Unique Experiences Of Women Research Articles

Fifty years later

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine identity intersectionalities of age, ethnicity, and gender among US professional women of color working in upper management as they challenge the glass ceiling in order to change organizations from the inside out.Design/methodology/approachFeatured are narratives of 36 midlife‐aged, middle‐class African‐American, Asian‐American, and Hispanic women who have built careers in mediated message industries. Feminism and Foucauldianism provide theoretical underpinning.FindingsThe findings illuminate how midlife‐aged women of color paradoxically resist and accept master narratives of “less than” in striving to change organizations and achieve their maximum potential. Organizational glass ceilings remain impenetrable, but women of color are optimistic that benefits of diverse upper‐level managements ultimately will be embraced. Moreover, overlapping public and private spheres continue to further complicate career advancement.Research limitations/implicationsMethod‐inherent limitations include recognizing that narratives are not generalizable but serve as a point of departure for future study. Implications for theory building are offered, as well as ongoing research suggestions – such as probing intra‐group differences and expanding dialog to include other unique identity groups.Social implicationsOf key import for public policy decision making are research participants' voices – how, as beneficiaries of socio‐political movements and legislation spanning nearly five decades, they still seek to negotiate organizational hierarchies and balance public and private work spheres.Originality/valueHeretofore, little scholarly attention has focused on midlife‐aged women of color and glass ceiling barriers in conjunction with monitoring organizational change. This exploratory study was designed to address the gap; encouraging policymakers and organizational leaders to consider these women's unique identities and experiences.

The Unique Experiences of Women and Their Families After the Death of a Baby

This study sought to discover the ways in which the woman's experience of a baby's death affects her as an individual and within the family system. More specifically, this study asked: Does a woman's experience of stillbirth appear to have long-lasting effects, and what variables influence such changes? Expressed through their own narratives, it appears that a baby's death has long-lasting effects for a woman. Variables that affect her perceptual experience include social support, legitimization of her loss, opportunities for rituals, and existential emotions such as shame and guilt. Results revealed that enhanced understanding of the experience and psychosocial support may help some women and their family systems cope with the long-term effects of this loss.

Experiência da adesão ao tratamento entre mulheres com Vírus da Imunodeficiência Humana/ Síndrome da Imunodeficiência Adquirida

OBJETIVO: Compreender a experiência da adesão ao tratamento para o Vírus da Imunodeficiência Humana/ Síndrome da Imunodeficiência Adquirida para a mulher. MÉTODOS: Estudo etnográfico, baseado no pensamento teórico interpretativista, com oito mulheres de um Grupo de Adesão em um hospital público. Os dados foram obtidos por meio de entrevistas semi-estruturadas e observação participante de janeiro a dezembro 2007. RESULTADOS: Emergiram quatro categorias: enfrentamentos aos valores da experiência da adesão ao tratamento, a experiência singular na adesão ao tratamento, costumes e práticas na experiência da adesão, o cuidar nas relações interpessoais. CONCLUSÃO: As experiências relatadas pertencem à vida singular de cada informante; no entanto, o caminho para uma adesão efetiva fica translúcido nas narrativas. Partiram da realidade específica de suas vidas para ensinar o caminho para aqueles que desejam sair da sombras de um diagnóstico estigmatizante.

Mother Delivers Experiment: Poetry of Motherhood: Plath, Derricotte, Zucker, and Holbrook

