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Woman's Life (woman + life)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences50%

Selected Abstracts

Reading, Work, and Catholic Women's Biographies

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 3 2003
Frances E. Dolan
This essay considers biographies of Catholic women written after their deaths, largely by priests who served as their confessors, and the saints' lives which these biographies took as their models. The purpose of this essay is twofold: to draw attention to a significant body of Catholic writing, and to use this material to shed new light on the one text of this group that has gained considerable critical attention, The Lady Falkland, Her Life, a biography of Elizabeth Cary by one of her daughters, a Benedictine nun. Considering the Life as a participant in a subgenre of Catholic biography reveals the tension between the conventions and precedents available to Cary's biographer, on the one hand, and her intractable subject, on the other. The Life, like other similar biographies, borrows from and verges on hagiography, but is particularly unsuccessful at transforming its subject into a saint. While criticism of Cary and her works continues to dwell on her as eccentric and exceptional, determined by the particularities of her own character and experience, she is as like other female subjects of Catholic biography and hagiography as she is unlike them. This can only be seen by attending to the kinds of texts that Cary and her daughter might well have read, and the parameters they set for writing an eminent Catholic woman's life. These texts figure reading and housework as the chief means by which Catholic women define and sustain their confessional identities in the hostile environment of post-reformation England. [source]

Counteracting the effects of invisibility in work with lesbian patients

JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 5 2001
Carolyn SaariArticle first published online: 9 APR 200
Lesbian women frequently experience "invisibility," the failure of others to recognize the significance of their sexuality and partnership relations. Such invisibility can have deleterious effects, such as a reduced ability to relate life stories to others and thereby to extend and integrate aspects of identity and its healthy complexity. Although this invisibility often is intertwined with coming-out phenomena, it continues to exist in many social contexts throughout life. Therefore, it is important for psychotherapists to recognize and understand the concept of invisibility so that they do not perpetuate it within the therapy. Several case vignettes are used as examples of how invisibility can affect a woman's life and functioning and can be counteracted in therapy. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol/In Session 57: 645,654, 2001. [source]

A social biography of Carnegie embryo no. 836

THE ANATOMICAL RECORD : ADVANCES IN INTEGRATIVE ANATOMY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, Issue 1 2004
Lynn M. Morgan
Abstract A tiny, sectioned embryo specimen known as Carnegie no. 836 has served as the prototype for Stage 13 (28-32 days) since the 1910s. Recently digitalized and reanimated for the 21st century, this singular specimen is now being used to develop 3D and 4D visualizations. Yet the social origins of the specimen have been largely forgotten. This essay traces the biography of 836 from its origins in a young woman's life, through sectioning and transformation into a scientific specimen, to its contemporary manifestations as a symbol of life. By reuniting the specimen with its story, we can appreciate how cultural attitudes toward embryo specimens have changed over the past century. Anat Rec (Part B: New Anat) 276B:3,7, 2004. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Untimeliness as Moral Indictment: Tamil Agricultural Labouring Women's Use of Lament as Life Narrative

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
Kalpana Ram
How do Dalit women forge certain forms of critical perspectives in relation to their existence? This paper explores the very particular poetics that shape the women's responses to an invitation by the ethnographer to tell her their life stories. Their narratives made use of several dominant discourses in south India that ritually construct a woman's life as a teleology of an unfolding essence, an embodied force that comes into flower and fruition, and must be socially shaped and tended in order to bring about an auspicious confluence for both woman and the social order. The women also made use of the structure and tropes of several styles of performance that have tragedy at their emotional heart, and which gain their force against the normative construction of life cycle as temporality. By using these forms, women were able to bring into discourse several aspects of their experience of marriage that would otherwise gain no social recognition. In particular, they highlighted the prematurity of their marriage, having wed while still children themselves. The wider argument of this paper engages with two very different versions of agency,one predicated on the use of reason and consent by the individual, the other derived from an examination of the Dalit women's narratives. [source]