Relationships Among Older Women Living in a Nursing Home

SUMMARY

Literature suggests that women's skills in establishing close ties with other women help sustain them in old age by giving them a sense of control over their lives. This paper questions how such a notion may apply to women in a nursing home setting and contrasts women's experiences with those of men. It is a reanalysis of data from a previously reported study of institutionalized elders' social networks, this time with a specific focus on women residents' relationships with one another. Here, I consider the role of negative interaction in personal relationships, the meaning of intimacy and reciprocity in the nursing home context, and issues of age and gender. The final section, implications for practice and future research, includes a discussion of the opportunities for and constraints on relationship formation.     

Women and Long Term Care Planning:

This is a practice-based essay, drawing upon current research and practice in long term care planning and finance. The main thesis is that women of all ages, including those who are well educated, and those who are in business occupations, resist thinking about their own long term care needs. As a result, women are at great risk for financial exposure and impoverishment when they reach old age. The authors explore the reasons for women's attitudes and make recommendations for steps that should be taken to change women's perceptions and assist them in planning for their needs. The article focuses on the different reasons for this resistance at three different stages of the life cycle: under age 40, ages 40-55, and over age 55. Four case studies, drawn from the authors' practice, are cited. The demographic and economic realities are defined, based on published research. Given the disparity between women's perceptions and the demographic and economic projections, the authors conclude with a series of steps that should be taken by the major actors: government, employers, insurers and other private sector organizations, and women themselves.     

The Emotional Significance of Affective Inequalities and Why They Are Important to Women in Old Age

Affective inequality is neglected in the study of old age. Using an egalitarian analysis, this article shows how affective inequalities matter to older women. Findings from the first author's PhD study explain the emotional significance of affective inequalities for Irish women. Twenty-one in-depth interviews were conducted to obtain data about experiences and perceptions of inequalities and how they had an impact on older women's well-being. Thematic analysis revealed that women experienced inequalities in old age as devaluation, obligations, exclusion, and misrecognition (DOEM), and they experienced injustices in areas of their lives that were largely outside of their control. Affective inequality implications are discussed.     

Friendships Among Old Women

Because of widowhood, divorce, retirement, and prejudice against them, old women are in special need of friendships with other women. Old women's friendships have many valuable functions. It is dangerous to depend on just one friend. There are impediments to making friendships in old age including projection of negativity about again on other old women, lack of resources and transportation, fears of loss, invasion of privacy, obligations, and preference for males. Some women settle for paid therapists as friends or for self help groups. Communities can provide activities fostering friendships, and women themselves can learn how to make connections.     

Unanticipated Consequences: A Comparison of Expected and Actual Retirement Timing Among Older Women

ABSTRACT

The present study adds to the growing body of literature on women and retirement by means of a comparative analysis of the factors associated with anticipated retirement timing (among pre-retirees) and actual retirement timing (among retirees). Adopting a political economy of aging perspective, we argue that socially-structured patterns of gender inequality related to women's multiple roles across the life course affect patterns of retirement timing. Specifically, we hypothesize that the gendered nature of women's work-retirement decision-making is unanticipated during pre-retirement years. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data drawn from a sample of 275 women aged 45 and older living in the Vancouver area of British Columbia. A central finding is that while actual timing of retirement is affected by family caregiving responsibilities and by health/stress factors, pre-retirees do not perceive these to be important in their own expected retirement timing. Implications for social policy, education, and women's financial and psychological well-being in old age are elaborated.     

Drinking as a Feminine Practice: Post-Feminist images of women's drinking in Swedish women's magazines

Previous feminist analyses have pointed out how the news media demonize women who drink, labelling them as irresponsible, disturbing or behaving “like men.” Popular media such as women's magazines, however, construct alternative representations, that frame women's drinking encouragingly and as part of a successful and “modern” femininity. This study carries out an analysis of fashion reports from six Swedish women's magazines, published between 1984 and 2008. It concludes that despite the fact that women's magazines create an alternative to problematizing portrayals of women who drink, this does not necessarily make them unproblematic from a feminist point of view. While the prevalence of positive and encouraging images may be interpreted as indicating a change towards more gender equal or gender neutral depictions of drinking; this article argues instead that these images should be regarded as parts of a discourse that celebrates stereotypical femininity and reproduces gender difference. As such, the present article brings new perspectives to the complex discourses that give shape to ideas about gender and alcohol in general, and women's drinking in particular.     

The Age Difference Between Spouses: Variations among Developing Countries

Sub-national and cross-national variations in the age difference between spouses are investigated with data from the World Fertility Survey relating to 29 developing countries. Substantial variation within and between countries is evident. Analysis suggests that the relative age of prospective spouses is a factor taken into account in the marriage market. Observed variation in the age difference, within and between countries, cannot be explained as the simple by-product of the random matching of independently determined distributions of men's and women's ages at marriage. Certain age differences are avoided, others chosen more frequently. Preferred age differences appear to differ in the societies studied, however, and this variation can be directly interpreted in terms of two sets of factors: kinship structure and women's roles. The analysis also suggests that demographic determinants of the age difference, in particular age constraints on the pool of possible matches, are of less importance in explaining societal variations than are social structural factors.     

