The literature on gender and psychotherapy, sex-roles, and the psychology of women reveals that the influence of gender on client and therapist behavior has important implications for the process and outcome of psychotherapy practice, especially as it pertains to angry feelings. The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationship between gender and anger in psychotherapy process. This was accomplished though in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight (four female and four male) mental health professionals. They were asked to discuss their general views regarding the role anger plays in one's emotional functioning and their perceptions of the relationship between gender and anger in their treatment of female clients. Qualitative data analysis indicated that there was considerable variation among therapists in how they conceptualized anger and viewed it as an issue in individuals' psychological functioning. General themes of therapists' perceptions of "female" and "male" patterns of the expression of anger emerged. The "female" pattern was frequently identified as involving the avoidance and suppression of anger and linked to feminine sex-role norms prescribing that anger is inappropriate for females to express. Conversely, the "male" pattern was frequently identified as involving the direct, open expression of anger and linked to masculine sex-role norms prescribing that anger is appropriate for males to express. Gender differences in how therapists' experienced and responded to clients' anger were revealed. These gender differences tended to parallel those found in clients' expression of anger. This study illustrates that gender is an important variable in psychotherapy and supports the view that anger is a central psychotherapy dimension. In considering the broader implications of this study, it is apparent that more systematic data needs to be collected from clients and/or third party observers in addition to therapists.

Detective fiction, thematically and structurally, contains the potentially rich ability to stand at multiple places simultaneously. Consequently, it provides an appropriate mediating structure for the discussion of potentially disruptive ideas, particularly ideas on identity. Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century literary and cultural contexts, I consider the geography of gender and the literary strands that provided fertile ground for the emergence of detective fiction. Through close readings of detective narratives by the three earliest women writers of the genre, Seeley Regester (1831-1865), Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935), and Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), I examine how these writers thematize the need for informed choice for their female characters, who either as detectives or suspects learn to achieve expansive readings of the confusing signs surrounding them, and seem to request expansive readings by their readers. Paralleling the discourse that moves toward answering the question "who did it?" is the double text of many of the novels that suggests a series of seemingly contradictory realities: women's entrapment by socially sanctioned roles and the clever ways they achieve freedom; women's victimization by male texts and their creation of a new story; women's invisibility to those unable to hear, see, or understand them and their vivid presence obvious in the emancipatory strategies employed for their survival. The ands suggest the wholeness of the vision of these novels and the possibility of their being read both ways--that is, read for their reinforcement of traditional ideologies and read for the future discourse they evoke. Central to my exploration are the disruptive pauses that begin a renegotiation of gender boundaries in Regester's texts, the significance given to gendered language in Green's novels, and the discourse of humor that demarcates a newly created space for women in Rinehart's narratives. Drawing connections between these early women writers and the presently emerging feminist detective novel, I argue that Regester, Green and Rinehart provide multiple mysteries in their narratives--mysteries that emphasize the desire of these women to understand the boundaries that define them and the ways in which they can change these contours.

This study was designed to synthesize the literature on women who reenter higher education, and to examine through a questionnaire their unique attitudes, personal characteristics and preferences for modes of learning. This study examined the responses to a questionnaire of 139 re-entry women in a small Catholic women's college (Emmanuel College) located in Boston, Massachusetts. The following questions were addressed in this study: (1) Who are the re-entry women? (2) What is the motivation for these women to enter into a undergraduate degree program? (3) What are these women's unique needs? (4) What are the support services needed to help meet their needs? (5) What are their instructional and program preferences? (6) What are the barriers that may interfere with their academic continuance? Methods used in the data collection process included: administration of a 50-item questionnaire to 139 re-entry Emmanuel College undergraduate women students. The participants responded by mail to the questionnaire, so the conditions were not standardized. All data were gathered according to self-reporting of the respondents. An analysis of participating re-entry women's responses revealed the following findings: (1) she was in her upper 30's, married, mother of two children and a part-time student; (2) she returned to school because she was dissatisfied with her job and received encouragement from family and friends; (3) she may find the following services useful: faculty advisement, weekly communication system and peer advisement; (4) she preferred a continuing education program that offered day and evening classes with undergraduate students and with the same full-time faculty; (5) she preferred a college that offered credit for life/work experience; (6) she preferred instructors who can relate theory to everyday experiences and ones who have a realistic view of student's outside duties; (7) she perceived work responsibilities and time commitment to family as a possible barrier interfering with her academic continuance.

