Young women’s negotiations of gender,the body and the labour market in a post-feminist context

This article explores the ways the body and femininity is understood and negotiated in relation to employment. This article draws on interview data from an Australian study which aimed to explore what it meant to be a ‘young woman’ in neoliberal late modernity, and in relation to the paradoxes of post-feminism. Though there has been an unprecedented rise in youth post-secondary school participation in Australia and elsewhere, girls’ and young women’s increased investment and participation in education has not provided the same gains as for their male counterparts. All interview participants described being aware of gender inequalities and gender discrimination in the workplace, including the glass ceiling, the gender pay gap, and demands and pressures on women to balance career and motherhood, however many did not associate these issues with ‘feminism’. We explore the dynamics of notions of equality, difference and the body in participants’ discussions of work and their anticipation of motherhood and the logics by which gender inequalities are sustained.     

Adolescence,embodiment and gender identity in contemporary india: Elite women in a changing society

This article is based on primary research among young middle-class women in school in India. It attempts to understand the processes in families and schools that contribute to the reproduction and creation of a class and gender specific habitus, as well as the factors that lead to the formation of a particular kind of identity that is located in the transitory moment of both reproduction and change in contemporary Indian society. It is argued that recolonization is the most significant social process in the postcolonial culture that constitutes urban, Indian society, and this undoubtedly shapes gender identity in different ways. The family is the ground on which the heterosexual patriarchal ideal is nurtured and sustained. At the same time, the influence of peer group cultures on young women's and men's perceptions of their embodied selves and gender identity is significant. Their perceptions of their identities are grounded in prevailing media images and clearly young women and men consciously create, devise, and formulate their own rules for conduct, appearance, and self-presentation within the complexity that is characteristic of a changing society.     

Gender differences associated with playing high school varsity soccer

Despite the increased participation of girls in competitive high school athletics, it is unclear that play on sports teams holds the same meaning for adolescent boys and girls. This study investigated school, grade, (freshman and sophomore vs junior and senior), and gender differences associated with a range of factors related to participation in high school varsity soccer play among 65 students attending two high schools, one emphasizing achievement, the other emphasizing competitive involvement in athletics, including soccer. Also of interest was the relationship between both soccer involvement and soccer knowledge and school climate, empathy, occupational interest, and perceived parent behavior. Because gender differences were found in comparative and correlational analysis, it is concluded that play on varsity soccer teams holds different meanings and values for adolescent boys and girls.An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, November 1984. The two authors shared equally in carrying out the research reported here.She received her doctorate in sociology and education from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include children's social development and games, the transition from school to work, and schools in central cities.He received his doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include social cognitive development, gay and lesbian relationships, and the effects of divorce on children.     

Who wants to be a woman? young women's reflections on transitions to adulthood

The focus of this article is on how Finnish young women construct their transitions to adulthood and how they imagine their futures as women. Tensions in this process are analysed: many young women want to accelerate their shifts towards independent adult status. At the same time, some of them attempt to postpone the point of being locked into the lives of adult women. They look forward to acquiring the legal status of an adult citizen and to moving to homes of their own. But they want to stay young, which means time for relationships, studying, work and travel, and definitely not children at an early age. Being an adult woman does not seem to be a very tempting position for some young women; being a girl is considered by them to open more possibilities. Those young women who are keener to embrace female adulthood are also discussed, focusing on ways in which they envisage their futures, and what contradictions they experience. These tensions are explored drawing from the research project ‘Tracing Transitions — Follow-Up Study of Post-16 Students’. In the study, 40 young women and 23 young men aged around 18 years were interviewed individually, in paris or in groups of three. The project is grounded on ethnographic research in which the same young people were followed when they started secondary school at the age of 13 years.     

Women Educators and Transnational Networking in the Twentieth-Century Nursery School Movement

In this article I argue that women educators' personal and professional networks underpinned the growth of nursery school education into a transnational movement in the interwar years. Edna Noble White, Lillian de Lissa, Mary Gutteridge and Gwendolyn Watkins' interlocking networks facilitated and connected the nursery school movements in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia. Although these women educators were at the centre of a feminised domain, I also show that their work and the movement were impacted by gender relations in the broader fields of education and child development research. Just as nursery school education transcended national boundaries and was reconfigured in each national context, so too the priorities and tensions in education and developmental psychology.     

