Worth Of Women Research Articles

Women's work and women's worth: the leisure implications of women's changing employment patterns

This paper reviews the interrelationship of work and leisure in British women's lives. It focuses in particular on the practical and ideological significance of changes in women's patterns of labour market involvement. While women's gross employment levels have risen substantially over the last three decades, the scale and pattern of female employment is strongly differentiated across social groups. Most women's work involvement continues to be primarily shaped by the requirements of their family role, and to be strongly differentiated from male employment patterns. Among women with higher status jobs, however, a contrasting pattern is emerging. This paper considers whether the ‘advances’ of professional women are indicative of a general tide of change which can be expected to permeate to other sectors of the female population, and highlights structural factors in both work and family domains which are likely to inhibit this. It concludes that current trends in women's employment patterns both represent i...

A (Boarding) House Is Not a Home: Women's Work and Woman's Worth on the Margins of Domesticity

The Christmas card received last year from my mother's cousin reminisced about the old days and recalled in particular my grandmother's zeal for cleanliness: Your grandmother was a wonderful housekeeper, the note said. I can still remember her washing and drying the insides of milk bottles before putting them out on the porch. This example of her fanaticism didn't surprise me, for my sister and have been working over the past couple of years to index and transcribe my family's letters and diaries that span the first half of this century, and my grandmother's dedication to rigorous standards of housekeeping emerges as a theme both in her letters and in those of her daughters. Indeed, my grandmother's need to catalog her stands out so starkly as to make me speculate about the significance of that to her understanding of her life and to her identity.' Certainly she was not unique in the type of she did. Lower-class and middle-class lives revolved around women's work in the twenties and thirties: cleaning, cooking, laundry, and child care. But the fact that my grandmother ran a small hotel--really a boardinghouse small enough that she did most of the rather than supervise a large staff--intensified and problematized her relationship to that work. Her three daughters, Amy, Iola (my mother), and Olivia, had been her companions for a brief period, but when two of them left to pursue careers, my grandmother and Amy, who remained at home and who was the primary diarist, continued to perform in an increasingly nonfamily context that seems to have problematized my grandmother's sense of self. After reading her letters over and over, have come to the conclusion that she struggled with this problem of

Women's wages, women's worth: Politics, religion, and equity

Women's wages, women's worth: Politics, religion, and equity

Women's Worth and Wedding Gift Exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907–89

Wedding gift exchange from the turn of the century to the present has served as a medium through which women in the Maradi valley of Niger could assert their worth, create social ties and respond to a shifting political economy. Rather than exploring the implications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘dowry’ in isolation, this paper sees wedding prestations as an ongoing and evolving dialogue in which women's roles and worth are contested, the nature of wealth is redefined and the terms of marriage are negotiated. The crisis in domestic labor which arose with the decline of slavery in the early decades of the century gave rise to informal unions through which the labor of junior women could be controlled. Women responded to these informal marriages by staging highly visible ceremonies which established the worth and standing of the bride. With the growth of an increasingly urban-centered commercial and bureaucratic economy, women have been drawn into a desperate ‘search for money’ to continue to meet their obligations in the gift economy. While the outward form of wedding gift exchange appears unchanged, the importance of cash to the acquisition of goods, services, and productive resources has radically altered both the content and the significance of gift exchange. Gifts no longer embody wealth in people derived from ability within an agro-pastoral economy. Instead they reveal the giver's access to the resources of the state and the market. Women's eroding position within the economy since 1950 has drawn them further and further into gift exchange, both in order to build a safety net in the form of exchange value stored in a woman's dowry and to secure the social ties which can ensure their continued access to increasingly contested resources.

The Worth of Women's Work: A Qualitative Synthesis.

The Worth of Women's Work: A Qualitative Synthesis.

