Intersectionality and Black Women’s Health: Making Room for Rurality

Black women have poorer health compared to their White counterparts in a range of health outcomes, including breast cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and heart disease. The health disparities literature has largely treated women as a monolithic group, assuming that health practices and treatments are equally applicable and effective for all women. This approach, which places too much emphasis on gender, risks masking the unique experiences of various women based on other social categories. This article argues that in order to advance Black women’s health, an intersectionality approach should be incorporated into health research and practice. This approach, however, should go beyond the usual intersection of race and gender to include rurality. The article builds this argument on the fact that Black women living in rural areas have unique experiences that intersect with their gender, race, and class status. Benefits for embracing the intersectionality approach are discussed.     

Marriage and the Allocation of Assets in Women’s Defined Contribution Plans

The goal of this paper is to understand the effect of family decision-making on the investment decisions of married men and women. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we investigate how the spouse’s relative control over financial resources in the household and the life-cycle stage affect the investment choices of married women and men. The results show that married women who have more control over the financial resources are less likely to invest their Defined Contribution Plans (DCPs) in risky assets. Also, women who are married to relatively older men are less likely to take on risk with their DCPs. There is little evidence that the wife’s characteristics affect the investment decisions of married men.     

Women’s mobilisation in the Portuguese revolution: context and framing strategies

This article examines the role of women’s mobilisations related to the 1974 Portuguese revolution. An in-depth analysis of three women’s organisations through archival research and interviews with participants highlights the ways in which they participated in a cycle of contention between 1974 and 1977. Examination of framing strategies demonstrates the effects of political and cultural context. In particular, I demonstrate that movement–party alliances informed and constrained the diagnostic and prognostic frames of women’s movements on feminism and the revolution. Opportunity structures are shown to vary for different organisations within the same cycle of contention. Facing relatively closed opportunities, two of these organisations pursued framing strategies that articulated with the Left-dominated master frame of the cycle in order to carve out spaces for gender-specific demands while rejecting the label of feminism. The third organisation, instead, presented a countercultural frame that alienated the organisation from party and movement allies. Unable to overcome ideological divisions and rivalries, the three organisations perceived each other as competitors, rather than potential allies. While party–movement cooperation contributed to the emergence of a fractionalised women’s movement, it also provided important support structures to aid women’s organisations to mobilise in a cultural and political context that was closed to feminist demands.     

‘Black holes in the fabric of the nation’: refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a novel which has been widely celebrated for its response to the refugee crisis of its contemporary moment. In a distinct echo of Salman Rushdie’s claim, thirty-five years earlier, that it ‘may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated’, Hamid’s novel similarly claims that ‘we are all migrants through time.’ Moreover, like Rushdie’s fiction, Hamid’s novel incorporates elements of magical realism: its protagonists escape their unnamed war-torn city through a ‘door’ that instantaneously transports them to Mykonos, and they subsequently travel through other such ‘doors’ to London and California. Their story is interspersed with a series of vignettes in which other migrants also find themselves magically transported across national borders. As well as considering the ways in which Hamid’s novel seeks to humanise refugees, this article considers the novel’s evocation of a world in which human beings – like capital, images, and (mis)information – have gained access to largely ungovernable networks of instantaneous travel across vast distances. It argues that Hamid’s novel is not just ‘about’ refugees but also constitutes a reflection on how they and their journeys are represented and mediated by actually-existing technologies.     

“We Have Closed Our Eyes and Sealed Our Lips”: Black Women’s Accounts of Discussing Suicide within the Black Community

Conversing about suicide with an at-risk individual can be enough to save a life. Given the rise of suicidal behavior among African American subgroups (i.e., youth and male), advocates are urging blacks to have candid conversations about the issue. The current study highlights black women’s experiences discussing suicide. Findings suggest that widespread beliefs that suicide is an insignificant issue among blacks make conversing about suicide especially challenging. These findings reveal problematic implications for African Americans contemplating suicide in their communities. Suicide may be a phenomenon for which communal support is less prevalent.     