Doing gender in Spanish same-sex couples. The distribution of housework and childcare

Housework and childcare have been considered mechanisms for ‘doing gender’ through the allocation of different functions to women and to men. Women continue to devote more time and effort to this type of work, in spite of their progressive incorporation into the labour market. Same-sex couples escape this gender binarism, and so this study set out to learn the distribution criteria work, as well as the influence of gender socialization when it comes to establishing this distribution. A qualitative investigation was carried out with 21 Spanish same-sex families. The results indicate that the majority of couples position themselves in an egalitarian discourse based on the absence of differentiated gender roles and a low level of specialization. No differences were found between male and female couples. Nevertheless, the female couples show higher levels of discontent when the distribution was not egalitarian. In conclusion, it is proposed that the effects of gender socialization are perpetuated beyond heterosexual relationships and also affect same-sex couples.     

Transitions in relationship style from adolescence to young adulthood

Literature on friendships of adolescents and young adults suggests important gender and age-related differences. In a study of transitions in relationship style from middle adolescence (high school) to late adolescence (college), 300 students described their relationship with the person who was closest to them, either same or other sex. Four relationship styles were characteristic: integrated (high friendly and high intimate), intimate (high intimate and low friendly), friendly (high friendly and low intimate), and uninvolved (low intimate and low friendly). Women's more intimate styles of relating, as compared to men's more uninvolved styles, suggested that women developed earlier competence at intimate relating than did men. Viewed as particularly important were the college women's close friendships with those of the same gender, an experience uncharacteristic of adolescent men in high school and college. Results were discussed in terms of Erikson's stages of development and Sullivan's concept of the chum.Received Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Colorado. Major interests are relationship style, intimacy development, and transitions to adulthood.     

Citation and marginalisation: the ethics of feminism in Medieval Studies

This article draws on my experience both as a medievalist and as a feminist working in a UK university today to discuss the challenges facing feminist academia more widely. Using Medieval Studies as a case study, this article argues that in times of austerity the pressure on young feminist academics to conform is greater as it is increasingly important to get one's work published in order to stay competitive. This pressure to publish limits intellectual curiosity and forces research down more conventional paths. This article lays out how this functions in Medieval Studies and attempts to suggest some ways in which it could be overcome. One strategy of resistance I suggest entails what I call an ‘ethics of source study’; a way of looking at and responding to both medieval and modern texts with an awareness of their potential effect on the world. I begin by discussing the pressing need to publish work forced upon us by the Research Excellence Framework, and how this drive towards publication can make our work less radical. I then illustrate this with examples from my own discipline. In Medieval Studies, the publication of more articles means that the production of editions is neglected, and this forces scholars to use out-of-date and misogynist editions. Finally, I suggest some ideas of how we can create alternative networks in which feminist academia can survive and flourish, including an outline of what an ethics of source study might look like.     

Re-examining Social Work Roles and Tasks with Foster Care

In order to promote developmental outcomes with children and young people and to nurture their positive health and well-being in foster care, social workers and case managers are required to direct professional attention toward both the child or young person and her/his daily living environment(s)—at home, at school, and in the local neighborhoods in which they live. When viewed from an ecological perspective, foster care environments are represented conceptually as a nested cluster of settings ranging from immediate life spaces and networks of relationships in a foster home, at school, and in a neighborhood, to organizational contexts holding a statutory duty of care for children and young people assigned looked after status, along with national policies and statutes which frame foster-care environments. This article explores how social-work roles and tasks with children and young people in foster care change as Social Workers transition from case management roles within state, provincial, or local authority departments to become Supervising Social Workers, or Team Managers of Foster Carers, or Directors of foster care services.     

The sporting life: Athletic activities during early adolescence

The decline in sports participation that begins in early adolescence has been well documented, and there has been considerable controversy regarding the reasons for this attrition. The present study addressed the attrition process by focusing on the subjective experience of sports as a function of grade, gender, and sport context. Following the procedures of the Experience Sampling Method, 401 5th–9th-grade boys and girls carried electronic pagers, similar to those worn by doctors, for one week, and filled out self-report forms on their activities and subjective states in response to signals received at random times. Older respondents spent less time in sports than their younger peers. This age difference was due primarily to a decline in informal sports participation, with less pronounced attrition from organized sports. Our findings suggest that the reasons for attrition from sport may be context specific. While informal sports were experienced more positively than gym class or organized sports, perceptions of skill were lowest during informal sports and declined with age. It seems youngsters stop participating in organized sports because these activities are less enjoyable to them, while attrition from informal sports is more performance based. Boys spent more time in sports than girls, and this difference was based primarily upon significant gender differences in informal sports participation. In spite of their differential rates of participation, boys and girls reported similar levels of affect, arousal, and skill during sports.This research was supported by NIMH grant number MH38324, Stress in Daily Life During Early Adolescence, awarded to Reed Larson, and was carried out while the first author was a Dissertation Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Loyola University of Chicago.Received Ph.D. in psychology from Loyola University of Chicago. Current research interests include athletic, involvement during early adolescence, body image, and adolescent mental health.Current research interests are stress and coping during early adolescence, and the adaptive use of leisure time.Received Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. Current research interests include pubertal development, the precursors of eating disorders, and the effects of maternal employment of young adolescents.     

