Joy K. Rice

Poverty, Welfare, and Patriarchy: How Macro‐Level Changes in Social Policy Can Help Low‐Income Women

A critical review of the current status of low-income women reveals how patriarchy, violence, and discrimination mitigates against their employment and contributes to their poverty. Myths that fuel prejudice against the poor have led to public policy and welfare legislation based on individualistic rather than structural assumptions about the causes of poverty. Research on the effects of welfare reform reinforces the conclusion that changes in social welfare and policy are necessary for income parity and improvement in the employment opportunities, access, and status of low-income women. A human-capital model and recommendations for macro-level changes in public policy and programming that address the systemic causes of women’s poverty are presented.

Reconsidering Research On Divorce, Family Life Cycle, And The Meaning Of Family:

This article analyzes functionalist and normative assumptions about marriage, divorce, family, and gender in developmental models of family life cycle. An interdisciplinary review of the literature in family development, family sociology, and family therapy reveals how a deficit comparison model implicitly informs the discourse in the study of single-parent families, women who are alone, and the adjustment of women and children to divorce. A feminist critique of family life cycle as the prevailing conceptual model in family development and therapy is presented, and postmodern definitions that deconstruct the concept of family are discussed. Future perspectives for research on family life and form are considered in terms of new action theory that considers divorce as a mode of resistance and change for women and families.

Self Esteem, Sex-Role Orientation, and Perceived Spouse Support for a Return To School

Sixty mature women seeking continuing education counseling were given measures of self-esteem, sex role orientation, and spouse support (SS) for a return to school or work. Emotional SS was measured in terms of the frequency of the praise, encouragement and accomodation by the spouse. Instrumental SS was defined as the spouses contribution to the total family output in the areas of housework, childcare, and social responsibilities. Women who were low on self- esteem or non-traditional in sex role orientation projected significantly greater in strumental SS upon their return to school than did women who were high on self- esteem or traditional in sex role orientation. Self-esteem and sex role orientation, however, were unrelated to the actual instrumental SS that the subjects reported receiving from their husbands.

Career Education Comes of Age

Joy K. Rice is Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Associate Director of Continuing Education at the University of Wisconsin Madison. During the past several years career education has blossomed. Thousands of teachers have informally begun to thread the idea of work, jobs, and career planning into the K-12 curriculum. Industry and business have provided role models in classrooms and collaborated with educators to make learning relevant to careers and work. The two ideas of &dquo;threading&dquo; and &dquo;collaboration&dquo; are basic concepts in the traditional