Women's Adult Development Research Articles

Ravenna M. Helson (1925-2020).

Memorializes Ravenna M. Helson (1925-2020). Helson was a pioneering feminist researcher whose studies advanced the understanding of women's development and creativity, and revealed the power of personality across the life span. She spent her 55-year career at the University of California Berkeley's Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. In 1955, she was the only woman on staff, and remained the only woman for decades. In 1958 with a 2- and a 1-year-old in tow, she launched the Mills Longitudinal Study of creative potential in 142 female seniors at Mills College. In those times, before second wave feminism or a women's movement, and without any psychology of women, she worked hard to attain visibility for her findings. In 1980 the Mills study transformed to a 50-year research program about women's adult development. Helson died October 2, 2020. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

One Surprise After Another

The author of this article describes her childhood, career, and some of her main findings as a personality psychologist who studied women's creativity and adult development as she herself constructed her personal and professional identity in a changing environment and developed in a number of ways.

Individual Differences in Melancholy Gender Among Women: Does Ambivalence Matter?

This research offers an empirical investigation inspired by Butler's theory of melancholy gender (1995) and a revision of this theory (Jay 2007a). Psychoanalytic feminist theory is drawn on to suggest that melancholy and gender are more likely to be associated in female development than in male development, and Freud's theory of melancholy (1917) is taken to suggest that ambivalence predicts individual differences in melancholy gender among women. In a longitudinal study of women's adult development, an examination of femininity, depressive symptoms, and ambivalence in attachment was conducted in order to evaluate these claims. Findings show that depressive symptoms and femininity are significantly correlated within the sample, but that individual differences in melancholy gender exist. To understand these differences, an analysis was conducted to determine whether ambivalence in attachment accounts for the relation between depressive symptoms and femininity; complementary analyses examined whether low ambivalence in attachment attenuates, or lessens, the relation between femininity and depressive symptoms. Results from these analyses support the notion that it is not the loss and internalization of the same-sex object choice per se that results in melancholy gender in women, as Butler argues; rather, it is the internalization of a lost, ambivalent same-sex attachment that forges the link between melancholy and gender. Narrative material is presented to personify melancholy and unmelancholy gender.

College-educated women's personality development in adulthood: Perceptions and age differences.

Adulthood encompasses a large time span and includes a series of psychosocial challenges (E. H. Erikson, 1950). Five aspects of personality (identity certainty, confident power, concern with aging, generativity, and personal distress) were assessed in a cross-sectional study of college-educated women who at the time of data collection were young adults (age: M = 26 years), middle-aged adults (age: M = 46 years), or older adults (age: M = 66 years). Respondents rated each personality domain for how true it was of them at the time, and they then rated the other 2 ages either retrospectively or prospectively. Results are discussed with attention to the ways in which women's adult development may have been shaped by experiences particular to both gender and birth cohort, and to how these women fit with E. H. Erikson's theory of adult development.

Leadership and Adult Development: Postindustrial Paradigms and Parallels

Current trends in adult development converge exceptionally well with the postindustrial model of leadership proposed by Dr. Joseph Rost in his book, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century. This article begins with a brief overview of the historical movements in human development. Subsequently, three contemporary fields of study in adult development are examined: (1) the research on women's adult development, conceived primarily by female theorists, which argues for affiliation, attachment and connectedness as hallmarks of adult maturity; (2) the constructive--developmental framework of Robert Kegan which argues that human development is shaped by balancing the interplay of the two polar motivating forces in adult life, namely, autonomy and inclusion; and (3) the research of psychologists Dan McAdams and David McClelland, which argues for the centrality of power and intimacy in the life story. Throughout the article there is an attempt to demonstrate the significance of employing concepts of adult development in the model of Rost's postindustrial paradigm of leadership.

Learning Environments for Women's Adult Development: Bridges Toward Change

Learning Environments for Women's Adult Development: Bridges Toward Change

Women at Midlife: Implications for Theories of Women's Adult Development

Research on midlife transitions in women is reviewed, and implications for theories of women's adult development are discussed. Findings on menopause, the postparental period, and the roles of women at midlife are presented. Research on women at midlife suggests that new theoretical models of women's adult development should continue to emerge to accommodate the diversity of women's experiences at midlife. Several theoretical approaches are discussed in light of the research findings, and recommendations are made for future research on women's adult development. Implications for counselors working with women at midlife also are discussed.