Marital Attitude Trajectories Across Adolescence

The current study seeks to address the implicit assumption in the developmental literature that marital attitudes are static by investigating how various marital attitudes might change across adolescence. Longitudinal change for three marital attitudes in relation to family structure, educational aspirations, race and gender are examined. Utilizing a sample of 1,010 high school students (53% male; 76% white) recruited from a Midwestern metropolitan area, latent growth models were used to model marital attitude trajectories across adolescence. The sample was followed for 4 years from ages 14 until 18. Results revealed that adolescents placed a higher priority on marriage as they prepared to transition into young adulthood but that gender, race and educational aspirations all altered the degree in which marital attitudes changed across the time period of the study. Results highlight the importance of considering multiple constructs of marital attitudes and the need for more longitudinal work in this area of study.     

Women Law Professors – Negotiating and Transcending Gender Identities at Work

This paper reports a research project on womenlaw professors in the U.K. Despite theirsimilar social and educational backgrounds,successful women legal academics disclosemarked differences in their perceptions of theinfluence of gender on their work identities.Many emphasise the caring and pastoral rolesthey adopt, or are expected to adopt.Organisational cultures also emerge as asignificant factor in determining the genderexperiences of women law professors. The fewwith experience as head of school downplay thesignificance of gender while simultaneouslyacknowledging the influence of genderconstructions and expectations.     

Predictors of Positive Development in Emerging Adulthood

This article responds to recent calls for a focus on successful development in young people and examination of its developmental precursors, in order to identify potentially modifiable targets for interventions. The current study examined child and adolescent precursors of positive functioning in emerging adulthood, including individual characteristics, relationship factors, and connections to the community, using a multidimensional positive development measure at 19–20 years. The sample consisted of 511 males and 647 females who were participants in the Australian Temperament Project, a population based longitudinal study that has followed young people’s psychosocial adjustment from infancy to early adulthood. Higher levels of positive development in emerging adulthood were associated with stronger family and peer relationships, better adjustment to the school setting, higher family socioeconomic status, and better emotional control. Some significant gender differences were observed, with emotional control, family relationships, and community orientation all being stronger predictors of males’ than of females’ positive development. The findings provide possible targets for child and adolescent interventions to promote positive development in early adulthood.     

Gender,Care, and the Normalization of Violence: Similarities between Occupational Violence and Intimate Partner Violence in Finland

According to the statistics, violence against women is quite common in Finland, particularly in partner relationships and in care work. The present article looks at the similarities in the ways in which victims of occupational violence in care work and victims of intimate partner violence understand their experiences of violence. The commonalities among interpersonal relations are highlighted in order to offer new insights to the analysis of gender in research on occupational violence. Drawing on empirical data and research literature on the experiences of violence of Finnish women, this article suggests that minimization, naturalization and legitimization of the encountered violence is typical for women in care work as well as for quite ordinary women in their intimate relationships.

The article identifies gendered ideals of caring as an area overlapping and in disjunction with violence at work and at home. These contribute to the ways in which women tend to belittle the impact of violence targeted at them in both these spheres of life. Women are traditionally assumed to be responsible for taking care of others and for maintaining interpersonal relations. In the Finnish context, the responsibility for care is associated with an assumption of endurance that Finnish women show even in violent situations. However, the complexities involved in the phenomenon of interpersonal violence give rise to a need of conceptualizing gender in a more multi‐faceted manner than as a binary opposition between men and women. While analysing the gendered meanings of care we should bear in mind the dynamic nature of gender as a process of signification.     

What Do They Want in Life?: The Life Goals of a Multi-Ethnic, Multi-Generational Sample of High School Seniors

