The growing cultural commodity of celebrity news and its increasing focus on celebrities' families is examined by this project to determine what consequence communications about celebrity pregnancy and parenthood have on readers most likely to identify with the stories – new mothers. While gossip magazines are not meant to provide parenting advice, their editorial focus on parenting may position celebrity parents as role models for audiences. Guided by theories of media effects, this project sought to understand why and how that might happen. Using narrative thematic analysis, two complementary data sets were analyzed: 36 issues sampled from the leading gossip magazines, People and Us Weekly, during 2007-2009, and five focus groups with recent mothers. Gossip magazines positively framed celebrity family life, idealizing the experience by avoiding talk of parenting's daily challenges. Resources such as nannies and personal trainers define celebrity parenting by affording celebrities, especially women, the ability to continue work while maintaining the identity of primary caregivers. A gendered act, consumption was intrinsically part of good celebrity parenting. Expectations for celebrity postpartum weight loss communicated that bigger bodies are a work-in-progress rather than an acceptable new body type. Fathers were visually depicted more often than in conventional parenting media, though these images similarly showed parents performing normative, gendered behaviors. Participants reported escapism as their main reason for reading gossip magazines and parasocial relationships existed with both liked and disliked celebrities. For liked celebrities, a parasocial dialectical tension emerged defining role models as both special and ordinary. For disliked celebrities, negative frames portrayed their parenting behavior as unacceptable and served as the strongest form of social learning from gossip magazines as readers internalized media criticism. Celebrity role models were selected based on feeling similar, serving as fantasy role models whose parenting lifestyles were simultaneously interpreted as aspirational and unattainable. Participants' social comparisons usually evaluated their own parenting experience as preferred to the demands and media environment faced by celebrities. Situations interpreted as incomparable attributed celebrities' success to external factors rather than internal characteristics. Overall, gossip magazines do provide parenting information that expands and impacts the real experience of mothers.

This study explores Indian culture in second-generation Indian American families. For the most part, this generation was not socialized to Indian culture in India, which raises the question, how do parents maintain and teach culture to their third-generation children? To answer this question, I interviewed 18 second-generation Indian American couples who had at least one child. Rather than focus on how assimilated or Americanized the families were, I examine the maintenance of Indian culture. Instead of envisioning culture as a binary between “Indian” and “American,” second-generation parents often experience “Indianness” and “Americanness” as interwoven in ways that were not always easily articulated. I also explore the co-ethnic matrimonial process of my participants to reveal the salience of Indian-American identity in their lives. A common experience among my participants was the tendency of mainstream American non- Indians to question Indian-Americans about India and Indian culture. My participants frequently were called upon to be “cultural ambassadors” to curious non-Indians. Religion served as a primary conduit for teaching Indian culture to third-generation children. Moreover, religion and ethnic identity were often conflated. Mothers and fathers share the responsibility of teaching religion to third-generation children. However, mothers tend to be the cultural keepers of the more visible cultural objects and experiences, such as, food, clothing, and language. Fathers were more likely to contribute to childcare than housework. The fathers in my study believe they father in a different social context than their fathers did. By negotiating Indian and American culture, fathers parent in a way that capitalizes on what they perceive as the “best of both worlds.” Links to the local and transnational community were critical to maintaining ties to other co-ethnics and raising children within the culture. Furthermore, most of the parents in my study said they would prefer that their children eventually marry co-ethnics in order to maintain the link to the Indian-American community. Ultimately, I found that Indian culture endures across first- and second-generation Indian Americans. However, “culture” is not a fixed or monolithic object; families continue to modify traditions to meet their emotional and cultural needs.

The methodological approach used to tell the Smith sisters’ story is first and foremost a case study of women in the nineteenth century and the gendered categories that were constructed to define women. The story will be told through a biographical narrative, which will allow Hannah, Julia, and Abby Smith’s to tell their story in their own voice. Also, included within the biography is an examination of the nineteenth-century theories that defined women’s lives, and what effect, if any, these theories had on the Smiths. Each chapter is layered with three different narratives in an attempt to unravel the world that women lived in the nineteenth century. First, the chapter provides a description and analysis of the specific theories such as Republican Motherhood and cult of domesticity to ground the Smith women in the discursive world in which they lived. Then the chapter closely examines the practice or the way the Smith women lived their lives and what they thought about their world. Lastly, each chapter explores the secondary sources that have been written about each subject, such as the new female seminaries that opened in the nineteenth century. By combining these approaches, I hope to avoid some of the shortcomings that dominate the study of women today. First, the theoretical models and the study of real lives of women actually leave women out of their own stories. Second, historians tend to evaluate women’s lives from the past based upon their own political agendas and their own beliefs of what freedom and rights mean completely discarding what it might have meant to women in their own time period.

