Background
Although research is emerging on the subtle slights that women experience, research is needed regarding the frequency with which gender‐based microaggressions occur, their impact on mental ...health, and how views on gender roles may influence their impact.
Objective
The current study examined how mothers and daughters experienced gender‐based microaggressions, internalized sexism, and mental health symptoms.
Methods
The sample included 102 predominantly White mother–daughter pairs. Adolescents were 14 to 18 years old, and mothers were 34 to 68 years old. Mothers and daughters answered surveys including a demographic questionnaire, the Gender‐Microaggressions Scale, Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, the Patient Health Questionnaire—9 for depression, and the General Anxiety Disorder—7 for anxiety.
Results
Greater gender‐related microaggressions experienced in the past month were related to higher levels of mental health distress associated with depression and anxiety among mothers and daughters (p < .05). Mothers and daughters scores were significantly correlated (p < .05) for microaggressions experienced in the past month, total score of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, depression, and anxiety. For mother's depression, a mother's level of ambivalent sexism approached significance in terms of moderating the relationship between microaggressions and mental health (p = .055).
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that microaggressions are related to mental health distress in adolescent girls and middle‐aged women.
Implications
Uncovering the chronic nature of gender‐based microaggressions and how these may affect individuals and family systems may be useful in individual and family therapy as well as in efforts to change broader social processes.
In this book, Aronowicz explores the lives of her parents, who lived through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the post-war Communist world, with much migration in between. Through ...stories about her childhood, she investigates larger questions about memory, Judaism, politics, and religion.
'Two things happen today. My mother falls and I foresee my own death. These two things may or may not be connected ... I know as I watch her fall that, contrary to the habit of a lifetime, I will not ...walk away.' Linda Neil is a successful musician and performer who, in her thirties, moves back home to live with and care for her mother, Joan. She doesn't realise that her mother's illness will rapidly progress into Parkinson's disease and that this time with her will change Linda's life. Connected by a deep love of music, Linda and her mother find a way to get to know one another again and make sense of what is happening to them. Learning how to Breathe highlights the universality of dealing with ageing and ailing parents and how the family relationships we may have taken for granted can be renewed. In Learning how to Breathe, Linda Neil uses music as a metaphor to share her heartbreaking, but uplifting, story of finally coming to know her mother – and herself.
Bringing together the writings of women from various walks of life - authors, artists, academics and ordinary people - this volume presents their experiences of being mothers and daughters. The ...complex emotions women go through, as a mother or a daughter, are portrayed in a variety of ways. The contributors provide humane, intimate and compelling real life narratives. The collection includes true stories on adoptive motherhood, step-mothering and single-motherhood within a South Asian context.
Juxtaposed against literature that views mothers' role for their daughters' education as a human capital this paper reimagines their role by foregrounding Pakistani mothers' agency in contexts with ...limited opportunities. This is achieved by theorising negative capability (NC) as an analytical framework drawing on available theorisations of the concept and define it as an agentive passive refusal to be intellectually paralysed by disadvantage. We demonstrate how the concept can be applied for empirical analysis. The paper takes an ethical stance that researchers should acknowledge that regardless of contextual difficulties people's agentive and intellectual faculties remain intact. Structural inequalities need to be challenged but their agentive potential also recognised. With a firm commitment that opportunities need to be made equal this paper builds on the second point to argue that even in the face of extreme disadvantage mothers' intellectual capacities to progress towards goals remain functional. We challenge the objectification of the marginalised and propose an analytical approach to understand difficulties faced as well as agency exercised by mothers facing socio-economic constraints. This work has implications for the capability approach that falls short of addressing issues of power, and policy that fails to understand the context.
As a physician and pregnant person, I reflect on my experiences providing abortion care in 2 disparate states, one protective of abortion rights and one with significant restrictions on abortion. I ...write this timely letter to my unborn daughter to impart the importance of abortion access and moreover, bodily autonomy for all.
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