In this dissertation I argue that reason is nothing more than the term we give to thinking taken to be legitimate. It has no a priori content. Because of this, there is no objective thing called reason which could be accepted or rejected. I argue that Nietzsche's most important contribution to the critique of the Enlightenment is his exposing of reason as a socially constructed discourse of desire. This puts him above the fray of the debates over the acceptance or rejection of reason, and onto what I claim is the more productive terrain of looking at reason as problematic but unavoidable. Irigaray develops this Nietzschian approach to reason in a way that exposes the tendencies of philosophical notions of reason to prevent women from being able to articulate their interests in discourses taken to be legitimate. Through this example of the marginalization of the interests of women, she is also able to help us see just how it is that reason can operate hegemonically. This epistemological perspective lends a certain plausability to Habermas' claim that in the absence of a transcendental ground for a notion of rationality, what we should call rational is a judgment that all participants in a discussion agree is correct. Where Habermas' position becomes problematic is in his insistence that a rational consensus can be distinguished philosophically from a non rational one. It is here that Habermas' position operates to reinforce dominant exclusionary mechanisms. I draw out the implications of this position for looking at feminist in an international context, and argue that we do not need universal notions of what counts as women's liberation to be able to make cross-cultural critical judgments. Rather, what we need to be able to do this is an open ear to the self articulation of the concerns of real women. I argue that critique can be rational if we do not suppose that we can ever have a fixed notion of what counts as rational, but rather if we accept that rationality is a place holder concept for the discourses which we take to be legitimate. From this it follows that the rational is the site of inevitable struggles over legitimation.

On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson asked Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly to confirm her impression that her verse was alive. Both her letter, which turned on the figure of a breathing body, and her enclosed poems, which served as samples of her living artifacts, presented Dickinson as a maker of verse and a remaker of human sentience. The context out of which her sense of language arose was local networks of exchange among kin, neighbors, and friends who had some connection to Amherst. This social economy of white, middle-class women involved exchanges of living artifacts from one household to another: food, stitched items, texts, flowers. The practice of trading handmade, material things that engaged Dickinson throughout her lifetime alters the perception of her as a recluse who isolated herself from others in order to develop her genius alone. Her linguistic choices and her indirect style are derived in part, from her social practice. So are several values espoused in her poetry: goods, not cash; unique artistry, not mass production; personal interaction, not the literary marketplace. The exchange of floral gifts reflected wider cultural practices of white, middle-class women: identifying flowers and sending messages through them. These "feminine" conventions offered Dickinson more than a temporary blurring of science and sentiment which was "corrected" by Charles Darwin in 1859: they freed her from some of the sexist constructions of nature dominant in her time. Her floral imagery resists the teeth and claws of Darwinian survival and the classifications of botanists. Science and religion emerge in her poetry as authorities proferring "instructive utterances" that require misreading. Her grounds for misreading include her experience with the Amherst landscape and her own body. Her various strands of earth, garden, and body imagery demonstrate how central the speaking body was to her art. By ignoring literature about diseased women's bodies and constructing gardens as primarily positive space, Dickinson found the means to let her body speak. Although speaking physical, sexual, and poetic fulness was difficult for Dickinson, she made verses that expressed the body's potential and touched others with their breath.

This study examined the experience of infertile women using a conceptual framework of developmental change that has been traditionally linked to pregnancy and first-time motherhood. In the literature, it has been observed that there is a reconciliative trend in a woman's object relationship with her mother over the course of a first pregnancy, and unconscious conflicts regarding identification with and separation from a woman's mother are powerfully reawakened during this time. It has generally been assumed that the experience of pregnancy and having a baby is the catalyst for these changes. The central question posed by this study was how infertile women negotiate these developmental issues. In-depth interviews were conducted with a small sample of infertile women. The results are presented in terms of how the women described their experience and how their experience related to the broader developmental issues regarding maternal identification and separation. The women's experience of infertility is divided into four themes: the all encompassing nature of the experience, issues of control, images of abnormality, and the wish to talk about the experience. Themes relating to issues of identification and separation are discussed in terms of: the women's wish to join a society of women and the world of their mothers, the wish to repair past hurts from childhood and the resurfacing of emotional conflict, and changes in the women's perceptions of their relationships with their mothers over the course of dealing with infertility. The experience of the women in this study suggested that, similar to the literature on first pregnancies, infertile women are actively reworking issues of identification and separation; however, whereas first-time mothers strengthen identifications with their mothers as nurturant, infertile women strengthen identifications with their mothers as competent, multidimensional, and able to withstand adversity. The women in this study were very conscious of mortality and limits, and it is suggested that coming to terms with infertility may involve the simultaneous negotiation of the psychological work traditionally associated with mid-life and the psychological work involved in the transition to motherhood.

Education can be an important tool of social transformation by empowering, organizing, and leading poor Third World women into the process of social transformation as agents of change. However, a review of the literature and interviews with those involved in nonformal education programs reveal that formal education and most nonformal education do not fulfill this purpose. Though radical change-oriented nonformal education may increase poor Third World women's critical consciousness as poor Third World people, it does not do so for them as women. A close examination of the literature on the theory of critical pedagogy, on which these radical change-oriented nonformal education programs are based, demonstrates that critical pedagogy itself fails to deal seriously with gender issues. In an effort to complement critical pedagogy, the author attempts to conceptualize critical feminist pedagogy by integrating feminist elements and vision developed by feminist pedagogy into critical pedagogy. This initial conceptualization of critical feminist pedagogy still requires more thought and development. Nevertheless, it may provide poor Third World women with a better theoretical framework for their education by addressing class, nationality, and gender issues with equal seriousness. Further, it may contribute to a better theoretical tool for social transformation. The author's personal experience with Minjung Kyoyuk (a Korean version of popular education) and a review of the literature reveal that, although an important vehicle for a popular movement, Minjung Kyoyuk is still very much male-oriented and needs modification to be a more proper form of education for poor Korean women. The application of critical feminist pedagogy as an analytical framework to Minjung Kyoyuk helps uncover the problems of Minjung Kyoyuk in addressing poor women's issues in detail and show ways to make Minjung Kyoyuk a better tool of social transformation.

