daughter, writer Anne Giardini, confirms her mother's mission address the erasure of these invisible women, lost heroines, because this obliteration is a tragedy (12). Shields employs myth and metafiction convey her feminism in Unless: she revises myth in a manner employed by feminist writers from H. D. Atwood, and she employs metafictionality, fiction about the art of fiction, critique women's place in a withholding universe (220). All Shields's novels are metafictional--beginning with her first novel, Small Ceremonies (1976), in which Judith Gill is writing a novel, through Sivann, in which critics cannibalize the poet Mary Swann, The: Stone: Diaries, in which Daisy Goodwill Flett, who writes under the pen name Mrs Green Thumb, narrates her own autobiography-but is her most explicitly metafictional novel, for her narrator uses fiction reflect and resolve her real-life dilemma. While all Shields's heroines are writers, the heroine of writes novels, like Shields herself: in contemplating her heroine's destiny, she revises her conception of the happy ending of marriage for women. Shields employs myth present the problem in and metafictionality seek a solution. In Literature and Myth, Northrop Frye defines literature as a developed mythology (35). To convey this, her most feminist fiction, Shields draws on that most female of myths, the ancient Greek tale of the fertility goddess Demeter's search for her missing daughter Persephone. (5) Shields frames this quest as a mystery in Unless. Reta Winters appears at age forty-three (the oldest point at which a woman could still exert sexual allure, as Shields then thought) (6) have it all: three engaging teenage daughters named Norah, Natalie, and Christine; a twenty-six-year-old loving partnership with their physician father, Tom; a sprawling one-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Orangetown just one hour north of Toronto; and a successful career as translator and novelist. But suddenly her eldest daughter, Norah, the most thoughtful and literary of the three sisters, drops out--out of university, out of her Annex apartment with her boyfriend, Ben Abbott, out of her family, and out of life--to sit in silence on a street corner with its own textual archaeology (ii), beneath the lamppost where a Muslim woman recently immolated herself--with a begging bowl and a sign around her neck reading GOODNESS (11-12). (7) The question is Why? is a novel of interpretation--how interpret Norah's defection from life. Theories abound. Each member of Reta's kaffee klatsch--a parody of the ancient Greek chorus-has a theory: A phase, Annette believes. …

The Two Addies: Maternity and Language in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women

In a 1973 interview with Graeme Gibson, Alice Munro declares that writers who first excited me were the writers of the American South, because I felt there a country being depicted that was like my own.... I mean the part of the country I come from is absolutely Gothic (248). While influence studies for Munro have flowed toward Eudora Welty, there are reasons beyond gothic similarity to justify a focus on Munro and William Faulkner together: both writers are often linked to issues of form (Faulkner as modernist, Munro as realist); both have been characterized by critics as more pointedly regional than national in their respective American and Canadian contexts; and both have been recognized as especially focused on maternity. Add to this the resonance in Lives of Girls and Women and As I Lay Dying between two mothers named Addie and two daughters named Del(l), as well as a focus in both novels on the relationship between maternity and language, and one wonders why they have not been compared more often. (1) Without making a specific claim that the correspondences are intentional, I do contend that the treatments of maternity and language in these two novels are worth examining together. Katherine Henninger observes that in Faulkner's work the tension between men's desire to have women represent collectivity, and women's desire to assume the perceived power of individualism is embodied in the battle for control of bodily (26). Indeed, the same could be said of Munro's work. Both novels feature a mother named Addie, who aspires to life beyond the farm, and a sexually active teenage daughter named Del(l). Faulkner's provocative image of a mother speaking from her coffin five days after her death demonstrates a physically constrained mother whose relationship to language silences her. This maternal figure has been seen by Magdalene Redekop as rewritten into a clown figure in Munro's work, as though it might be better to clown than to be like a corpse (64). Redekop argues that Munro's novel portrays female reproduction as dangerous, but does so with a twist of irreverence. Mother figures that range from mock mothers to dolls undermine overly fearful or sentimental portraits (both observations that have been made about Faulkner's portrayals of women) (2) for a steelier, more realistic picture of motherhood. It is tempting to interpret Munro's revision of motherhood as a depiction of female triumph impossible in a Faulknerian fictional world. However, a number of critics have noted in Munro's work a lingering sense that life continues to be restrictive for mothers. I make the case that Faulkner's metaphor emphasizes physical constraints, while Munro's clown metaphor focuses more on psychological pressures. As a result, both novels can be seen as tracing the contours of containment for mothers in their respective societies. The two Addies are similarly striking for the disempowerment they experience as mothers in their relationship to language. Before arguing the similarities between these two texts, I would like to acknowledge important differences. First, they were written in very different cultural, social, and historical times. Faulkner wrote at the end of a decade that ratified the 19th Amendment and gave women the right to vote, but the political and social environment remained bleak for American women seeking control over their own reproductive capacities. As a female citizen of the rural South, Addie Bundren would have belonged to the category of women with the highest fertility rates in the nation (an average of 6.3 children each) and as a result would have lived with the most debilitating consequences of compromised knowledge about reproductive control (Bergman 397-398). This ignorance was openly enforced by the Comstock Act of 1873, a law that, as James Reed explains, made it a misdemeanor to give away or sell any information on contraception (107). Resisting this repressive trend were first-wave feminists in the 1920s, who agitated for women's autonomy over their reproductive capacities: In 1918 [Margaret] Sanger successfully appealed the decision which had shut down her birth-control clinic, and 5 years later, she opened another. …