The Worth of Women's Work: A Qualitative Synthesis. Edited by Anne Stathman, Eleanor M. Miller, and Hans O. Mauksch. State University of New York Press. 331 pp. Cloth, $39.50; paper, $12.95

The Worth of Women's Work: A Qualitative Synthesis. Edited by Anne Stathman, Eleanor M. Miller, and Hans O. Mauksch. State University of New York Press. 331 pp. Cloth, $39.50; paper, $12.95

Book Reviews : Women Working. Edited by Ann Helton Stromberg and Shirley Harkness. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1988, 448 pp., $18.95, paperback. The Worth of Women's Work. Edited by Anne Statham, Eleanor M. Miller, and Hans O. Mauksch. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, 288 pp., $12.95, paperback

Book Reviews : Women Working. Edited by Ann Helton Stromberg and Shirley Harkness. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1988, 448 pp., $18.95, paperback. The Worth of Women's Work. Edited by Anne Statham, Eleanor M. Miller, and Hans O. Mauksch. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, 288 pp., $12.95, paperback

The Worth of Women's Work: A Qualitative Synthesis.

The Worth of Women's Work: A Qualitative Synthesis.

Ladies of the Fraternity of Saint George and of the Society of the Garter

Contemporary society has discovered—or in some cases been forced to discover—the worth of women. Historians have provided valuable insights into the social, cultural, and legal status of women in an effort to highlight the roots of attitudes that have excluded women from positions of power in the western world. Much of this research has focused upon new ways of viewing history, and the fine series of monographsWomen in Culture and Societybeing published by the University of Chicago Press provides a prime example of the new awareness of the distaff side of history. Yet, little attention has been paid to some of the most basic assumptions of past generations of medieval historians about women and society. The claim that male chauvinist attitudes are founded in the primative Germanic concept of a warrior fraternity from which women were physiologically excluded from membership was already hoary when Fritz Kern published his classic account of medieval law and society in 1914. Thecomitatusband of Tacitus has been seen as a central component of the leitmotiv that produced chivalry. The chivalric love ethic has, of course, received great attention from women's historians, but the chivalric orders into which such views were distilled have been largely ignored.The traditional view of the chivalric orders as fossilized parodies of the values they espoused so eloquently advocated by Johan Huizinga'sThe Waning of the Middle Agesstill holds the field. Only in the last year have the chivalric orders been rehabilitated as genuine expressions of the human values of their age. The position of women within the tradition of the chivalric orders is worth a look for the intrinsic interest of the subject and for the insights that the investigation provides into the shifts in attitudes toward females over the centuries. The chivalric orders, and the Arthurian legends that inspired them, placed a high value on women, much higher than the earlier chansons de geste. While it is true that this tradition tended to place the lady upon a pedestal from which her daughters have fought to climb down, the greatest and longest lasting of these late-medieval chivalric fraternities, the Order of the Garter, also gave women a role in its celebrations.

Women's Terms

books that have been most important to me-as a feminist, as a leftist, as a believer in social and spiritual change-have been those that translate the reality we've been handed by generations of male minds into women's terms. Elizabeth Fisher's Woman's Creation does this, as does Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman -and though the books contradict each other in ways I find totally confusing, I love them both. I am enormously impressed by the work of two dear friends of mine, Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker: their book, Woman's Worth, looks at women in cultures around the world and shows that capitalist, communist, and socialist are words that describe men's lives, and that women's economic lives fall into different categories, systems in which we have minimal, token, or negotiating power. This exploration of women's culture, existing apart from the realities of the lives of the men who have lived with us, controlled us, and often literally owned us, is one of the aspects of feminism I find most crucial, and feminist historians are also addressing it. I am excited by the books that have followed in the wake of Carroll Smith Rosenberg's brilliant 1975 essay, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in

