Nickie Charles

I just cope from day to day: Unpredictability and anxiety in the lives of women

Data are presented from in-depth interviews with 35 women in an industrial town in South Wales, U.K., many of whom were from low income households. The research aimed to explore womens own concerns about their health and the ways in which health problems affected their lives. This paper focuses on one prominent theme in these interviews: unpredictability. In particular, women described how their lives had become less predictable and amenable to control as a result of health problems--epilepsy, asthma, ME, anxiety, nerves and panic attacks, for example. Womens accounts are used to show how they experienced these problems, how they influenced womens self-identity and the ways in which women struggled to cope with the dreadful uncertainty that characterized their days. They often hid these problems, and the privacy of this aspect of their lives is striking. The data are set within the context of class and gender relations which diminish womens control over their lives and erode their self-esteem and sense of autonomy. Class and gender combine with ill health to create the conditions for womens sense of unpredictability and powerlessness. They can aggravate and provoke the health problems women described: women spoke of the challenges they faced in their roles as wives and mothers, the problems associated with widowhood, the loss of their jobs, the impact of unemployment and their efforts to cope with severe financial problems. In part, these provided them with a framework for understanding the uncertainty, anxiety, nerves and panic they experienced.

Cultural stereotypes and the gendering of senior management

This paper asks whether place is significant in understanding the gendering of senior management and how it might be integrated into existing theories. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with women and men in senior management in Wales, it compares the gendering of senior management in Wales with other regions of the UK. The situation in Wales is explained by the historical legacy of a peripheral economy dependent on male-dominated heavy industries and the gender relations and stereotypes associated with this. There is a relative lack of senior managerial positions, for both women and men, and women are under-represented in middle management compared with women elsewhere. There is evidence that paternalistic masculinites are widespread in managerial cultures and that although women may find this form of masculinity easier to deal with than a more aggressively ‘macho’ masculinity, it casts them in a subordinate role at work. Cultural stereotypes such as the ‘Welsh mam’ operate in contradictory ways, in some instances holding women back and in others furthering their careers, and there is evidence that women are challenging existing gender stereotypes. A lack of geographical mobility and associated attachment to place affects progress into senior management and creates stability at middle-management level. Place needs to be taken into account in explaining the gendering of senior management because of the spatial distribution of production and the cultural patterns and stereotypes associated with different economic structures.

Age and Gender in Women’s Accounts of Their Health: Interviews with Women in South Wales

In-depth interviews with 35 women in a working-class community in South Wales suggest that there are generational differences both in the ways women talk about health and in their health experiences. These are linked with women’s differing social circumstances; changes over time in the ways in which health and ill health are explained; and the physical changes which are an unavoidable part of embodiment. The ability to perform their roles with respect to social reproduction was a key element in women’s definitions of their health. Older women talked about arthritis and the ways in which it was a challenge to keep doing things while younger women talked about the stress they felt in juggling the roles of mother, wife, daughter and worker. Younger women were also more likely to talk about the problematic nature of gender relations and high levels of unemployment. Age thus structures women’s health problems and the ways they explain them.

Feminist Politics, Domestic Violence and the State

This paper explores the relationship between feminist politics and the state around the issue of domestic violence. Its focus is the refuge movement in Wales. Feminist analyses of the state and feminist political practice identify the state as an important object of struggle. A particular form of feminist politics, the refuge movement, has engaged with the state while retaining its autonomy. It has been instrumental in effecting legal changes which bestow certain rights on women threatened with domestic violence, and in increasing womens access to resources in the form of temporary refuge and permanent housing. Feminist political practice can affect the distribution of resources through engaging with the state, thereby enabling women to challenge the gendered power relations which structure their daily lives.

Contested communities: the refuge movement and cultural identities in Wales

This paper explores different meanings of community and cultural identity. Women involved in the refuge movement in rural Wales belong to overlapping communities: geographically located rural communities; linguistic and ethnic communities; and the gendered and occupationally based community of Welsh Womens Aid. Language is an important marker of belonging to Welsh rural communities which are under threat from an influx of non-Welsh speakers. Incoming women who are homeless as a result of domestic violence may be perceived as part of this threat. This creates a potential conflict for refuge workers, some of whom are also Welsh speakers, who represent the interests of this group of women but also belong to Welsh-speaking, rural communities. We explore the interrelation between these refuge workers, the various communities to which they belong, and how belonging or not belonging shapes their identities. We conclude that these women, in spite of the conflicting rights and interests of their various communities, negotiate a shared collective identity which owes something to all three.