Feminist Identities: Career Choices and Experiences of College-Educated Women

Feminist Identities: Career Choices and Experiences of College-Educated Women PDF Author: Kerry Diekmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This qualitative study explored how feminism as a social identity impacts how women interpret their career and life experiences. The overarching research question that guided the study was: How do feminist-identified women make sense of their feminist identity, life experiences, and career path? The theoretical framework that provided the lens for the study included feminist, multicultural, intersectionality, and career development theories. Two distinct bodies of literature were reviewed to provide a foundation for the study: (a) women's career development, in particular, the supports and barriers experienced, and (b) feminist identity, including influences to adopting the feminist label and factors associated with a feminist identity such as the expectation of egalitarian relationships. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was the research design and informed the data collection and analysis. Eight college-educated and feminist-identified women participated in the study and data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Four themes emerged through the data analysis: (a) personal journey to feminism, (b) community of support, (c) adversity experienced, and (d) empowerment and authenticity. Although there were a few limitations around generalizability, the findings suggest a connection between feminist identity and career choices as well as the positive impact women can have on other women through providing inspiration, mentoring, and support.

Feminist Identities: Career Choices and Experiences of College-Educated Women

Feminist Identities: Career Choices and Experiences of College-Educated Women PDF Author: Kerry Diekmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
This qualitative study explored how feminism as a social identity impacts how women interpret their career and life experiences. The overarching research question that guided the study was: How do feminist-identified women make sense of their feminist identity, life experiences, and career path? The theoretical framework that provided the lens for the study included feminist, multicultural, intersectionality, and career development theories. Two distinct bodies of literature were reviewed to provide a foundation for the study: (a) women's career development, in particular, the supports and barriers experienced, and (b) feminist identity, including influences to adopting the feminist label and factors associated with a feminist identity such as the expectation of egalitarian relationships. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was the research design and informed the data collection and analysis. Eight college-educated and feminist-identified women participated in the study and data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Four themes emerged through the data analysis: (a) personal journey to feminism, (b) community of support, (c) adversity experienced, and (d) empowerment and authenticity. Although there were a few limitations around generalizability, the findings suggest a connection between feminist identity and career choices as well as the positive impact women can have on other women through providing inspiration, mentoring, and support.

Women in College

Women in College PDF Author: Mirra Komarovsky
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759107267
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In Women In College, Mirra Komarovsky followed her groundbreaking works on gender roles to focus on the essentialist debate. Komarovsky interviewed post-WWII generation female students about their feelings about gender inequality and domesticity. She makes a strong case for the role of society over biology in shaping gender roles.

The Experience and Meaning of Work in Women's Lives

The Experience and Meaning of Work in Women's Lives PDF Author: Hildreth Y. Grossman
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1134990642
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In the past, social scientists have relied predominantly on traditional models of work to understand women's experiences. These models, however, have been based on men's occupational experiences, which have been assumed to be the same for women. More recently, researchers and theorists from a variety of disciplines have begun to challenge earlier assumptions as inaccurate reflections of the realities for female workers. Newer studies have concentrated on the historical and social reasons for women's employment and career choices, including changes in economy, family, and social conditions. To provide a deeper understanding of women worker's realities by including the meaning they make of their work experiences, the editors have assembled the research of social scientists from various disciplines whose investigations focused exclusively on this subject. Their qualitative methodology provides a forum for women to voice issues, raise questions, and share self-reflections about their work experiences and the meaning they make of their work in the context of the rest of their lives. The common themes that are interwoven within the fabric of women's work experience are: the need to expand traditional definitions of what constitutes "work;" the fluid nature of boundaries between personal life and work life; the importance of the relational aspects of their work; the issues related to the uses of power at work; the role of work in the development of women's sense of self and personal identity; and the degree to which women's work experience is colored by discrimination and sexism.

Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education

Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education PDF Author: Maddie Breeze
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030536610
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
To do feminism and to be a feminist in higher education is to repeat oneself: to insist on gender equality as more than institutional incorporation and diversity auditing, to insert oneself into and against neoliberal measures, and to argue for nuanced intersectional feminist analysis and action. This book returns to established feminist strategies for taking up academic space, re-thinking how feminists inhabit the university and pushing back against institutional failures. The authors assert the academic career course as fundamental to understanding how feminist educational journeys, collaborations and cares and ways of knowing stretch across and reconstitute academic hierarchies, collectivising and politicising feminist career successes and failures. By prioritising interruptions, the book navigates through feminist methods of researcher reflexivity, autoethnography and collective biography: in doing so, moving from feminist identity to feminist practice and repeating the potential of queer feminist interruptions to the university and ourselves. ​

Revising Herself : Women's Identity from College to Midlife

Revising Herself : Women's Identity from College to Midlife PDF Author: Ruthellen Josselson Professor of Psychology Towson State University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198028326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In 1972, Ruthellen Josselson was a young psychologist fascinated by the riddle of how a woman creates an identity and chooses one path over another in life--particularly in the face of the nascent feminist movement, which challenged as never before the traditional role models of earlier generations. Selecting at random thirty young women in their last year of college, Josselson undertook a ground-breaking study that would follow these women's personal odysseys over the next twenty-two years, from graduation to midlife. What she learned about the ways women reinvent themselves in an ever-changing world is the subject of Revising Herself, a myth-shattering look at both a unique generation of American women on the front lines of wrenching social change, and at the conflicts and compromises facing women today. With stunning candor and hard-won insight, the "ordinary" (and anonymous) women in Josselson's study reveal how much more complex and interesting real women's lives are than the one-dimensional stereotypes often portrayed in the media. Dismissing a traditional "stage theory" of development as overly simplistic, Josselson identifies four trajectories that women take from adolescence to adulthood. Guardians are the "good girls"--high achieving and committed to fulfilling their family's expectations, but rigid in outlook and resistant to change. Pathmakers are not afraid of risk or commitment, striving to balance their own needs with others'. The often idealistic Searchers are overwhelmed by choice and unable to make commitments, while Drifters live only for the moment, avoiding choice and an exploration of identity. Reflecting the degree to which women take risks, make choices, and form commitments, these paths form a foundation for adulthood--but they also lead to surprises: at midlife, Guardians seem strikingly able to "cut loose" from earlier traditional patterns, while many Drifters have "found themselves," sometimes in quite traditional ways. And coming of age just as the feminist movement gathered momentum, the women in Josselson's study were the first to confront many contemporary issues not faced by their mothers, or their mothers' mothers: How does an Irish Catholic contemplate an abortion? How does a woman whose parents believe education is wasted on a daughter find the will to apply to medical school? In examining these questions and others, Josselson shows that the forging of a woman's identity--whatever her "path"--is ongoing, a balancing of the need for self-assertion against the equally compelling need for relationships. Women create their identities along the seams of both competence and connection and continually revise what they have made. Allowing women to define themselves in their own terms, Revising Herself holds up a provocative mirror in which readers can reflect upon their own life choices. Whether a Guardian, Pathmaker, Searcher, or Drifter, readers will recognize themselves in these women's experiences and gain new insight into how we construct our identities over a lifetime.

Revising Herself

Revising Herself PDF Author: Ruthellen Josselson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190283866
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In 1972, Ruthellen Josselson was a young psychologist fascinated by the riddle of how a woman creates an identity and chooses one path over another in life--particularly in the face of the nascent feminist movement, which challenged as never before the traditional role models of earlier generations. Selecting at random thirty young women in their last year of college, Josselson undertook a ground-breaking study that would follow these women's personal odysseys over the next twenty-two years, from graduation to midlife. What she learned about the ways women reinvent themselves in an ever-changing world is the subject of Revising Herself, a myth-shattering look at both a unique generation of American women on the front lines of wrenching social change, and at the conflicts and compromises facing women today. With stunning candor and hard-won insight, the "ordinary" (and anonymous) women in Josselson's study reveal how much more complex and interesting real women's lives are than the one-dimensional stereotypes often portrayed in the media. Dismissing a traditional "stage theory" of development as overly simplistic, Josselson identifies four trajectories that women take from adolescence to adulthood. Guardians are the "good girls"--high achieving and committed to fulfilling their family's expectations, but rigid in outlook and resistant to change. Pathmakers are not afraid of risk or commitment, striving to balance their own needs with others'. The often idealistic Searchers are overwhelmed by choice and unable to make commitments, while Drifters live only for the moment, avoiding choice and an exploration of identity. Reflecting the degree to which women take risks, make choices, and form commitments, these paths form a foundation for adulthood--but they also lead to surprises: at midlife, Guardians seem strikingly able to "cut loose" from earlier traditional patterns, while many Drifters have "found themselves," sometimes in quite traditional ways. And coming of age just as the feminist movement gathered momentum, the women in Josselson's study were the first to confront many contemporary issues not faced by their mothers, or their mothers' mothers: How does an Irish Catholic contemplate an abortion? How does a woman whose parents believe education is wasted on a daughter find the will to apply to medical school? In examining these questions and others, Josselson shows that the forging of a woman's identity--whatever her "path"--is ongoing, a balancing of the need for self-assertion against the equally compelling need for relationships. Women create their identities along the seams of both competence and connection and continually revise what they have made. Allowing women to define themselves in their own terms, Revising Herself holds up a provocative mirror in which readers can reflect upon their own life choices. Whether a Guardian, Pathmaker, Searcher, or Drifter, readers will recognize themselves in these women's experiences and gain new insight into how we construct our identities over a lifetime.