The Politics of Menopause: The "Discovery" of a Deficiency Disease

Menopause, once regarded as a sign of sin, and later neurosis, was redefined as a disease by physicians the 1960s, when synthetic estrogen became widely available. Estrogen therapy, promoted by physicians and the pharmaceutical industry as a way of avoiding menopause and preserving youth and beauty, was linked to cancer and other health problems the mid-1970s. Feminists argued that menopause was a normal aging process and that women's health care was a social problem. This paper looks at how these opposing definitions of menopause evolved and examines the efforts of women to fight off the stigma of the disease label. In the 1960s the medical profession the United States hailed the contraceptive pill as the great liberator of women, and estrogens general as the fountain of youth and beauty. Prominent gynecologists discovered that menopause was a deficiency disease, but promised women that estrogen replacement therapy would let them avoid menopause completely and keep them forever. Yet within a few years, U.S. feminists the vanguard of an organized women's health movement defined the health care system, including estrogen treatment, as a serious social problem. The male-dominated medical profession was accused of reflecting and perpetuating the social ideology of women as sex objects and reproductive organs. Treating women with dangerous drugs was defined as exploitation and an insidious form of social These issues raised several questions: How did such diametrically opposed definitions evolve? How, under what conditions, and by whom does a certain behavior become defined as deviant or sick? In what context does a putative condition become defined as a social problem? I believe that definitions of health and illness are socially constructed and that these definitions are inherently political. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful or criminal, according to Conrad and Schneider (1980:1), now been given new medical meanings which are profoundly political nature and have real political consequences. Indeed in many cases these medical treatments have become a new form of social control. I interpret the definition of menopause from this framework. During the 19th century, Victorian physicians viewed menopause as a sign of sin and decay; with the advent of Freudian psychology the early 20th century, it was viewed as a neurosis; and as synthetic estrogens became readily available the 1960s, physicians treated menopause as a disease (McCrea, 1981). Perhaps more important than these differences, however, are four themes which pervade the medical definitions of menopause. These are: (1) women's potential and function are biologically destined; (2) women's worth is determined by fecundity and attractiveness; (3) rejection of the feminine role will bring physical and emotional havoc; (4) aging women are useless and repulsive. In this paper I first analyze the rise of the disease definition of menopause and show that this definition reflects and helps create the prevailing ageism and sexism of our times. Then I show how the disease definition has been challenged from inside the medical community. Finally I examine how feminists outside the medical community have also challenged the disease model, claiming that menopause is normal and relatively unproblematic.

Body Image Disturbance as a Factor in the Crisis Situation of Pregnancy A Review

Pregnancy has been viewed as a period of increased susceptibility to crisis. In our society, the female body continues to be a measure of a woman's worth. From a developmental perspective of body image, the reason for the suffering of body image disturbance in pregnant women becomes clear. The time during which a woman must prepare to take on the role of mother is greatly complicated by her struggle to adapt to her rapidly changing body. The nurse is the ideal person to explain, to both the woman and her partner, the reasons for and normal nature of these insecurities. It is felt that this anticipatory counseling can help make pregnancy less of a crisis.

Helping Relationships: Relationships of Clients with Physicians, Social Workers, Priests, and Others

Appeals for help were frequently made to specialists in institutional settings by women living in low-income areas who were raising children by themselves. These appeals often were productive of distress for the women. Appeals for service were responded to by examinations regarding eligibility, bargaining regarding the character of the service, and incidental derogation of the women's worth. Appeals for support and guidance customarily were rejected.

Marriage, Madness and Murder

Marriage is one human relationship that is portrayed in many Arab women's fiction. It is usually employed as a means to question traditional female roles, re-define feminine selfhood, explore the conditions of female singleness in a patriarchal society, alert us to the emotional and psychological pressures exerted on women within these institutions, and confront us with dramatic examples of the ways in which marriage may legitimize the abuse of women. These ideas are clearly expressed in Alia Mamdouh's Mothballs (Eng. Edition 1996) and Salwa Bakr's The Golden Chariot (Eng. Edition. 1995). By focusing on traditional and non-traditional discourses of marriage, both Bakr and Mamdouh provide a very interesting and yet troubling perspective on the politics of marriage in the Arab world. They also show that for many women, the experience of marriage threatens a woman's identity, worth and existence. In many instances, it leaves nothing but the remnants of a self on the verge of madness.