Women at middle age: The childless perspective.
Item
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Title
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Women at middle age: The childless perspective.
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Identifier
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AAI3187408
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identifier
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3187408
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Creator
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Singer, M. Forbes.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jeffrey Rosen
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Clinical
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Abstract
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This qualitative study investigates the experience of ten middle-aged women without children. These women who were between the ages of 44 and 50 were invited to explore how they establish their identities and make meaning in their lives. All were posed open-ended questions that asked them to examine the implications of the fact that they are middle-aged women without children. Their responses delineated a process which many, though not all, traversed to arrive at a place of "grace" or acceptance of themselves. The states they described, middle age awakening, awareness of loss, taking stock, and acceptance, were not always experienced in successive order nor were all experienced by each participant, yet they appear to capture the nature of these women's lived experience.;The women is this study appeared to negotiate the developmental tasks presented by middle age with varying levels of competency depending on their paths to childlessness as well as their acceptance of an identity as 'other' i.e. as different. Those who from a young age understood they were different and received support for who they were appeared able to navigate the stigma of childlessness with more ease and less heartache than those who had never before found themselves on "the margins of social arrangements." Those women who had chosen to remain without children (five of them) seemed to achieve a level of acceptance of themselves in middle age that those who had 'forgotten to have kids' (the remaining five) had not yet achieved. This seemed related to the latter's internalization of the cultural mandate to reproduce against which their lives were experienced as a "failure." The study also addresses the implications for clinical and counseling psychology research and practice when working with middle-aged women without children.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