Working Class Female Students' Experiences of Higher Education

Working Class Female Students' Experiences of Higher Education PDF Author: Sam Shields
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030889351
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
This book explores the experiences of working-class women undergraduates at three universities in the North of England. The author examines the women’s identities, choices and emotions in relation to higher education; and how they reframe their constrained university choices to maximise their chances of academic success. Highlighting differences in working-class women’s learner identities, caring commitments and quests for upwards social mobility, the book offers an understanding of working-class female student journeys and their mixture of compromise, uncertainty and hope. It will be of interest and value to scholars of working-class women students, widening participation, and sociologists of education.

Feminism and Intersectionality in Academia

Feminism and Intersectionality in Academia PDF Author: Stephanie Anne Shelton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319905902
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This edited volume explores the diversities and complexities of women’s experiences in higher education. Its emphasis on personal narratives provides a forum for topics not typically found in in print, such as mental illness, marital difficulties, and gender identity. The intersectional narratives afford typically disenfranchised women opportunities to share experiences in ways that de-center standard academic writing, while simultaneously making these stories accessible to a range of readers, both inside and outside higher education.

Gender and Sexual Identities in Transition

Gender and Sexual Identities in Transition PDF Author: Patricia Bou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443810142
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The aim of this volume is to offer an international panorama of gendered and sexualised experiences, with new and original data collected from a variety of cultural settings and sociopolitical contexts. We look at many parts of the world (Japan, Sweden, Poland, Cyprus, Spain, US, Australia, Canada, Hungary) with different assumptions and expectations, often revealing various research practices and traditions. Gendered or sexualized discourses are unstable constructions, in permanent transition, in a perpetual struggle to gain social legitimacy and to counter the workings of opposite discourses. They constitute privileged vantage points from which one can observe and judge power relationships. New identities are created and reproduced, refused and challenged. This volume explores, among other issues, the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity in Evangelical universities; the pharmaceutical industry’s promotion of biometaphors involving a shopping strategy which revolves around compulsory heterosexuality; the perpetuation of Greek-Cypriot men’s sexual superiority over women; the Catholic Church's attempt to impose a restrictive view of religion and of sexual ethics; the consolidation of American TV shopping channels as a setting where middle-class femininity and consumption are linked stereotypically; the negotiation of gender- and sex-related norms in groups of British Bangladeshi girls. Even heterosexuality, as the unmarked form of sexual identity and the primary site for the reproduction of gender difference, needs to reassert its normative and prescriptive status, maybe through the silent workings of tradition. By suggesting the concept of transition, we resist seeing the idea of identity as a fixed and definitive category. Gender and sexual identities are never at rest. One is never finished developing into a woman or a man, or any other gender/sexual identity. Contributors include: Joan Pujolar, Andrea Simon-Maeda, Allyson Jule, Stina Ericsson, Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, Joanna Pawelczyk, Nóra Schleicher, Elli Doukanari, Pilar Garcés-Conejos, Lidia Tanaka, José Santaemilia and Pia Pichler.

Understanding Feminist Identity in Three Generations of College-educated Women

Understanding Feminist Identity in Three Generations of College-educated Women PDF Author: Alyssa Naomi Zucker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780591945287
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description