Pamela
Young is a professional social worker and administrator of psychosocial
programs in a health care system. She has devoted her career to the facilitation
of the health and well-being of women and their children, especially those
living in poverty or with other disabling conditions. As she experienced
her own midlife transitions and aging process, Ms. Young became interested
in how women over the age of 50 perceive their continuing contributions
to their world. She designed her doctoral research to explore this interest.
Ms. Young has continued to define her own contributions through service
to her community by serving on the boards of a continuing care retirement
community, a large behavioral health system and her professional organization,
consulting with non-profit organizations, and providing field instruction
to graduate social work students.
The Braided Strands of Womens Lives: How Contributions
are Defined in Counter-narrative and Narratives of Acceptance (Abstract) American women born during and immediately following World War II
came to adulthood at a time that brought great social change and expanded
opportunities for women. These enlarged opportunities help to define the
context in which these women characterize their life contributions. These
women are now in the last decade of middle age (55-65), preparing for
the next and final stage of their lives. The purpose of my research was
to explore the experiences of women of that birth cohort (1939-49) as
they enhance and revise the meaning they make of their lives through the
contributions they make to their world.
The scholarly background in which this study is framed is
in theories of adult development, especially those concerning generativity,
the task of middle adulthood, to produce and care for the next generation
and to continue the culture (Erikson, 1963). This study used a form of
narrative inquiry in a dialogic perspective using in-depth interviews
as the method of gathering womens narratives. The studys approach
to data analysis combined a search for factors related to generativity
and adult development with an analysis of certain structures in the participants
language.
The study participants expressed a sense of personal autonomy
and self-confidence with a practice wisdom gained from life
experience in family and careers. A stress on personal development requires
that contributions be satisfying to oneself as well as helpful to others.
Contributions are both enhanced and inhibited through relationships.
Women used a narrative form, counter-narrative, when they
experience their exceptional or marginal status. Counter-narratives demonstrate
how the narrator does not think, feel or behave the way the dominant structure
says she is supposed to. Some stories challenged the dominant
structure while others appeared to accept those conditions, but detailed
measures women took to survive or accommodate. I found counter-narratives
related to race, gender, social class, age and motherhood, often co-occurring
with multiple marginal statuses reflected in one counter-narrative. Narratives
of generativity were often superimposed on narratives arising from marginal
statuses. In these counter-narratives, women struggled against the dominant
expectations to enact their generativity despite obstacles resulting from
their marginalization.