My thesis comprises three papers on individuals' preferences over family composition and the degree to which these are culturally determined, or learnt. Prices, Norms and Preferences: The Influence of Cultural Values on Fertility This paper investigates the influence of cultural values on fertility. High country of origin fertility is associated with high fertility in the UK, in line with previous results. This is consistent with fertility preferences being a transmissible (learnable) cultural value. However, I find that high fertility in the country of origin is also associated with earlier childbearing. If timing is not accounted for, this phenomenon could lead to an upward bias when estimating the importance of cultural values. Son Preference and Culture I measure the sex preferences of immigrant women in the United Kingdom by estimating the effect of family composition on birth hazard rates. International comparisons of son preference are constructed, the first known to the author. A theoretical model suggests that costs (e.g., dowries) are unlikely to explain the variation in outcomes between groups. Finally, women arriving in the UK at a young age appear to have less distinct tastes, also consistent with a primarily cultural, rather than economic, explanation for parental sex preferences. Son Preference and Sex Ratios: How many 'Missing Women' are Missing. When parents prefer sons, heterogeneity in the probability of having sons can lead to excess girls. I argue that this may lead to under-counting the number of 'missing women'. Parents show significant differences in son preference between countries. I exploit these differences to simulate sex ratios in the presence of measured heterogeneity. Parents' son preferences account for 1.5% of differences between sex ratios worldwide (significant at 10%). The presence of this effect may imply that sex ratios are more biased than previously estimated, since previous comparisons use benchmarks that already contain too few girls. Therefore there may be more women missing due to discrimination than we thought.

The present dissertation takes late postwar Japan as its case study and investigates the ways in which ambivalence to/in motherhood’ emerges at the very site where maternal violence and, more specifically, maternal filicide disrupts social norms of acceptable maternal behaviour. In 1970s Japan the number of cases of mothers who killed their own children saw a dramatic increase to the point of reaching, within media representations in particular, the dimension of a social phenomenon. Within the framework of idealizations of maternal identity, formulated in terms of continuous love, self-sacrifice and domesticity, filicidal mothers came to be labelled as either "bad" (cruel, monstrous) or "mad" (mentally unstable, neurotic). The apparent proliferation of maternal child-killing and what was perceived as the unjust treatment meted out to these criminalized mothers became a major concern for a new women’s liberation movement emerging in Japan between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, known as ūman ribu (woman lib). Ribu contested the widespread characterization of mothers who kill as either devilish or mentally ill, and drew on the numerical increase of cases of maternal filicide as evidence of a symptomatic malfunctioning of the dominant gender ideology in modern Japanese society. Postwar Japan also witnessed a boom in women’s literature whose focus on the grotesque, on worlds of dreams and madness and on the morbid portrayal of female antisocial behaviours constituted fertile terrain for the proliferation of disquieting images of motherhood and maternal violence. This thesis focuses on the work by Japanese writer Takahashi Takako as a specific case study to address the discursive construction of filicidal mothers in women’s literature. This study acknowledges motherhood as a heated site of contested meanings and focuses on a close textual reading of media coverage, the rhetoric of ribu and women’s literature in order to explore the discursive constructions of mothers who kill which characterised early 1970s Japan. It sheds light on the problematic interactions between the different discourses under consideration and identifies the relationship between motherhood and violence as a hot-spot where clashing discourses produce a constant re-articulation of maternal and female identity.