Junior partners: Women's contribution to family income in Canada

This research examines the degree of financial contribution of married women to their overall family income. This phenomenon is analyzed from the point of view of sex-role/human capital orientations. The sex-role position argues that regardless of women's social, economic and education background their financial input to household economy will always be less than fifty percent because women's financial opportunities are impeded by sex-role configurations and expectations. The human capital thesis explains women's apparent inability to contribute more than half of the family income as a function of their lower human capital; that is, education, professionalization and training in the labour market. Individual data pertaining to thirty-year old married women, taken from the 1981 Canadian census, are examined. Generally, we find support for the positions: Women with relatively high human capital assmulation contribute significantly to overall household income, but invariably that contribution is less than 50 percent of total family income. On average, all women contribute 22 percent of their families annual income, while working women provide approximately 33 percent of the total. This analysis demonstrates what appears to be a pervasive phenomenon in industrial nations: married women are generally junior economic partners within the family. The extent of junior partnerships, however, is somewhat conditioned by women's human capital resources.     

Women's Responsibilities,Freedoms, and Pleasures

In the building of the Swedish welfare state, men and women have been seen as equal in their roles as parents, breadwinners, and citizens. This conception is not confirmed by the images produced by advertising. The article presents an analysis of alcohol-related advertisements published in Swedish women's magazines from the 1960s to the 2000s. The advertisements are approached as representations of gendered performances in which gender is made visible “here and now” by placing women in particular subject positions that are related to private or public spheres and associated with specific kinds of gender norms reflecting women's shifting responsibilities, freedoms, and pleasures. The article asks what kind of drinking-related subject positions have been portrayed as desirable in women's magazine advertisements over the past few decades and how those positions have changed as we move closer to the present day. The analysis reveals both continuity and variability in alcohol-related subject positions in Swedish women's magazine advertisements. It shows how women's responsibilities, freedoms, and pleasures have expanded from the traditional domain of the private sphere to multiple new areas as Sweden has developed from a modern welfare state to a late-modern competition state. However, this does not mean that the traditional gender norms have disintegrated and been replaced by equal gender norms. Rather, it seems that traditional gender norms continue to be reproduced in alcohol-related advertising.     

Feminine Sexualities in the Chick Genre

This paper foregrounds the voices of women who read chick lit or watch contemporary chick flicks or both, and who, to date, have been absent in the scholarship on representations of women's sexuality in this genre. It is informed by an empirical study of responses from forty-one Australian women to an anonymous Internet survey that asked, “How do you think women's experiences of sex are portrayed in the chick genre?” and “If you were a writer of the chick genre, how else would you portray women's sexual experiences?” Following the works of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, and Joke Hermes on “interpretive repertoires,” the data reveal that most readers draw on two repertoires to interpret representations of women's sexuality—one, as “passive or asexual,” and the other as “perfect with Mr Right”—both of which are situated within a wider “romantic love” frame of reference. Participants are, predominantly, critical of the way women's sexuality is represented in the chick genre. The findings, that also show that most readers have a preference for texts that show a broader range of sexual representations for women, are discussed in the light of current theorizing about postfeminist texts.     

Women's Alternative Internet Radio and Feminist Interactive Communications

The nude male centrefold spread like a virus through the new women's magazines of the seventies. At the time, and since, the academic gaze has viewed the centrefold as little more than a joke, a failure for feminism and female sexuality. This article returns to the heyday of the centrefold and listens to the responses of ordinary women in reader letters published in the new Australian women's magazine Cleo from 1972 until 1985. It argues that far from being a failure, these representations of the nude male became a practice of popular feminism, one of the early representations of popular feminist desire in mainstream women's magazines.     

Men's influence on the onset and progress of fertility decline in Ghana, 1988–98

While lower fertility is commonly associated with women's reproductive autonomy, we demonstrate that the influence of men's education on reproductive decision-making increased during the first decade of rapid fertility decline in Ghana. Husband's education exerts a stronger influence on wife's fertility intentions than does her own education, and the magnitude of the effect of his education increased significantly from 1988 to 1998. Lower fertility in Ghana seems to be associated more with men's declining fertility desires than with women's increasing reproductive autonomy. Nevertheless, there is some indication that women's education may play a relatively greater role in reproductive decision-making as fertility decline progresses still further.     

Sexual Messages in Black and White: A discourse analysis of Essence and Cosmo

The research presented employed critical discourse analysis to examine advice columns on sex and women's sexual freedom as expressed in two popular women's magazines, Essence and Cosmopolitan, over a three-year period. Essence has a Black female audience, Cosmo a predominantly White female audience. Critical discourse analysis is concerned with language as a primary force for the production and reproduction of ideology and belief systems that come to be accepted as common sense. The study asked whether and to what extent sex talk in these two magazines mirrored tenets of sexual liberation as set forth by “second-wave feminism.” Findings showed that while both magazines reinforced women's right to sexual pleasure and to ask for what they wanted, Essence came closest to mirroring the tenets of women's liberation by advocating women's right to say no to men's bad behavior and to be their own persons. By contrast, Cosmo advised women to be innovative in exciting and keeping their men and to be more flexible in managing men's less than desirable behavior.     

