Family Factors in the Ego Development of Adolescent Girls

Thirty-nine adolescent girls, 16–19 years, were observed together with their 2 parents at a family discourse about moral and family issues on which they disagreed, to study interaction and conflict handling in families with daughters at different levels of ego development. Family interactions were coded by the Constraining and Enabling Coding System, ego development by the Washington University Sentence Completion Test and handling of internal conflict by Bond Defense Style Questionaire. Daughters' ego development was predicted by parental cognitive and affective enabling, but not by constraining communications. Fathers' cognitive and affective enabling transactions and mothers' affective enabling transactions contributed to the explained variance in the adolescents' ego development when daughters' age, parents' SES and ego development were controlled for in hierarchical regression analyses. Parents' ego levels were related to their enabling transactions, which also predicted daughters' ego levels, suggesting that especially enabling parenting behavior may play a mediating role. Mothers' challenging behavior toward daughters and parental autonomy from responding in kind to daughters' communications were also related to high ego levels in daughters.     

Restricted to Half the Sky: Unwanted Girls,Battered Wives and Inglorious Women

The proverb ‘women hold up half the sky’ was created by the Maoist government 64 years ago in order to show that women in ‘New China’ have equal power and rights to their male peers. I selected three photographs for my FLaK zine and called them ‘unwanted girls’, ‘battered wives’ and ‘inglorious women’. To examine the relevance of the proverb in Modern China, I will discuss three women-related problems behind these photographs and analyse their cultural and legal causes. By doing so, I aim to achieve two purposes—first, to help the reader have a better understanding of the problems of women in the region where one-fifth of the global population lives, and second, to argue that seemingly gender neutral law and policy can produce new and greater restrictions on women’s freedom.     

Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.     

Stevie Smith and Her Dancing Girls

Abstract

What constitutes a good Stevie Smith poem? The question bothered the author herself and it can bedevil the reader too, with evaluative quandaries often compounding interpretative ones. Smith's uncertainty about the relative merits of her poems informed publication decisions, and this in turn has resulted in certain compositions being overlooked in critical assessments of her achievement. This article takes as a test-case example a hitherto largely neglected poem, ‘The Ballet of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’, and through sustained close reading makes the case that the poem, unpublished in Smith's lifetime, may be one of her finest pieces. Through an analysis of the poem's cultural and historical context, its manifold ambiguities, its imagery and atmosphere, its coded engagement with the fabular and the strange effects achieved through rhythm and rhyme, the poem is shown to offer a complex, psychologically suggestive response to issues which exercise Smith in many of her poems, including the tension between innocence and knowledge, between the child and the adult, between the capricious and the calculated, and between the ‘frivolous’ and the ‘ominous’. The difficulty of determining how ironically and how seriously Smith engages with some of the latent preoccupations of her poem, such as the power of sorcery and the supernatural, the growth of sexual awareness in young girls and (possibly) the approach of the Second World War, is taken as symptomatic of the tendency of Smith's poems to at once invite and defy exegesis. Taken together, these various concerns and characteristics provide the grounds for considering one of Smith's overlooked poems as one of her most effective. Yet the conclusion seeks to complicate this assessment by cross-questioning the criteria by which Smith's ‘success’ as a poet may be determined.     

Maternal Control and Adolescent Depression: Ethnic Differences Among Clinically Referred Girls

The relationship between perceived maternal control and depression was examined in 111 urban adolescent girls seeking psychological services at an outpatient mental health center in the Midwest. This study sought to clarify inconsistent findings in earlier research linking parental control and adolescent depression by examining urban girls with mental health problems and by testing ethnic background as a moderator of the general relationship. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires of adolescent girls' depressive symptoms, and perceptions of their mothers' parenting styles. Analyses did not detect a significant association between maternal control and depression in the combined sample of adolescent girls; however, findings were moderated by the ethnicity of the girls. Once ethnicity was included, no relation between control and depression was found for Caucasian and Latina girls, but high control was linked to less depression among African American girls. These findings highlight the importance of ethnicity and gender in child rearing and adolescent depression and stress the need for more culturally sensitive conceptualizations of depression     

Heterogeneity of Girls’ Consensual Popularity: Academic and Interpersonal Behavioral Profiles

The present study explored the heterogeneous nature of popularity by investigating subgroups of popular girls (N = 365) in their first year of secondary school (mean age  =  13.05). Cluster analysis revealed the presence of five subgroups based upon sociometric popularity (i.e., those considered likeable by peers) and consensual popularity (i.e., those considered popular by peers), and academic behavioral indices. Two of these groups contained girls who were all nominated as “popular” by classmates, yet the girls in one group displayed very positive academic behaviors (Popular Studious); girls in the other popular group displayed extreme antiacademic behaviors (Popular Disengaged). The remaining groups were Average Popular, Unpopular Disengaged, and Unpopular Studious. External validating measures confirmed the existence of the subgroups, that is, Popular Studious girls were judged by classmates to behave in a prosocial fashion, whereas Popular Disengaged girls exhibited many antisocial behaviors, and were often nominated as bullies. Unpopular Studious girls were often nominated as victims. These findings confirmed the hypothesis that consensual popularity is a heterogeneous concept, and that antiacademic and antisocial girls may still be among the most consensually popular students in secondary schools.Lecturer at the Department of Educational Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Wibautstraat 4, 1091 GM Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His interests include the academic and social behavioral correlates of consensual popularity in adolescence.Associate Professor and Head of Developmental Division, Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut. His interests include peer relations, social behavior, and social cognition in middle childhood and early adolescence.     

Eating Problems and the Self-Concept: Results Based on a Representative Sample of Norwegian Adolescent Girls

The joint role of self-esteem and unstable self-perceptions for eating problems was investigated in a representative Norwegian population sample of girls in 3 age groups (N = 5287; aged 12–19 years). Three scales from the 12-item Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-12) measured eating problems: Restriction, Bulimia-food preoccupation, and Diet. Girls low on all EAT scales were most often characterized by high self-esteem combined with stable self-perceptions, whereas girls high on all EAT-scales were characterized by having low self-esteem and unstable self-perceptions. Bulimic tendencies and dieting were more common in older groups, whereas high scores on all EAT-scales simultaneously were equally common in all ages. The findings gave initial support to the continuity hypothesis in indicating that the age trends for eating problems, except for restrictive tendencies, followed those of eating disorders and in that the risk factors found for eating problems parallel those reported for eating disorders.