Identity and mental wellbeing through the lifecourse Suzanne Clisby and Julia Holdsworth GENDERING WOMEN Identity and mental wellbeing through the lifecourse Suzanne Clisby and Julia Holdsworth First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 6th Floor c/o The University of Chicago Press Howard House 1427 East 60th Street Queen’s Avenue Chicago, IL 60637, USA Clifton t: +1 773 702 7700 Bristol BS8 1SD f: +1 773-702-9756 UK [email protected] t: +44 (0)117 331 5020 www.press.uchicago.edu [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk © Policy Press 2014 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978 1 84742 677 2 hardcover The right of Suzanne Clisby and Julia Holdsworth to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover illustration: Fairy Tales of London 1, 1992 (oil on canvas) by John Keane, c/o Bridgeman Images Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners Contents About the authors v Acknowledgements vii one Gendering, inequalities, and the limits of policy 1 two Gendering women’s minds: identity, confidence and 39 mental wellbeing three Gendering girls, gendering boys: identities in process 55 four Gendering and engendering violence in women’s 77 everyday lives five Gendering education: the paradox of success versus status 101 six Gendering reproduction: women’s experiences of 127 motherhood and mental wellbeing seven Gendering women’s labour: status, esteem and inequality 155 in paid and unpaid work eight Conclusions: the embodied infrastructure of women’s 181 spaces, gender awareness, and the capacity for change Notes 223 References 229 Index 261 iii About the authors Suzanne Clisby is the director of postgraduate studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Hull, UK, and an editor of the international Journal of Gender Studies. Her research focuses on gender, social policy and development both in British and international contexts and she has published across a range of areas, including gender mainstreaming in Bolivia, environmental relations in Costa Rica, and youth, desire and the carnivalesque at the English seaside. Suzanne is the coordinator of the Joint European Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA) at the University of Hull in a European- wide consortium managed through the University of Granada, and is developing a joint European doctorate in women’s and gender studies as a pathway beyond the GEMMA programme. As co-coordinator of the Centre for Gender Studies, Suzanne organises the biennial international and interdisciplinary gender research conference held at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation around November 25th – the international day to mark the elimination of violence against women. For many years she has worked in a voluntary capacity with women’s services in the city of Hull. Julia Holdsworth has a background in social anthropology and sociology and holds a lectureship in social science in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Hull. She has worked in both academic and applied contexts with particular focus on social change, development, migration and gender. She has experience working in the field as a practitioner in community development, especially in Central and Eastern Europe which complements her academic interests in social change in Ukraine. In recent years her academic work has explored issues of gender in adult and higher education, gender and mentoring in professional contexts and barriers to women’s aspirations and achievements. Julia has for many years been an active member of a women’s community group working to address disadvantage and social inequality in Hull. v Gendering women Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the support of Hull Women’s Network, the European Social Fund, the Learning and Skills Council, the University of Hull and the hundreds of women and men who participated in the research. We would like to thank everybody involved, especially those who shared their life stories and contributed their knowledge and experiences to facilitate the creation of such a rich dataset. We are grateful to all the staff and users at Willow and Hull Women’s Centre for their friendship and support throughout this research. We also thank the original project team: Hannah Miles, Anne Fairbank, Andrea Broadbent and Clare Kerridge. Finally, thanks to Mark Johnson and Glyn Green for all their support in the completion of this book. We would also like to thank John Keane who kindly gave us permission to use his artwork for the cover of this book. John Keane achieved success and notoriety in 1990 when he was chosen as the official artist to document the Gulf War. Keane’s work, which often deals with social and political issues, gains much of its impact through his use of ironic humour. We chose this painting in part because she has become something of an old friend, as she hangs in the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, and mainly because it seemed an appropriate choice. In this powerful image from a series John painted called Fairy Tales of London (1992) a young woman battles her way through a threatening urban landscape, burdened by the weight of the shopping and her children. In the distance her husband holds her on a lead in a comment on the constraints and controls many women feel they deal with through their lives in our society. Thus it seemed an appropriate choice both for the subject matter and because it is a popular and familiar painting for many of the women who participated in this study. Dating from 1992, it also has something of a retro feel to it, and as our research encountered many similar themes to those raised by women during the feminist Second Wave and since, for us it reflects the commonality of threads of experience across time. vii ONE Gendering, inequalities, and the limits of policy Introduction We begin this book with a statement that should come as no surprise to the reader, but which remains no less significant for its lack of novelty: despite several decades of equality legislation and positive and affirmative action, it remains the case that women in the UK, as a group, continue to experience greater inequality when compared to men, as a group. We also know that deeply rooted socio-cultural factors in contemporary British society continue to act to create significantly different life chances and experiences for men and women. So if we know this already what is the point of this book? The answer lies in the key word in the statements above: continue. Gender-based inequalities continue and while they do so, it remains imperative that we also continue to analyse, debate and challenge these realities. In doing so we tend to focus throughout this book more on commonality than difference. This is not to dismiss the critical importance of difference, a concern that has been key within feminist theory and epistemology for many decades and has more recently come to be referred to as intersectionality. Understanding the impacts of diverse identities for people’s lived experiences is of course extremely important, and much work has been done in this field to explore how intersections of identities such as class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and age intertwine and affect women’s experiences (see, for example, Stanley, 1990; Lennon and Whitford, 1994a; Franken et al, 2009; McCann and Seung-Kyung, 2013 to cite but a few of many). Nevertheless our concern here is to recover some of the possible commonalities of experience for many women qua women. We do this because we recognise there can be a danger within academic debates about gender of leaving real women and men behind which risks losing sight of the materiality of women’s and men’s embodied realities. The real risk of this is that we fail to acknowledge the actual lack of transformation at many levels for many women, and in the rush to recognise diversity, a danger that the continued commonalities in the material conditions of many women’s lives both locally and globally are overlooked. 1 Gendering women Thus we argue that ‘woman’ and ‘man’, while not being the only gendered spaces available to us, continue to be necessary and valid categories not least because they continue to be significant material and perceptual categories in our highly gendered worlds. Threads of common gendered experiences continue to link and weave together ‘women’ as they do ‘men’. To see commonality, however, does not render difference invisible: commonality and diversity are not necessarily dichotomous and ‘differentiation does not depend on opposition’ (Whitbeck, 1989, 51). Moreover, as Stanley and Wise (1990) argue, to talk about commonalities of experience does not infer the same experiences.