The historical social positioning and exclusion experienced by disabled people, particularly disabled women in Western society, is profound. Traditional disability research methods and theoretical approaches are built from a combination of fear and ignorance, reflecting myths and misconceptions about the 'abnormality' and 'dysfunction' of disability. People with disabilities remain largely invisible and 'out of place'. Many disability researchers adopt a 'colonial' perspective toward disability and arguably fail to engage with disabled people in a substantive manner other than as a particular type of limitation or possible candidate for correction. Quantitative disability data provides a rudimentary reference source from which a medicalised one-dimensional profile of disability has developed, but information gaps and methodological weaknesses with such data can readily be identified. This thesis is hence a qualitative critical disability survey examining the timing and spacing realities of lives for women with physical disabilities. The social context of disability in public/private space is thereby examined for the perspectives of disabled women. The fluidity of embodied geographies, disability, and impairment are explored, moving well beyond individual incapacity in the workplace and looking at wider social perceptions and attitudes. Through a series of in-depth interviews developed in conjunction with the involving twenty women in Scotland and twenty in Canada, the interconnections of education, community and workspaces are explored in relation to disability policies. The 'voices' of women in disabilities remain at the forefront, and what emerges are rich contextual profiles of women making spaces on their own terms, allowing new insights into proactive policy interventions.

The thesis is an ethnographic study exploring understandings of love and intimacy amongst young middle class Indians of Gujarati origin living in the UK and India. It is based primarily upon repeat in-depth interviews, and participant observation. A two site comparative study was used to enable an understanding of how social and economic contexts shape cultural constructions of intimate relationships and sexuality. I explore these issues through the narratives of men and women who are either single, in the process of courtship/pre-marital relationships, or are recently married. The study is informed by recent work in the 'political economy of love' and Giddens' thesis on the 'Transformation of Intimacy‘. I examine to what extent young Gujaratis aspire to or are moving towards a more individualized, companionate and 'western' model of relationships, and whether such a 'transformation' impacts on the gender relations between husband and wife. I argue that while global ideologies of romantic love are pervasive, they are interpreted by informants within local understandings of appropriate marriage and relationships. As such, informants in Baroda, India are negotiating new forms of courtship which fit in with the ideals of love, but also with more traditional aspects of arranged marriage as a system of status maintenance. They want to be in love with their future spouse, but only within socially acceptable models of endogamous marriage. In contrast in the UK love marriage is idealised over arranged marriage. Informants distanced themselves from any sense of 'arrangement' in their relationships, which seemed to call into question for them the veractiy of their love. The social context of the UK both supports and facilitates love marriage amongst young people, while the converse is true in India. Largely men and women in both contexts appeared to have similar aspirations for their relationships, though women were likely to be more in favour of egalitarian values. What this meant was interpreted differently in India and the UK. In neither setting, however, was gender equality fully realised in the lives of the informants due to both structural and normative constraints.

This thesis attempts a sociological and feminist analysis of anorexia nervosa. Anorexia is an illness which affects predominantly women, and its incidence is greatest among middle-class young women in Western countries. Its strong bias along class and gender lines suggests that such an approach to the illness could prove fruitful. The thesis argues that analysis of anorexia demands a clear understanding of the sociology of the body. The sociology of the body sees the body as constructed in social life: understandings of the body vary temporally and culturally, and reflect the categories of their culture. It is suggested that anorexia nervosa represents an attempted transformation of the concept of the feminine body in contemporary culture. Anorexic women aim to transcend appetite, and to allow no intrusions into the body, constructing an anorexic body which is closed, separate and inviolable. Since this transformation is individuated and privatised, however, it cannot ultimately succeed in overturning a system of social meanings. The thesis concludes that individual solutions to anorexia will not lead to the end of the illness as a social phenomenon in the lives of women. Only collective feminist action can reconstruct the degraded contemporary concept of woman. The argument is pursued firstly through a discussion of the initial use of the term `anorexia nervosa' in the late nineteenth century by Gull and Lasegue. The treatment of anorexia as a modern disease is discussed, and the claim that anorexia has always existed but has not been recognised is refuted. Psychiatric and feminist accounts of anorexia are then considered. The former see anorexia as a purely individual phenomenon, and the limitations of this position are discussed. Feminist analyses of anorexia, in seeing it as deeply intertwined with women's social position in a patriarchal culture, are argued to advance understanding of the illness, while still retaining individualist elements. The next section analyses the ways in which anorexic women themselves explain their illness. This leads on to a discussion of the notion of the body as concept. After a theoretical outline, several body-concepts are analysed and placed in their social and historical contexts. Contemporary understandings of the body as an individuated possession are then discussed, with particular focus on the concept of the feminine body as passive object. Objectification, discipline and chaos are argued to be the central meanings of the feminine body in contemporary culture. Analysis of the issues of abortion and rape seek to make this theoretical point clearer. A detailed analysis of anorexic practices looks at how these meanings are transformed in anorexia. It is suggested that anorexic women try to construct an inviolate anorexic body which is completely under their control through a complexly ritualised eating pattern. The precarious nature of this control points to the limitations of individual `solutions' to social problems.