Women’s Accounts of Heterosexual Experiences in the Context of Menopause

ABSTRACT

A number of biomedical models of female sexuality have emerged during the past few decades, and these have been challenged by feminist theorists who have tended to focus on the influence of contextual issues that mediate women's sexual experiences. In this article, a qualitative analysis of accounts relating to heterosexual experiences obtained from 25 menopausal women in Ireland through in-depth interviews is presented and considered in light of existing theoretical perspectives on sexuality. The average age of women in the sample was 54.2 years, and a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds was represented. We found that in describing their contemporary sexual experiences, contextual issues were brought heavily to bear as participants drew on discourses of personal history and biography, including previous relationships, to explain their current sexual experiences. However, a few women foregrounded physiological and biological reasons associated with hormonal changes to explain alterations in their sexual relationship, although overall, these were featured to a far lesser extent compared with their prominent position in biomedical menopause literature. A dominant feature of data was the influence of the discourse of the male sex drive, and many women explained their lesser interest in sexual activity compared with that of their partner in terms of men's nature. The findings suggested that for participants, anxiety around sexuality was socially produced either through the expectation to satisfy a partner, or by dominant discourses that defined sexual engagement as “healthy” and sexual apathy as “unhealthy.”     

Black slaves and English liberty: A re‐examination of racial slavery in England

Blacks in eighteenth‐century England were caught in a half‐way stage between colonial slavery and English domestic servitude, and out of the ambiguities of their position they were able to alter their status. Consequently slavery came to an end in England between the 1760s and the 1790s, not from the Somerset Case in 1772, nor from the Act of Parliament in 1833, but from the escape of the slaves themselves. Certain institutional elements, namely the traditions of household servitude, a popular libertarian political culture, and the ideology of the rule of law, provided a climate conducive to black resistance. Nonetheless, the initiative for ending slavery, the force which brought the institutional elements into play, came from individual members of the black community.     

Negotiating the New Market: Women,Families, Women’s Organizations and the Economic Transition in Poland

Women have been affected more negatively than men by the economic transformation in Poland. They are the majority of the unemployed and the poor, they have a more difficult time finding jobs, and their incomes are significantly lower than mens. The disadvantageous position of women on the labor market, coupled with increasing governmental withdrawal from social provisioning like childcare, health care, and education, has created problems for families, especially for growing numbers of single mothers and two-parent low-income families. The transition to a market economy also has generated a steady growth of womens organizations which have stepped in where the state has withdrawn from social provisioning and provide assistance to women and their families. These organizations are not only helping women and low-income families adjust to the new market situation, but also to negotiate the market so that it better responds to their needs.     

Women’s Experiences with Infertility: The Fluidity of Conceptualizations of ‘Family’

In this study, I examine women’s experiences with infertility and the impact upon their conceptualizations of ‘family.’ Active interviews with 32 women revealed most women started out with conceptualizations that reflected a traditional ideology of family. Participants who conceived biological children through medical assistance expressed a broader conceptualization of family through a greater appreciation for their children and family life in general. Women who did not conceive, despite medical assistance to do so, also discussed broadening their conceptualizations so that ‘family’ took on new meanings, structures, and/or significance. Conceptually, the analysis shows how notions of family are not static, but rather a fluid process subject to interpretation and re-evaluation as a result of life events, in this case, encounters with infertility.     

Cohort Perspectives on Women’s Educational Attainment and the Timing of Parenthood in Ghana

This paper examines the effects of womens educational attainment on the timing of parenthood across successive generations of women in Ghana. Given the more enhanced career opportunities in recent years, we argue that the opportunity cost of parenthood may be higher for contemporary educated women, and as such, they are expected to delay parenthood for longer periods than their counterparts in the past. Using data from the 1998 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, we found that while higher maternal education associates with delayed parenthood, significant cohort differences were noticeable. Consistent with our expectations, the effect of higher educational attainment was substantially greater among younger women, indicating a longer transition to parenthood. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

From these roots: The role of historically Black colleges and universities in preparing the nation’s gerontologists for an aging society