Time spUts, fractures; hours shed minutes. Attention is concentrated. Concentration narrows to the finest details, minutiae blossom. (Money is redirected.) Food changes quaUty from taste to nutrient, pleasure to purpose. The Child is the Great Interruption, great in aU tones of enormity and also enthusiasm: pervasive, powerful, but also great-superawesome. The Ufe of Mother is a becoming, a changing, and the force is the child interrupting: first with cries, then questions, then silences. The first lesson of the woman's thus-becoming-mother is the maternal moment, its cUpped intensity, and this moment is also a lyric moment for the poet-mother. Like all other things that feel the press of the child's presence, the poetry is pressed, molded by this influence. To continue, the poet can cloister herself from child or from poetry, but increasingly poet-mothers write through - piercing it, that maternal moment - and the poetry must adjust as the Ufe, the home, the parent does. This change forces a newness on the creative act, the poetry of motherhood by mothers expressing their own experience in this is an experiment. Over and over again, the poetry changes when the topic turns to I-am-a-mother, and the changes can be exhilarating. as life. Becoming-Mother gives women unique experiences, of pleasure, of pain, of dislocation, and also - more important and generaUy - of change. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes in her foreword to the exceUent 2003 anthology of essays The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, Motherhood leads to, demands, provokes, and excites innovations in poetry and inventions in (Dienstfrey and Hillman 2003, ix). In writing about motherhood, narrative and lyric often bleed into each other; intense surges of love and frustration, for example, expose a blurring of emotion, the relationship between time and the rituals of daily life, and the explosive quality of experience, even in its most mundane. When Susan Winnett argued in PMLA in 1990 that women experience pleasure differendy from men, and that this difference has an effect on the reading and even the production of narratives, the well of possibility for the analysis of women's writing seemed newly tapped: Winnett 's two examples of pleasures specific to the female body are both functions of mothering - breastfeeding and childbirth. If these women's experiences have the potential to inform innovative narrative practice, then they have the power to influence creative innovation in other forms as well. The body is the ground for writing, and motherhood not only informs the poetics discussed here, but also transforms them. Women's poetry of motherhood frequendy takes into account the relationship between the generative female body and the creative female poet, and much of the poetry by mother-poets about motherhood direcdy acknowledges the ways in which the life of a mother influences the creative process and the poetic product. The body changes, swells, slackens, slows, and accelerates. If the body is the ground for writing, then pregnancy and childbirth must be intensely transformative. When this awareness infuses poetry, acknowledging maternal experience as Subject, the impact is particularly interesting. The poetry often resists traditional generic expectations and limitations while addressing topics previously un- or mis-represented. Women write about the objects around them, the voices they hear, the physicality that is created (and altered) by the introductions of motherhood into the plan of a life. Beyond the fleshy stuff of pregnancy, the dailiness of Change is a force pressuring creative work. Rather than dwell on the lack of time to write, contemporary women poets often celebrate the ways in which the challenges - often mundane or logistical - of making both mothering and writing fit into one life have an unusually intense effect on their creative work. Kimiko Hahn observes, Art happens and happens because women are not only creative, but creative with how to be creative. …

Developing Effective Programs and Services for College Men: New Directions for Student Services (Number 107) (review)

Reviewed by: Developing Effective Programs and Services for College Men: New Directions for Student Services (Number 107) Shaun R. Harper and Frank Harris III Developing Effective Programs and Services for College Men: New Directions for Student Services (Number 107) Gar E. Kellom (Ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004, 112 pages, $27.00 (softcover) Gender discourse in higher education, particularly within student affairs, is unarguably lopsided. That is, conversations and corresponding institutional responses have focused almost exclusively on the needs of and challenges faced by female students and women in academe. The continuous illumination of sexism and gendered institutional structures that disadvantage women is both necessary and important. The introduction of feminist perspectives and critiques has enabled practitioners and faculty to better understand the developmental needs and unique experiences of women, which in turn has led to the provision of essential resources and services on campuses across the country. While women's concerns merit ongoing consideration and perhaps even greater attention, we argue here, as we have done elsewhere, that current and future scholarship on gender must become more inclusive of college men. Sociologists and leading men's studies scholars Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner (2004) contend that men have long been treated as if we have no gender. A cursory glance at research and published perspectives on gender issues in higher education and student affairs would confirm this assertion. Thus, Developing Effective Programs and Services for College Men is a much-needed contribution to a longstanding gap in the literature. Edited by Gar E. Kellom, Vice President [End Page 487] of Student Development at Saint John's University, this volume brings together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners who consider various aspects of men's development and college experiences. It was refreshing to see authors from a variety of institutional types, including Historically Black Colleges. The monograph emerged from the Reconnecting Males to Liberal Education symposium held at Morehouse College in 2001. Consistent with other New Directions for Student Services sourcebooks, notes from the editor precede the chapters in this issue. Kellom described the agenda and recommendations from the Morehouse symposium, including the need for stronger partnerships and additional scholarship pertaining to male collegians. He then offered a quick report of significant, but seemingly random trends and statistics regarding gender inequities that are unfavorable for college men. These data deserved fuller treatment and explication—this review would have been better situated in an actual chapter instead of the editor's notes. In the first chapter, Obie Clayton, Cynthia Lucas Hewitt, and Eddie Gaffney discussed the enrollment disparities that exist between men and women in higher education. They described how and why men of color (particularly African Americans) and male students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are underrepresented in comparison to their same-race female peers. The theories and sociocultural frameworks in which their consideration is grounded elucidate the undercurrents of low matriculation rates among racial/ethnic minority male students; this is a definite strength of the chapter. Although the issues articulated therein are indeed exacerbated for African American men, in many sections sole emphasis is placed on that population at the exclusion of others. Notwithstanding, the authors offered a useful set of implications for research and policy at the end of the chapter, along with this cautionary note: "Policies that might help male students at the expense of female [students] should be avoided" (p. 20). Rocco Capraro provided a masterful synthesis of historical and theoretical perspectives from the men's studies literature in chapter 2—the comprehensiveness of his review is both exemplary and noteworthy. He drew on seminal and contemporary works from major thinkers on masculinities and forged logical connections between male student development in higher education and widely accepted points of view from men's studies. Readers who lack prior exposure to literature on men and masculinities will find this chapter especially insightful. Chapter 3 is divided into two fragmented parts. In the first half, Cynthia Neal Spence posited that several lessons can be learned from women's colleges, particularly Spelman, regarding curriculum, pedagogy, and the creation of environments in which healthy, non-monolithic gender identities are developed. She situated this transferability primarily in the context of Morehouse...