This dissertation explores the relationship between transsexuality, autobiography and ideas of sexual difference in the United Kingdom and the United States of America between the years 1950 and 2000. This dissertation argues that rather than viewing sex and gender in hierarchic fashion, transsexual autobiography allows us to see their relationship as mutually legitimating. Both biological sex and psychological gender acted as historically contingent ‘sex signs’ which worked to show the autobiographer as man or woman, despite having been born in the opposite sex. I argue that far from biology dictating gender, or gender defining sex, both were used equally and strategically by transsexuals in order to fluently speak a language of sexual difference which their ‘audiences’ – be they medical professionals, legal scholars, newspaper journalists, or close friends and family members – could understand. This fluency permitted belief in them as the men or women they knew themselves to be. At some times, and in some company, genital sex signs were the most appropriate way of signifying sexual difference, whist in a different place and with different people, certain gender traits were more useful. Always, though, was the transsexual’s signification of him- or her-self as man or woman delimited by public discourses of sexual difference which impacted upon ‘non-transsexuals’ also. In closely reading transsexual autobiographies we are better able to see the construction, and naturalisation, of sexual difference in the second half of the twentieth century. By looking both at the strategic uses of transsexual autobiographies and the wider public reactions to such life stories (and the individuals who tell them), this dissertation shows how the languages of sexual difference, of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ were in a constant state of flux during the period in question.

This research study explores young women's accounts of becoming mothers below the age of 21 and in adverse circumstances. The findings are based on five group interviews and twenty-eight individual interviews. All participants were living in areas of social deprivation, and just over two-thirds had been in care. The meanings the young women give to motherhood are used in negotiating their social worlds. The key dimensions of these processes of negotiation are: the validation of heterosexual femininity and of a 'caring' identity; the negotiation of their class position, including their position in relation to the labour market, the education system and the care system. Motherhood also gives them agency and control when patriarchy, capitalism and surveillance constrain their opportunities to actively shape their lives in other ways. The young women's own discourses of motherhood and mothering allow them to resist hegemonic discourses of teenage mothers as irresponsible, promiscuous and as seeking economical dependency. Much of their own discourse of motherhood is positive, and they often employ a discourse in which they have reformed and 'grown up' through motherhood. They argue that it is responsibility, rather than age, which is the key determinant of adequate mothering. However, these positive meanings are in tension with the difficulties and losses. All the young women found that their lives are constrained in some way by motherhood and that, ideally, that would have postponed motherhood until they were more settled. The young women assert that there is a mismatch between their own views and professional responses. It is argued that a shift is required, in the framing of policy and practice, away from viewing vulnerable young people in terms of 'risk assessment', towards an approach based on their strength and resilience, and on a recognition that, given support, young women can be good enough mothers.