ABSTRACT

The aging of the United States population is creating an increased need for social workers and other helping professionals with training in gerontology. Recent estimates indicate that less than 3% of MSW students are enrolled in an aging concentration, as compared to 19% enrolled in children/youth concentrations. In addition, the phenomenon of a diverse baby boomer generation joining the ranks of persons age 65 and older has created a plethora of scholarship and curriculum development aimed at readying the aging network for the unprecedented growth of older persons. Social work can make unique professional contributions to the field of gerontology and older persons. This study asserts, however, that social work is not adequately prepared to practice in an increasingly diverse aging society. The social work profession has articulated commitments to acknowledging and affirming how diversity and culture shape the human experience and to developing social workers who can competently engage in research-informed practice and practice-informed research. However, there remains a need in social work education for more widespread use of culturally relevant pedagogies that can help achieve these goals. Informed by both the Afrocentric and Black perspectives, this study presents a content analysis of the curricula infused at two historically Black universities. The nature and extent of the contributions of historically Black universities to social work education is the focus of this article. The scope of this investigation also includes the identification of prominent Black social work educators and discusses the implications of these perspectives for more culturally informed gerontology curricula that promote culturally competent gerontological social workers.     

Source of complexity in the social and managerial sciences: an extended Sen’s theorem

Many disciplines, including the social, behavioral, and management sciences, search for appropriate aggregated outcomes—a search that can be frustrated by complexities and inefficiencies. As shown here, explanations for these difficulties can be found in social choice. Indeed, it is shown why some of these problems are direct consequences of adopted approaches (e.g., management style, choice of a division of labor, or even the use of expertise and experts), and they cannot be avoided. These results are motivated by Sen’s Theorem from decision theory.     

Coming out of the Therapy Closet: Women’s Disclosure of Same-sex Attraction in Counselling

“Coming out” is a process that same-sex attracted people undergo if they choose to acknowledge it to others. Minimal research exists examining the coming-out experience for same-sex attracted women in counselling settings. This qualitative study addressed the gaps in existing research by exploring counsellors’ perceptions of factors influencing same-sex attracted female clients to disclose their sexual orientation to a counsellor. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 counsellors from diverse clinical backgrounds. In their view, the main factors influencing disclosure were the perceived lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) friendliness of a service or counsellor; the presence of LGBQ symbols within services; using gender-neutral language; and the level of a client’s self-acceptance of their sexual orientation. These findings suggest that the utilisation of culturally affirming models by counsellors working with same-sex attracted female clients can create a safe environment for disclosure of sexual orientation.     

Children’s protective strategies in the context of exposure to domestic violence

The purpose of this study was to explore children’s accounts of exposure to domestic violence and the strategies they used to protect themselves from such adversity. Convenience sampling included youth (N = 29), ages 7–16, who received mental health services at a rural victim-service provider. Child self-report measures were used to assess exposure and protective strategies. Children were most often exposed to verbal and physical abuse of mother, inter-parental disagreements, and the abuser’s destruction of property. Participants used a variety of strategies to escape, understand, safety plan, protect, and intervene among these types of abuse.     

Characteristics for the Effectiveness of Women’s Self-Help Groups in Bihar

This study examines whether group heterogeneity and group structure and process predict the effectiveness of women’s self-help groups in terms of their financial performance, self-reliance of the group, members’ decision-making ability at the household level, and access to non-financial benefits. Data were collected using an interview schedule from 210 women’s self-help groups in six districts of Bihar and data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The findings suggest that the group heterogeneity directly predicts the effectiveness of women’s self-help groups and it is fully transmitted through group structure and process to positively predict the effectiveness of the women’s self-help groups. The group structure and process is found to be a full mediator between group heterogeneity and group effectiveness. The predictive accuracy of the model is found to be high. The findings have implications to bring in more diversity in members castes, education, and their reasons for joining women’s self-help groups at the formation stage and variations in members’ skills and expertise at the performing stage of the groups. The members’ awareness on group norms and trust in financial transactions, and leadership styles together with cooperation and cohesion among members, transparency in financial transactions, group attendance, and networking with the bank and the federation foster the effectiveness of women’s self-help groups.