Mother and daughter

Janet Todd (ed.) A Wollstonecraft Anthology (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1989; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life Her Fiction Her Monsters (Routledge) New York and London, 1989.     

Mother-daughter dyads view the family: Associations between divergent perceptions and daughter well-being

Divergent perceptions (or disagreements) within the mother-daughter dyad and the association of such divergence with daughter's affective and behavioral well-being were examined in the current study. One hundred sixty-one mother-daughter dyads (daughters aged 14–18 years; mothers aged 37–59 years) completed paper- and-pencil measures assessing their perceptions of family cohesion and family conflict; daughters also rated their own depressive affect and dieting behavior. While the means for groups of mothers and daughters on family cohesion and conflict were similar, dyads varied substantially in their level of agreement. Disagreements on family cohesion were associated with daughter dieting behavior; maternal employment status was more highly associated with daughter depressive affect than either family conflict or cohesion. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for studying the divergent perceptions of family members, and for family systems and relationship approaches to understanding the family.The research presented in this paper was supported by the W. T. Grant Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Portions of this paper were presented at the 3rd biennial meetings of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Atlanta, Georgia.Received Ph.D. in Child Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Research interests include the interplay among developmental processes during transitions into and out of adolescence.Received Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. Research interests include familial adaptation to chronic illness and the role of family processes in self-image and depression during adolescence.Received Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include girls' psychological adaptation to pubertal change, biosocial aspects of female reproductive events, and development of biologically and socially at risk children and adolescents.     

Like father like son: Imprisonment of fathers and the psychological adjustment of sons

The present study demonstrates that profiles of children from families with imprisoned fathers were more similar to those of juvenile delinquents and less similar to the norm group than were the profiles of children from divorced families. Based on findings presented, it would not be justified to conclude that father absence and father imprisonmentper se were the causes of negative psychological reactions. Discordant family relationships before the father left the family could have primarily caused the disturbance of these children.Received Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Main research interest is developmental psychology.     

The other woman and her child: extra-marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth-century Britain

This article investigates the numbers of 'other women' and their children up until the 1960s in Britain. It analyses 'irregular and illicit unions' in the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now One Parent Families/Gingerbread), and explores evidence on these unions in the debates over the passage of the Divorce Acts of 1923 and 1937 as well as the Legitimacy Acts of 1926 and 1959. It suggests that the prevalence of illicit unions throughout the twentieth century and before allows us to question contemporary concerns about our supposed 'divorcing society' and the decline of family life in modern Britain.     

A Lebanese contemporary female mystic and her counter-conducts

ABSTRACT

A network of Christian female mystics in Lebanon and Syria has been forming since the early 1980s. Composed of women from large cities, such as Beirut or Damascus, it is characterized by its denominational and social diversity. This article will focus on one of these mystics: Catherine Fahmi, who has been living, and officiating, in her apartment in the suburbs of Beirut since the late 1990s. Catherine is a Maronite. She is a married mother of three, in her forties. Each Tuesday morning, she experiences a public ecstasy. Every year, on Good Friday, surrounded by a number of faithful followers, she sees and experiences the Way of the Cross. My aim here is to grasp the complex interplay between this female mystic, her followers and the Maronite Church. Her activities, and the rituals surrounding her stigmatized body, will be analyzed in terms of ‘counter-conducts,’ a notion developed by Michel Foucault.     