This thesis explores the meaning and significance of sibling and peer relationships for young people looked after by local authorities, from their own perspectives. A sociological approach to research with young people is employed, drawing on additional post structural and feminist insights. It is argued that hegemonic ideas concerning the nature of development have resulted in a concentration on adult and adult-child relationships, from adult perspectives. Accordingly, children‟s perspectives on the contribution of their interrelationships to their well-being, support networks, and sense of social inclusion have not been adequately theorised. It is concluded that this has had particular implications for looked after children, as the process of becoming and remaining looked after can result in considerable losses within their sibling and peer relationships. A participatory methodology was developed in order to address issues of power, agency and choice within the research process. Qualitative interviews were undertaken with eighteen young people, aged between twelve and nineteen, who were, or had previously been, looked after. Sibling and peer relationships were found to make significant contributions to the young people‟s emotional and physical well-being, and sense of individual and familial identity, as well as providing emotional and practical support into adulthood. Accordingly, the loss of significant relationships, particularly those with siblings, could affect them deeply. While living in care, the young people were often optimistic about the ease of negotiating relationships with siblings and friends after leaving care. However, in reality, living independently could amplify problems within sibling and peer relationships, placing young people at risk of homelessness, violence, and social isolation. This thesis contributes greater understanding of the importance of a wide variety of sibling and peer relationships to the lives of looked after children, from their own perspectives. It also informs as to the complex challenges they face both during and after leaving care in negotiating their sibling and peer relationships in the interests of their emotional and physical well-being.

This study is set in the context of an increasing awareness of the need for and importance of quality play learning experience for pre-school children owing to its crucial role and great contributions to various aspects of child development. The main aim of this study is to examine teachers' and parents' perspectives on play and their understanding of the role of play in relation to children's learning particularly in pre­school practice. Teachers' perceptions of play were described and analysed with respect to their definition of play, roles and values of play in relation to children's learning, and the use of play in teaching. Parents' understandings of the concept of play were examined through their perception on play as pedagogical tools and their preference for pre-school learning activities. The findings of the study imply that: (i) There was a mismatch between teachers' understanding of the word play in child development and play in relation to educational program of the children. (ii) Only few parents considered play to be the appropriate way of children's learning. Most of them preferred a formal learning environment for their children's pre-school activities. (iii) Play activities tended not to provide learning experiences of acceptable quality in most of the settings and many pre-school teachers taught children in a very formal way. (iv) There was no evidence of systematic differences between the philosophy and type of settings in respect to play understanding. The differences are the level of the teachers' knowledge, professional training and academic qualifications. (v) Mainly there were four main factors concluded as impeding the progress of deploying play in Malaysian pre-school practice: conceptual barriers, attitudinal barriers, structural barriers and functional barriers. As a result of the findings, some implications have been advocated concerning the need for rethinking the practice in Malaysian pre-schools for improving the approach to educating young children by giving play its central role in children's learning and free from academic stress.

This thesis explores the discourses and organisations through which girls' development towards adult womanhood was framed and managed during the inter-war period. It examines how contemporary perceptions of social change following the First World War resulted in widespread scrutiny of girls' circumstances and behaviour, particularly their sexual conduct. It argues that representations and responses to girls were increasingly underpinned by the conceptualisation of adolescence as a critical period of change and instability. This understanding of adolescence pervaded both medical and lay discourses. It was interpreted through the prisms of gender and class, and served to legitimise increasing levels of intervention into girls' lives, mainly on the basis of their sexual behaviour or perceived exposure to sexual risk. Adolescence was also represented as the period in which individuals developed moral agency. This study examines the increased importance ascribed to the moral training of the adolescent, in the context of widespread agreement of the need to express traditional moral values in ways that took account of social change. This was seen as particularly important for girls, not only because of their changing circumstances, but because of women's new status as enfranchised citizens. The thesis explores the work of the Girl Guides Association and the Young Women's Christian Association in some detail. These organisations drew upon the discourse of social change, adolescence and citizenship to claim an enhanced role in shaping the development of young women. While histories of girls' youth organisations have tended to portray them as conservative movements intent on socialising girls into their future role as wives and mothers, this study highlights these organisations' commitment to preparing girls to understand and exercise their future responsibilities as citizens, and argues that such organisations were more complex in their purposes, and more varied in their approaches, than has previously been recognised.