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 Women’s 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 women’s narratives. The study’s 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.