Tracing the voice: Pandita Ramabai's life through her landmark texts

‘The silence of a thousand years is broken’ exulted Rachel Bodley's introduction to Pandita Ramabai's feminist manifesto The High‐caste Hindu Woman, which was published in 1887 and sold 9,000 copies internationally within a year.1 Rachel L. Bodley, ‘Introduction’ in Pandita Ramabai, The High‐caste Hindu Woman (Maharahstra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1887, reprinted 1977, pp. i–xix (reference p. i). The 1888 reprint of the book in the United States mentions that it is the ‘tenth thousand’. View all notes Its author was instantly made into an icon in Western countries from the United States to Australia, to linger on in their collective memories, even as she was relegated to ‘silence’ in the social histories and discourses of India. This conundrum, pivotal to an understanding of her life and, I submit, rooted in her feminism, is still to be addressed. The numerous and informative biographies of Ramabai (23 April 1858–5 April 1922) have been located within two distinct paradigms: one projects her life, sometimes almost hagiographically, as a triumphant expression of the Christian impulse;2 Ramabai's Christian biographies in English include S.M. Adhav, Pandita Ramabai (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1979; Bodley, ‘Introduction’; Rajas K. Dongre and Josephine F. Patterson, Pandita Ramabai: a Life of Faith and Prayer (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1963; Nicol McNicol, Pandita Ramabai (Association Press) Calcutta, 1926; and Padmini Sengupta, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati: Her Life and Work (Asia Publishing House) Bombay, 1970. Her best‐known Marathi Christian biography is Devadatta Tilak, Maharashtrachi Tejaswini Pandita Ramabai (Nagarik Prakashan) Nashik, 1960. View all notes and the other valorises her advocacy of women's education while sidestepping the issue of religion.3 Ramabai's Hindu (or non‐Christian) biographies include Tarabai Sathe, Aparajita Rama (D.P. Nagarkar) Pune, 1975, and K.S. Thackeray, Pandita Ramabai (V.R. Baum) Mumbai, 1905 (both in Marathi); and A.B. Shah, ‘Introduction’ in A.B. Shah (ed.), The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai (Maharashtra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1977, pp. xi–xxxvi (in English). View all notes Both elide her feminism. Recent feminist scholarship on Ramabai has impressively interwoven multiple disciplinary and ideological strands, but tended to focus either on her passage to Christianity,4 Susan Glover, ‘Of Water and of the Holy Spirit’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1995; Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Silencing Heresy’ in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 1998, pp. 118–52. View all notes or her reverse gaze at the West during international travels.5 Antoinette Burton, ‘Restless Desire’ in A. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late‐Victorian Britain (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1998, pp. 72–109; Inderpal Grewal, ‘Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale’ in I. Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press) Durham, NC and London, 1996, pp. 179–229. Kumari Jayawardena, ‘Going for the Jugular of Hindu Patriarchy’ in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (eds), Unequal Sisters, 3rd edition (Routledge) New York and London, offers a variation on Ramabai's interaction with American women, in terms of American aid to her educational project in India and its inherent tensions. View all notes The parameters of her life and of her feminism have rarely been clearly outlined.6 I have tried to do this in Meera Kosambi, ‘Introduction’ in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words: Selected Works (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 2000, pp. 1–32; and Meera Kosambi, ‘Returning the American Gaze: Situating Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter' in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter: ‘The Peoples of the United States’, 1889, M. Kosambi (trans.) (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 2003, pp. 1–46. View all notes In this article I propose to analyse her feminism by tracing her multiple ideological trajectories mainly through a discussion of some of her landmark writings, and then indicate the problematic of her representation of the highly troped ‘oppressed Indian woman’.     

The sultana and her sisters: black women in the British Isles before 1530

This interdisciplinary study examines cultural representation of black women in the British Isles before 1530. It addresses a lacuna in the historiography of black women which has, hitherto, paid little attention to the fact of their existence in the British Isles before British involvement in the slave trade. Representations of black women in stained glass and in poetry of the Middle Ages are examined and their meaning and function interrogated through an analysis of the medieval discourses which framed them and through which they were refracted: biblical exegesis, natural histories and travel literature, bestiaries, constructions of female beauty and medical treatises. These images suggest that the bodies and behaviours of black women were the site for a definition of gender and racial otherness long before the development of the slave trade of Elizabethan and Jacobean England     

At-risk factors for the adolescent mother and her infant

This article describes some at-risk features for the adolescent mother and her infant. The inadequacies of the adolescent mother may be manifest in her inability to provide for herself or her infant, and in difficulties in relating to a mate in a suitable fashion since she is still dependent on and, to some extent, symbiotic with her own mother. Complications, such as the increased possibility of having crises in pregnancy, a premature birth, giving up the baby for adoption, malnutrition, decreased stimulation, and divided mothering, are detailed. Compared to infants of adult mothers, offspring of adolescent mothers have a greater risk later on of conduct disorders, absence of both parents, and placement in foster homes or institutions. The adolescent mother's dynamics seem related to oedipal conflicts, wishes to mother and be mothered, and a predominance of symbiotic or other preoedipal conflicts. Becoming a mother in adolescence may be based on efforts to separate from infantile objects, an attempt to make up for the loss thereof, or substitution and avoidance of separation-individuation conflicts; or it might be an accident to avoid regression. At-risk factors are listed for the psychiatrist and pediatrician to observe in the adolescent mother and her infant in order to be alert to the possibilities of increased complications.Past President of American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry. Received his M.D. from the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine in 1948. Trained in psychiatry and child psychiatry in New Orleans. Main interests include group and family therapy, separation and attachment processes, and early child development, particularly in prematures.     

The impact of divorce and subsequent father absence on children's and adolescents' self-concepts

The self-concepts of 406 grade school and junior high school students were assessed in this study. It was found that children and adolescents who had experienced father loss through divorce and whose mothers hadnot remarried demonstrated significantly lower self-concepts than those who were from intact families. Interestingly, children and adolescents who had experienced father loss through divorce and whose mothers had remarried were found to possess lower self-concepts than those from intact families, but this difference was not statistically significant. These findings were found across grade levels (i.e., grades 3–8) and for both sexes. The importance of these findings are discussed in light of current trends toward an increasing divorce rate and an increasing presence of stepfathers in American families.Recieved his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1972. Research has been varied, ranging from assessment and amelioration of emotional and social problems in children to the impact of father loss on children and adolescents.Currently serving in the U.S. Navy. He has pursued graduate studies at Kansas State University. Primary research interests have been in the assessment of inter- and intrapersonal attitudes of children.