A Mental Health Program for Ground Zero Rescue and Recovery Workers: Cases and Observations

A Mental Health Program for Ground Zero Rescue and Recovery Workers: Cases and Observations

Steering through Provinces

Baumgartner continuedfrom previous page grief . Divided by men, by the demands of family, by distance, they are often torn apart in such a way that they never recover. Hangings is a rich, rich read, ripe with associations . As the title suggests, "hangings" can invoke execution at the end of a rope, art like Miro's moBBVKW biles, the threads oflives spun out and clipped short word—something inevitable, beyond grief, beyond by the Three Fates—and all are fitting connections. "Experimental" is a highly contested designation, but make no mistake: this is haunting writing, saturated with a beauty drawn from tragedy. Shope has written tragedy in the ancient Greek sense of the poignancy, with Medea-sized impact. Holly L. Baumgartner is Associate Professor of English at Mercy College and a Visiting Lecturer for Oxford University 's Summer Programme. Steering through Provinces Selah Saterstrom Requiem Teresa Carmody Les Figues Press http://www.lesfigues.com 72 pages; paper, $13.00 I was sitting in a coffee shop when I began page 35 ofTeresa Carmody's Requiem. Outside, the weather was miserable. Inside, glum shoppers taking a break from commercial visions of holiday joy and the reality of securing such joy for loved ones. A father and his teenaged daughter sat down at the table next to mine. The father said, "If you had to choose one of your children to die, who would you choose?" He wasn't asking her the question directly, but using it as a way to conclude some point he'd been making en route to the table where they now sat. "Easy," the girl said. "I'd choose the oldest." "No, you would not," the father said, clearly annoyed that she was taking on the question instead of anchoring his point. The girl slammed her mug of coffee on the table. "You're right," said the girl, "I'd choose the whole family. It's unjust to choose just one." I include this event as part of my review of Requiem because one of the implications of the text itself is that we would do well to notice how human exchanges cut across or otherwise interrupt our readings of life. Carmody activates plain language as a transcendent liturgy that reveals existential dilemmas not limited to the Midwest, even as it celebrates how a culture within the margins contributes to a larger, national language. As the title implies, Requiem orbits the subject of death—in particular, how death reveals tangled, living relations, especially those between fathers and their children. Much like our human capacity for simultaneously interacting yet remaining isolated, Requiem is a collection of stories that interconnect , but also stand alone. Through both its formal construction and its content, Requiem asks how we internalize and claim connection when we stand outside of one another's solitude and death. On page 35, a woman reflecting on life through the lens of her father's death says: I don't think it has to be so difficult: just be honest with yourselfand anybody who asks.... It's like with Dad, he was the way he was, and I don't believe I began seeing him until I accepted the fact ofhis opinions. While in the coffee shop I am reminded of myself as a teenage girl. I wonder if the girl sitting next to me will one day find herself electing to see her father as he actually was instead of dwelling on the need to be right. It is a question I also ask myself while reading Requiem: when does the act of witness become the act of unconditional love? In this book, anything that can be seen is seen through language itself. The characters populating these stories make visible their culture and relations through the provincial nuances that structure their speech. Carmody activates plain language as a transcendent liturgy that reveals existential dilemmas not limited to the rural Midwest, even as it celebrates how a culture within the margins contributes to a larger, national language—the language of outlet malls and shag-carpeted, smoky lounges. It is through this same language that we have the opportunity to view and consider very human—both endearing and tragic— strategies...