In this study, I conduct a multiple method content analysis of literature on postpartum depression (PPD) from two on-line sources, Medline and LexisNexis. The purpose of the study is to determine how the medical profession defines and frames PPD, and to consider the implications of its movement into the medical model. I use the theories of Foucault, Gramsci, critical constructionism, and postmodern feminism to examine the effect of the medicalization of PPD on women’s lives. Using both simple descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis, I show the expansion of medical control over women’s bodies in the childbearing years beyond the physical to include the emotional and psychological aspects as well, which results in standardized maternal behaviors and emotions that tighten the boundaries of motherhood.

The early marriage as a patriarchal cultural fact is not a retrospective solved up, ended issue but a problem lasting with all its tragedy. The early marriage which is the subject of this study is a form of actualisation of child abuse within the family, in the prison of privacy. This abuse may only be expressed within the repertoire of femaleness. Regarding this language, which is functionalized with destiny, fortune, luck, sin, immoral, the comprehension of what it means to be child-bride, how the patriarchy institutionalize the early marriage which we may call as legitimate child abuse was tried. If marriage occurs between persons either one of them or both of them is under 18 is called early marriage.Although child marriages are no legitimacy in the sense of jurisprudence, child marriage is still occurring as a cultural practice. This study based on some presumption such as everybody who is under the age of 18 is accepted as a child. Marriage is an important issue for feminism. Although there are different feminst perspectives, all of them are critical towards marriage. For instance / according to radical feminists&rsquo / theoreticians&rsquo / marriage is a systematic way of oppressing women hence being a child likely to intensified adverse consequences of marriage. The main concerns of this study how their child status affects their marriage experiences. In this frame work early marriaged studied based on a field research conducted on 19 women in Van province .In order to get diversity in Van, four districts were chosen. The scopes that women&rsquo / s marriage experiences are questioned are the following women&rsquo / s domestic labor, women participating in social life, violence against women, sexuality, motherhood and childcare. In order to get more insight about the issue 8 representatives of non governmental organizations and 10 public officials who interested in women issue are met.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-212). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-138).

Cette thèse a comme objectif de contribuer à la compréhension du processus de construction de l’identité des femmes experts-comptables. Elle s'appuie sur la réalisation d'une quarantaine d’entretiens semi-directifs, à portée biographique, réalisés auprès de femmes et d'hommes experts-comptables et stagiaires. Deux identités saillantes, de professionnelle et de mère, ont été plus particulièrement mises en évidence. Ces deux identités s’influencent réciproquement. Leurs évolutions s'interpénètrent et nourrissent une même construction identitaire. Les rôles de mère et de manager/professionnelle sont cependant porteurs de contradictions et de tensions qui induisent différentes stratégies de conciliation. La distinction de deux grandes catégories de stratégies, une stratégie de gestion familiale et une stratégie de gestion professionnelle a permis d'analyser la manière dont les femmes professionnelles comptables ont pu s’adapter à la culture organisationnelle des cabinets d'expertise. Ces pratiques ne sont cependant que principalement adaptatives et peinent à véritablement induire des changements culturels. / The thesis is positioned at the confluence of literature on gender, professions and identity and aims to contribute to the understanding of the processes of identity construction of women public accountants. The empirical data presented in this dissertation is based on over forty semi-structured biographic interviews with women and men, CPAs and trainees. My method was built progressively as a result of my immersion in the field and of my personal experience as a woman and professional accountant. Based on my findings, I highlighted the existence of an approved organizational path characterized by linear, constant upward mobility and submitted to organizational norms. This professional model, constructed as masculine, does not appeal to a majority of women, and especially mothers, who decide to have recourse to alternative professional models. Although promoted by the firms, these models lack the legitimacy of approved routes and often imply a derailment of women’s careers right from the early days because previous choices may limit the range of choices available in the future. My study is focused on the construction of women CPA’s professional identity and of its interaction with motherhood. I show that in constructing their identity women dwell on socially defined roles and organizationally available discourses that may be in contradiction with each other. Thus, women attempting to construct themselves as both good professional and mother may experience identity tensions. Nevertheless, their identities are not fragmented, but are the result of a continuous effort to integrate contradictory discourses in an ongoing biography. In addition, I highlight two types of strategies that women professional accountants use: strategies concerning family and strategies concerning work. Their analysis allow me to draw the conclusion that women CPA impose new work practices that are mostly adaptive practices and do not aim to alter the current ones.

Body image, eating disturbance, and depressive symptomatology have been examined extensively in the general population. The assessment of these variables within the postpartum period has also been a target of recent research. Unfortunately, no existing studies have examined the intercorrelations among these factors in mothers of young children, despite increasing media pressure for moms to maintain a slim, pre-pregnancy body. The current study examined predictors of body dissatisfaction, eating disturbance, and depressive symptoms in mothers of children aged 0-5. Simple correlations were followed by a series of linear multiple regressions incorporating sociocultural predictors alongside covariates identified in the extant literature. Findings suggest that sociocultural factors are significantly related to body image, eating disturbance, and depressive symptomatology in the mothers sampled, and BMI, perceived stress, and current exercise status accounted for significant variance in study outcomes. Limitations, implications and significance are addressed in turn.

Abstract