Invention Begins at Forty:

This paper examines a group of prolific women inventors, all specializing in machines, and all arguably professional inventors for some or all of their working lives. The group is interesting in its very existence, which contradicts time-honored stereotypes against woman as inventors, and especially as professional inventors. However, it is particularly interesting for its high average age at first patent and its continuation of patent and/or inventive activity into old age. Data on the women's marital and economic status and social class are presented where available, and the group is compared with a sample of nonprofessional women inventors who exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876.     

Positioning the self

This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking about women's magazines they formulated narratives about their own identities, and they drew on various discourses that placed women's magazines in relation to their subjective experiences of ordinary everyday life. A reflexive positioning of the self was therefore crucial to their mode of interpretation. The analysis is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with subscribers to a popular Norwegian women's magazine, and the findings are discussed in the light of Anthony Giddens' theory of the reflexive self and Toril Moi's reading of Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist philosophy.     

Between the look (la mirada) and the Escape (la fuga): the imaging of women in Solanas' La hora de los hornos and Tangos/El exilio de Gardel

This paper revisits the issues raised in debates on the politics of recognition from the point of view of media practitioners and their experiences in covering women's issues and perspectives. It explores the concerns regarding the attempts to improve media coverage of women's issues and perspectives by looking into one particular women's programme, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. The analysis is based primarily on interviews with members of the Woman's Hour's team and complemented by basic information on the presence of different subject areas and speakers in a sample of actual programming. The paper explores the criteria employed by journalists in their day-to-day decisions regarding the issues and approaches appropriate for the specialist women's programme. It discusses interviewees' definitions of Woman's Hour items and the three main factors that influence their selection of issues and the ways to approach them. The first factor concerns the identity of the programme: its issues, voices, and their diversity. The second factor is the listeners or, more broadly, the public and the ways it shapes Woman's Hour. The third factor is the professional and institutional context of the programme. The concluding discussion examines the ways in which Woman's Hour combines or oscillates between recognition and deconstruction of women's/gender identities, producers' interests and the perceived interests of their audiences, and feminist politics and journalistic principles.     

Feminism and women's film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–1959

Feminist film criticism is widely thought to have started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the “Images of Woman” debate associated with critics such as Marjorie Rosen provided the foundation for later developments in feminist film theory. Antonia Lant has recently claimed the immediate post-1950 period to be a barren time for female-authored publications on film and cinema. This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, the post-war period (1945–1959) in Britain was a time when women's film criticism flourished, with writers such as Dilys Powell, C.A. Lejeune, Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson enjoying high-profile careers. Moving beyond a simple recovery of women's “hidden histories,” this article highlights the points of connection between the post-war period and later film criticism informed by second wave feminism. Through a case study of de la Roche and Robertson this article explores how women critics in this period were similarly preoccupied with screen representations of women and women's roles within the film industry, anticipating the later concerns of Rosen and others. I argue that a cross-media focus is a productive method for generating insights into women's critical agency at this time, and conclude that women's film criticism demonstrates something of the wider shifts taking place in gender relations in British society.     

Neoliberalism,Soul Food,and the Weight of Black Women

This article examines the representation of Black women's weight in contemporary diet advertising and African American film. It positions socioeconomic class as a significant factor that distinguishes between “good” weight and “bad” weight. I argue that there is a distinction to be made between representations of poor and working-class fat Black women and middle-class fat Black women. The increased presence of Black women as diet spokeswomen is also questioned. The social construction and filmic representation of the African American cuisine “Soul Food” and the political economic notion of neoliberalism are used as frameworks to deconstruct how notions of self-discipline, personal responsibility, and citizenship impact upon Black women's bodies. As a case study, I examine the careers of Oprah Winfrey and Gabourey Sidibe and the ways in which their weight has been differently coded based on class, the neoliberal rhetoric of “personal responsibility,” and food. I ultimately critique how contemporary media has helped to shape contemporary discourses on Black women's weight.     

Change and Continuity in the Formation of First Marital Unions in Australia

Marriage rates have now been falling in all Western countries for more than 20 years. Rising levels of women's education and employment, extra-marital cohabitation, and separation and divorce both preceded, and continue to accompany, this trend. We apply hazards models to a data-set rich in event-history information in order to study the links between these movements at the level of the individual in Australia. Contra the New Home Economists it transpires that longer education lowers women's propensity to marry, not by providing them with alternative careers to marriage, but by delaying their entry into the marriage market. Again, contra the New Home Economists, employment actually increases women's marriage probabilities. Cohabitation serves variously as an alternative and a prelude to formal marriage. Finally, in contrast with a study of marriage dissolution in Australia, the strengths of factors that variously inhibit or promote marriage, such as women's education and employment, have neither weakened nor strengthened during the recent past.