Girl Power: Young Women and the Waning of Patriarchy in Rural North China

Since the early 1950s, several generations of in rural north China have responded to social changes brought about by state policies and practices, gradually altering their position in the domestic sphere from statusless to new players in family affairs. While favorable conditions in larger social settings are necessary and important, equally important have been the agencies of who took advantage of the new opportunities to challenge the patriarchal order of family life. By focusing on individual women, the previously marginalized members of the family, this article identifies and provides a better understanding of the most active driving force of family change from within. (Young women, agency, family change, China) ********** Although there are still many issues under debate among students of the Chinese family, it is widely agreed that the decline of parental authority and power is the most visible and significant change that has occurred in the domestic sphere in rural China since 1949. Such a trend began in the heyday of socialist transformation during the 1950s (Yang 1959) and continued in both the collective period (Parish and Whyte 1978) and the post-collective reform era (Davis and Harrell 1993; Bossen 2002). Thus far, most studies see the decline of parental power and authority as a result of a set of social changes occurring in larger social settings, such as the implementation of the new marriage law and other government policies, the state-sponsored attack on patrilineal ideology and kinship organization, and public ownership that disabled the family as a unit of production. The contribution of individual agency to the shifting power balance across generational line, especially the role played by women, however, has been by and large underplayed, if not completely ignored. To balance the previous emphasis on external, social causes, this article explores the active role played by to redefine intergenerational power relations in particular and other dimensions of private life in general. Throughout this article the term young women is used to refer to rural between the ages of 15 to 24, or as defined by social terms, those who are going through the transition period from a teenage daughter to a daughterin-law. For a rural woman, this is the most difficult and important period in her life, full of changes and challenges (Wolf 1972). In the areas where this study was conducted, in this age group are referred to as guniang or yatou, which may be translated as in English. But guniang or yatou refer only to unmarried women. Once a woman marries, she is no longer a girl; but has been transformed into a daughter-in-law (xifu) and an adult woman. In a traditional family, were marginal outsiders with only a temporary position, as daughters married out and new daughters-in-law entered the domestic group under the rules of patrilineal exogamy and patrilocal post-marital residence. Thus, daughters were commonly regarded as a drain on family wealth and new daughters-in-law were seen as a potential threat to the existing family order. In comparison to their male siblings, girls were statusless, powerless, and somewhat dangerous; they could acquire a proper place in the domestic sphere only by becoming mothers (Baker 1979; Freedman 1966; Watson 1985, 1986; Wolf 1972; Bossen 2002). As a result of their anonymity in family life, have drawn little scholarly attention thus far and, admittedly, they also constitute the most difficult age group to study for a male researcher. Male informants are the usual sources when conducting fieldwork. When I tried to reach female informants, I found myself more often talking with older women, the supposedly more knowledgeable and certainly more powerful woman in a household, typically the mother (or mother-in-law) who manages the household budget. …

Reflections from a Single Father of a Teenage Daughter with Mental Retardation

This paper discusses some of the experiences of a single father of a teenage daughter with mental retardation. It presents some of the first descriptions of a highly underreported family type, single fathers of children with disabilities, as well as discussing some of the general issues of parenting a child with severe disabilities. This family type provides some interesting challenges to traditional gender roles, as well as providing examples of the fluidity of gender roles.

Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture

Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture Rachel Devm. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Appearing in the Gender and American Culture Series launched in 1988, Relative Intimacy appears on a par with other titles that have won notable awards. In this judgment I am biased by the book's clarification of one issue that has puzzled me for exactly 50 years. As a high school student, I saw the film Rebel Without a Cause (1955). While I found a kind of melodramatic credibility in Jim Stark (James Dean), his weepy girl friend Judy (Natalie Wood) seemed mysterious. The angry, erotically tinged relationship with her father (William Hopper) grew from a desire to titillate him sexually; he reciprocated with brutish violence that turned her to juvenile delinquency. In every subsequent viewing of Rebel, I wondered why such a rendition of daughter-father attraction/antagonism could be considered psychologically plausible for a mainstream feature film. Now the analysis from Rachel Devlm, an associate professor of history at Tulane, has left me gasping with new tremors of alienation from the reigning wisdom that she demonstrates for the popular therapeutic culture of my youth. Devlin treats Rebel as just one of many artifacts in the history of postwar attempts to represent middle-class adolescent girls, understand their challenges, and prescribe cures for them. Placed in that context, the story of Judy and her father is meant to be an instructive female Oedipal drama that expresses insights for family therapy. Drawing upon numerous examples from films, plays, and widely read psychoanalytic tracts - Helene Deutsch's Psychology of Woman (1944) and Phyllis Greenacre's Trauma, Growth, and Personality (1952) among them-Devlin shows postwar therapeutic consensus that a teenage daughter's Oedipal attractions to her father are so urgently normal that they need to be ripened toward some kind of decisive resolution. (It was assumed that a male's Oedipal attachment to his mother died at puberty in a kind of benign molting.) Mom was the daughter's biggest emotional problem in this understanding. If girls were to become independent from mothers, they would have to decisively reject their influence. In this emancipation they would symbolically join Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) when he murders Mrs. Senator Iselin (Angela Lansbury) -absolutely the world's most viperous mom. While therapists of the Deutsch/Greenacre persuasion did not openly advocate physical incest, they squirmingly sanctioned it as a negligible evil preferable to continuing childish dependence on the mother or eruptions of acting out in promiscuity, drinking, and smoking. Affirmative Oedipal enactment with the father, in other words, was the way beyond the control of, in Lillian Gordon's words from that period, the giantess of the nursery (44). So, returning to Rebel, we can recognize that both Jim and Judy's parents fail because of weak fathers-Jim's because he cannot assert himself against a domineering wife and Judy's because he fails to reciprocate her erotic impulses in ways that legitimize her developing sexual stature. The mothers are evil, too, but in a derivative way enabled by their husbands' inadequacies. Without Rachel Devlin's resourceful sleuthing in the popular postwar materials, I would never have understood Judy's motivation as the second rebel who really did have her cause. The exegesis here is just one of many executed with fascinating sources and a rich collection of handsomely produced visual illustrations gathered from premier collections of American social history. Topics have been arranged into chapters that deal with coherent sets of cultural artifacts and all the sources of public understanding or taste linked to their production and consumption. Devlin ranges gracefully over government documents, juvenile court proceedings, professional journals, popular magazines, fiction, radio broadcasts, and stage plays. …

Fifty Years of Parker and Hulme: A Survey of Some Major Textual Representations and Their Ideological Significance

The article discusses Peter Jackson's filmic representation of the famous case in the history of crime in New Zealand, of the murder of Honora Rieper by her teenage daughter Pauline and Pauline's friend Juliet Hulme. Some of the most significant textual representations of the case are highlighted.