Women's Experience of Co-Occurring Substance Abuse and Mental Health Conditions

ABSTRACT This study explored the relationship between gender and co-occurring substance abuse and mental health conditions among a sample of 754 consumers of behavioral health services in the southwest U.S. Logistic regression was used to determine factors that would predict women's unique experience of dual diagnosis. Women were almost seven times more likely than men in this sample to have a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder in conjunction with substance abuse. Women were also significantly more likely to experience anxiety and mood disorders and to have been married. Implications of these findings for social work practice are suggested.

Women's experiences with HIV/AIDS: mending fractured selves

* Acknowledgments * Chapter 1. Introduction * Disruption and Legitimation: Hillary * Problematic Repair Strategies: Denise * Disruption and Nonrepair: Stephanie * HIV/AIDS As a Gender Issue * Analytic Framework: Biographical Disruption and HIV/AIDS * Sample and Methodology * Overview of This Book * Chapter 2. Feeling Like Nothing: Receiving an Diagnosis and Initial Disruption * Biographical Disruption Among Women with HIV/AIDS * Hopelessness * Disbelief * Social Withdrawal * Placing Blame * Putting Oneself Last * Assigning Meaning and Sense of Self * Women and Disruption * Chapter 3. Living with Infection: The Impact of Illness on Everyday Life * Gender and the Psychosocial Impact of Infection * Adaptive Tasks for Women with HIV/AIDS * The Perceived Significance of Gender * Women's Unique Experiences and Needs * Chapter 4. Towards Legitimation: Coping with HIV/AIDS * Coping with HIV/AIDS: A Brief Review of the Literature * Women's Ways of Coping: Repairing Disrupted Biographies * Going Public and Becoming an Activist * Support Groups * Spirituality * Establishing Positive Lifestyles * Avoidance * Legitimation and Sense of Self * Chapter 5. Social Support: The Role of Informal Networks in Women's Lives * Social Support and HIV/AIDS * Familial Support Networks * Problematic Support * Keeping the Secret: Untapped Support Networks and Self-Protection * Social Support and Illness Progression: Speculating on the Likelihood of Future Support * Chapter 6. Women As Carers: The Dual Challenge of Caregiving and Living with Infection * Mothering * Planning for the Future: Child Care and Guardianship * Caring for Adults with HIV/AIDS * The Consequences of Caring * Chapter 7. Multiple Assaults on Self: The Relative Impact of HIV/AIDS on Women's Lives * I'm Used to Being Ate Up Anyway * Nothing Compares to HIV * The Relative Impact of Assaults * Chapter 8. Disruption and Repair: Lessons from Women's Illness Experiences * The Strengths and Weaknesses of Women's Coping * Formal Care and Women with Infection * Empowerment and Social Change * Experiencing Illness: Extending HIV-Positive Women's Experiences to Other Populations * Appendix: Sample Demographic Summary * References * Index

A Historical Review of the Depiction of Women in Cardiovascular Literature

A historical review of the literature demonstrates that women have long been acknowledged as suffering from cardiac disease and disorder. Until recently, women's experience with cardiac disease was investigated primarily as the cardiac disease impinged on pregnancy or women's ability to carry out home-related duties. Only in the last decade has a more appropriate and more holistic view of women's unique experience with cardiac disease been undertaken. The authors attribute this new perspective in health literature, in large part, to the advancement of feminist approach and critique.

A Model for Women's Alcohol/Drug Treatment

An all-women's treatment program for alcohol and drug abuse is presented as a viable alternative to treating women in traditional mixed-gender programs. Women's unique experiences, problems, and special needs can best be addressed in women-sensitive treatment settings. All women's programs provide an opportunity for women to gain a separate sense of self, empowerment, and ability to make important changes which are so necessary in their quest for recovery.