Because women's studies programs are a recent phenomenon, dating only from the 1980s, Latin American academicians, researchers and feminists have barely begun to explore the impact of women's studies programs on women students participating in them. This study is an effort to document the importance of women's studies programs in the development of feminism in Latin America and the empowerment of women through higher education. The primary method used in this study is qualitative research and ethnographic interviews to gather the data. I explore the experiences of six women students participating in three of the major women's studies programs in Latin America: El Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios de la Mujer (The Interdisciplinary Women's Studies Program) of El Colegio de Mexico; El Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios de la Mujer of La Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica; and the Carrera Interdisciplinaria de Posgrado de Especializacion en Estudios de La Mujer (Interdisciplinary Post-graduate Career Specialization in Women's Studies) of La Universidad de Buenos Aires. A general account of Latin American women's history and a review of the literature on feminist theories, and discussion of women's studies as a social movement are included in this dissertation. My intention is to bring forth new perspectives and interpretations that could contribute to both women's studies programs and to feminism in academe. I also aspire to help fill a gap in feminist scholarship by enabling Latina women to speak for themselves about the impact of women's studies and feminism on their lives.

The purpose of this research was to identify and differentiate the mentoring needs of one group of administrators, high school assistant principals. Specifically, the study has focused on mentoring functions delineated according to psychosocial vs. vocational needs, determination of the comparative value subjects placed on psychosocial and vocational functions, the influence of an individual's age on the desire to enter a mentoring relationship, influence of years as assistant principal on the need for mentoring functions, a preference for mentor gender, and effect of one's career aspirations on his/her desire for mentoring assistance. Subjects were 42 male and 33 female assistant principals from Massachusetts. All subjects completed a questionnaire rating eight mentoring functions (educating, coaching, sponsoring, protecting, role-modeling, encouraging, counseling, and moving from transitional figure to colleague). Ten subjects (five men; five women) participated in a follow-up interview. Questionnaire data were analyzed using a correlational approach; interview data were presented thematically. Hypothesized influence of age of subject and years of experience affecting the need for mentoring assistance were not found except for the counseling function. Hypothesized effects for subjects' valuing psychosocial more than vocational functions were substantiated. Hypothesized effects for women valuing same-gender mentors more than men or men valuing vocational assistance more than women were not substantiated. In the follow-up interviews, however, women indicated a preference for same gender role models. Hypothesized effects for the career aspirations of an individual influencing his/her desire to receive mentoring assistance were substantiated for the consulting and sponsoring functions only. The function least valued was the protecting function. The major conclusions of the study were: (1) Similarities between the mentoring needs of the men and women suggest that progress has been made in differentiating gender from leadership. (2) Novices are not alone in exhibiting the need for mentoring assistance. Something akin to the need for the collegiality, counseling and honest feedback of mentoring exists at every level throughout one's career. Results suggest a mentoring program would benefit individuals of varying ages and experience levels and that it is unnecessary to match proteges and mentors by gender.

Organization development (OD) is an applied field of social science aimed at improving organizational performance and the quality of work life through planned change interventions. OD draws from a wide range of theories and methods such as group dynamics, management theory, and industrial psychology. Many OD professionals consider themselves social change agents who contribute to societal transformation by promoting humanistic and democratic values in organizations. This dissertation proposes, instead, that OD theory/practice is constituted through specific textual strategies and discursive formations which serve to do the opposite--to support relations of domination and to contribute to the sedimentation of current social practices in organizations. Using deconstruction, genealogy, feminist and third world theories, I argue that: (1) OD is the story of the making of a professional class caught in the contradictory purposes of working to produce more knowledge, that is, develop as a social science, and serving as an effective social technology, that is, develop as a practice of management. (2) OD comes to function as a technology of the social and managerial power/knowledge by inventing "the consulting relationship" and deploying a variety of "organization change strategies" to legitimate (through 'science') and sustain (through practice) current capitalist, patriarchal, and racist social relations in organizations. Analyses of three representative OD texts illustrate the credibility of these arguments: Beckhard's (1969) "Organization Development: Strategies and Models;" Lippitt and Lippitt's (1978) "The Consulting Process in Action;" and Weisbord's (1987) "Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning and Community." The texts are critiqued using a variety of deconstructive and feminist strategies and read, in particular, to call attention to the gendered, classed and raced subtexts contained in them. The readings demonstrate that OD is a product of a particular kind of discursive enterprise, yet, a non-unitary and contradictory one. It is because of the precarious nature of this discourse that resistant voices and significant "spaces" can be found which a third world-feminist-poststructuralist theory/practice can exploit to begin to envision possibilities for "organization changing."