This study investigated ethnic as well as gender and generational similarities and differences in the life goals among graduating high-school seniors. Adolescents came from six ethnic groups: White, African, Mexican, Other Latino, Filipino, and East/Southeast Asian Americans. Their self-articulated medium-range life goals were grouped into 8 major categories such as occupational, educational, familial, and material goals. Group differences in various aspects of future plans, such as priorities given to different life goals, time frame of attainment, and perceived controllability over their attainment, were also examined. Hypothesized group differences based on current social realities and small-scale qualitative studies on ethnic minorities were not found; there were very few ethnic, gender, and generational differences in adolescents’ life goals. All groups reported a higher priority for, earlier expected attainment of, and more control over their medium-range educational and occupational goals than their family-related and material goals. Further, long-term educational and occupational aspirations were high across all groups. There were moderate ethnic differences in educational expectations and none for corresponding career expectations. Thus, current inequalities in educational and occupational attainments across ethnic groups were only partially reflected in the life goals of adolescents on the brink of graduating from high school.This study was supported by the School of Social Ecology and the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine; as well as the Max-Planck-Award for International Cooperation granted to Jutta Heckhausen and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We are indebted to Susan Farruggia, Ph.D. and Laura Gil-Trejo for their valuable contribution to data collection and help in the day-to-day management of the overall project. We also acknowledge with appreciation the assistance of numerous undergraduate research assistants in data collection and data entry.Developmental psychologist with current interests in the familial factors that affect motivation and disengagement with life goals in adolescence and young adulthoodDevelopmental psychologist with current interests in cross-cultural human development,and the neural bases of math and language learning.Developmental psychologist with clinical training. Her current interests are in the cross-cultural study of familial and peer factors in adolescents’ and young adults’ psychological well-beingClinical psychologist with research interests in the links between economic stress and behavioral disorderDevelopmental psychologist with a current focus on developmental regulation during major life-course transitions, in particular the transition from school to work and to college     

precarious changes: gender and generational politics in contemporary Italy

The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women's lives. Young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make ‘their’ precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women's experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time.     

Gender construction at work in Icelandic fish plants

In this article we present the results of our studies of gender construction at work in Icelandic fish plants. Our aim is to contribute to the understanding of the processes involved in the gendering of jobs, labour and the organization of work and their interrelations. We argue that an examination of these factors can shed light on larger questions of gender segregation, women's lower position in the labour force and how gender categories and identities are constructed and reconstructed in the workplace.     

Life Cycle,Labour Remuneration,and Gender Inequality in a Chinese Agrarian Collective

Conventional wisdom about gender inequality and labour remuneration on agrarian collectives in rural China has emphasized various discriminatory practices against women. Using a life cycle approach, this article examines instead the way in which men and women possess changing patterns of and opportunities for work at different stages of their lives. Drawing on economic and demographic data from an agrarian collective in East China, gender differentiation is scrutinized in terms of how work assignment, labour remuneration and work attendance rates were transformed over time. A number of other factors – the persistence of pre-revolutionary patriarchal ideology, as well as government policies on population control and work incentives – that influenced the way in which peasant households deployed labour on the agrarian collective during the 1970s also had a gendered impact on work remuneration.     

Testing a Model of Universal Prevention Effects on Adolescent Relationships and Marijuana Use as Pathways to Young Adult Outcomes

There are several interrelated knowledge gaps in the literature on skills-building interventions for middle schoolers designed to prevent initiation of substance use, all of which concern the limited study of the adolescent pathways of those intervention effects on distal young adult outcomes. Among the most important yet understudied pathways of influence on long-term effects are positive youth relationship outcomes of middle-school interventions. Other influential pathways for long-term effects are reductions in adolescent substance misuse, particularly marijuana use, considering the long-term consequences of early marijuana initiation. To address these knowledge gaps, data from a randomized controlled trial were used to test a longitudinal, developmental model positing pathways of intervention effects on age 21 illicit drug use and positive relationship affect, via earlier effects on adolescent relationships and marijuana use. Sixth-graders and their families enrolled in 22 Iowa schools were randomly assigned to the Iowa Strengthening Families Program or a control group (N?=?446). The average age of students at baseline was 11.3 years (10–13 year age range); 48% were male and 98% were Caucasian, reflective of the demographics in the participating rural Midwest communities. Measures included middle-school relationships (parents, peers, school), high school marijuana use, plus age 21 illicit drug use and relationship affect (parents, work, school), 10 years past intervention implementation. As expected, intervention effects on young adult variables were indirect, through effects on adolescent outcomes, with higher-risk participants showing greater intervention impact. The findings suggest preventive interventions with young adolescents have potential to demonstrate effects into young adulthood.

     

‘What can I do next?’: Cosmetic Surgery,Femininities and Affect

This article is based on a study of young people's understandings and experiences of body work (or body modification) in relation to gender and health. Drawing on feminist and Deleuzian–Spinozan approaches to the body, the article explores the embodied sensations, or affects, associated with the body's physical modification through cosmetic surgery as one practice of body work. This approach pursues a non-dualist analysis of the body and contributes to new understandings of body-modification practices such as cosmetic surgery as processes influenced, and informed, by affect. Through examples of differing experiences and trajectories relating to the practice of cosmetic surgery, which has long been a contentious issue in feminism, the article makes evident what a feminist Deleuzian approach means in practice and what it can contribute to analyses of the body in/and society. This approach can assist in exploring the complex ways in which gendered embodiments assemble, and in understanding the dynamics and processes informing differing bodily possibilities related to gender.