A Qualitative Method Illuminates Women's Adult Development

A Qualitative Method Illuminates Women's Adult Development

Medicine and the Family: A Feminist Perspective

and the Family: A Feminist Perspective. Lucy M. Candib. New York: Basic Books. 1995. 360 pp. Hardcover ISBN 0-46502374-6. $38.00 cloth. In 35 years, I have never seen anyone in the medical profession take on the problems related to their interaction with families. and the Family is the first book I have encountered written by a physician who critiques the role of the medical profession regarding family health care. Thank goodness there are physicians who are females, feminists, and capable of putting into words the thoughts and feelings I have experienced for years as a woman and a nurse. The theory as well as the practice of medicine, says Lucy Candib, is male-gendered. Medicine as an institution is rooted in sexism and racism and organized to the greater glory of capitalism. She offers a understanding of the conceptual problems in contemporary medical practice and proposes a feminist view of clinical work. She accomplishes she set out to do: to write about what is the matter with male Candib describes her own physician father as a physician-addict, and it was in the house of her father that she learned the magic and misery wrought by male medicine. Her early mission in life was to not keep up false appearances but to name the evils as she saw them. A product of the 1960s, she wondered if she could become a radical and a physician at the same time and bring change from within. What is wrong with male medicine? experience in the health care system offers ample ground for criticism. Historically, women have had their symptoms blamed on their reproductive systems; they have undergone excessive, inappropriate, and experimental surgery; they have been overmedicated; and to this day they are underrepresented in scientific studies that have a bearing on their health. Candib shows how traditional male medicine continues to be an intellectual tradition that is oppressive to women. She also points out that medicine, transformed by feminism, requires a change in how society views persons and relationships. The first section of the book examines the bias in the theoretical groundings of modem medicine. The second section is devoted to a feminist reconsideration of the clinical relationship. In Chapters 1 and 2, Infant and Child Development and Women's Adult Development, the author analyzes how medicine applies the template of male development to all of human development and assumes that male outlooks and experiences are representative of the viewpoints and experiences of women as well. Growth and development theory and common health care teachings reveal a preoccupation with separation and autonomy, key themes in male identity development. In this view, women's adult development appears as an aberration or truncated version of male development. Females primarily are viewed in terms of their family commitments and productive status. As an alternative, Candib begins to sketch another paradigm-that of beings-in-relation. …

Bridging practice and theory for women's adult development

AbstractThree strands of practice and inquiry—adult learning, women's development, and feminist pedagogy—come together in the context of alternative higher education for adults to help attune learning environments to women's developmental needs.

Speaking her mind: Adult learning and women's adult development

AbstractWomen whose educational experiences resulted in change describe the learning environments that support development of self‐authored and self‐authorizing identity.

Sitting beside herself: Self‐assessment and women's adult development

AbstractSelf‐assessment leads to greater awareness of one's meaning‐making methodology and, hence, more complex meaning.

Multiple roles of the mentor supporting women's adult development

AbstractMentors' multiple caring roles with learners can be instrumental in women's growth and development.

Enduringness and change in creative personality and the prediction of occupational creativity.

Participants in a longitudinal study of women's adult development were scored at midlife on the Occupational Creativity Scale (OCS), which draws on J. L. Holland's (1985) model of vocational environments in the assessment of participants' creative achievement. College measures of cognitive-affective style and career aspirations predicted OCS scores at age 52, and consistency of creative temperament (H. G. Gough, 1992), motivation, and overall attributes of creative personality were demonstrated with both self-report and observer data over several times of testing. However, there was change along with this enduringness: Large fluctuations in creative temperament over one period of life or another were common in individuals, and OCS scores were associated with an increase in level of effective functioning over 30 years.

Women's Adult Development:

The psychological importance of friendship has been neglected in our theory and practice, partly because our models of adult development have been based on the male experience. One of the hallmarks of female development is lifelong intimacy with women friends. Although women's capacity for intimacy and mutual support is highly developed in comparison with men, their friendships are too ften an exchange of selflessness instead of mutual growth. Women's friendships are marred by excessive responsibility for the friend's needs and feelings, fear of envy, fear of success, and fear of conflict. Many women find it harder to set limits to express neediness and anger, and to work through conflicts with women friends than with their husbands and lovers.

Finished At 40: Women's Development within the Patriarchy

Psychological theories of women's lives in middle age and beyond are restricted, negative, and scarce. An overview of women's adult development in textbooks and the professional literature indicates that (a) the prevailing focus of concern is the woman as a biological creature, especially as a mother; (b) the proposed lifecycle trajectory is one in which the woman's life goes into decline after approximately age 40; and (c) little attention is paid to the particular character of women's life narratives. Such treatments of adult womanhood are advantageous to a patriarchal system of power. For future inquiry a social constructionist approach is proposed. Recommended are theories that: liberate interpretations of women from an exclusive focus on their reproductive roles; support methodologies along feminist valuational lines; give preference to relational networks over autonomous individualism; create new narrative life forms for women that are multiple and non-linear; and support a critical function both within psychology and in the society at large.

Women and Work: Toward a New Developmental Model

Women's adult development has been explained by means of research and theory that are either individualistic (based on work and achievements) or relational (based on relationships and caring). The author proposes a model that conceptualizes women's growth in self-understanding as being attained through both work and relationships in key life domains. The model is examined as a guide for developmentally based practice with adult women.

Levinsonian studies of women's adult development.

We reviewed four unpublished dissertations that used Levinson's theory to study women's adult development. The 39 biographies presented in these studies suggested that the women progressed through the same developmental periods as had men in Levinson's study and at roughly the same ages. Although the timing of the periods and the nature of the developmental tasks appeared to be similar, the ways of working on these tasks as well as the outcomes achieved were different. These differences are understood in part as consequences of the greater complexity of women's dreams and the problems encountered in living them out.

Levinsonian studies of women's adult development.

Levinsonian studies of women's adult development.

Seeing Me, Being Me, Becoming the Me I Want to Be

This article summarizes pertinent research on women's adult development and Dream formation, then examines the Dreams of six female psychotherapists in their thirties. Evidence of how these women's Dreams guided their adult professional and personal development is discussed and compared. Finally, recommendations are made for educational and counseling institutions in order that they may more effectively facilitate the articulation and constructive use of women's adult Dreams in their professional and personal lives.