Esse trabalho teve origem numa monografia de conclusão de curso de graduação em psicologia, e parte da constatação de que atualmente, nos grandes centros urbanos, o grupo de mulheres financeiramente independentes sem um companheiro é cada vez mais numeroso, tornando-se muito presente no nosso cotidiano e na mídia. A pesquisa teve como objetivo descrever, analisar e discutir a representação social da mulher solteira construída por 210 mulheres, com idades entre 20 e 49 anos, habitantes da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A coleta de dados foi realizada pela aplicação individual de um questionário às participantes da pesquisa. O questionário consistiu na solicitação de tarefas de evocação, em seu contexto normal e de substituição, além de perguntas fechadas e abertas, e da obtenção de dados de caracterização sociodemográfica. Os dados coletados por meio da evocação livre foram processados com auxílio do softwareEvoc e analisados de acordo com a abordagem estrutural das representações sociais, segundo a qual os conteúdos cognitivos de uma representação se organizam em dois sistemas internos: um sistema central, também chamado de núcleo central, e um sistema periférico. A análise do questionário envolveu tratamentos estatísticos descritivos das respostas às perguntas fechadas e abertas, tendo sido estas últimas submetidas a um processo prévio de categorização temática. A representação da mulher com 30 anos ou mais, solteira e sem filhos, construída pelas mulheres em geral, é fortemente marcada por elementos contraditórios, mas sem deixar de caracterizar a mulher contemporânea. O conteúdo representacional evidencia uma dimensão imagética muito influenciada pela mídia, e expressa o sentimento de autonomia, refletindo o atual momento da mulher. Esse perfil de mulher, apesar de corresponder a uma mulher que rompe com o seu papel tradicional na sociedade e que tem um poder de escolha, ainda incorpora a imagem de encalhada, o que pode indicar a persistência de um grande conservadorismo por parte das próprias mulheres. / This work had its origin on a psychology graduation monograph, and it sets forth on the finding that nowadays, in large urban centers, the group of financially independent women without a partner is evergrowing, thus becoming very present on our everyday and not only on the media. The research aimed to describe, analyze and discuss the social representation of the single woman built by women. The study included 210 women, aged between 20 and 49 years, inhabitants of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Data collection was performed by individual application of a questionnaire to the research participants. The questionnaire included evocation tasks, on its normal context and tasks of substitution, as well as open and closed questions and attainment of socio-demographical characterization data. The data collected through free evocation were processed using the software Evoc and analyzed according to the structural approach of social representations, whereby the cognitive contents of a representation organizes into two internal systems: a central system, also called central core and a peripheral system. Analysis of the questionnaire involved descriptive statistical treatments of the answers of the closed and open questions, the latter having been subjected to a preliminary process of thematic categorization. The representation of the woman 30 years old or more is strongly marked by contradictory elements, without ceasing to characterize the contemporary woman. The aforementioned elements show an imagetic dimension greatly influenced by the media, and expresses the feeling of autonomy reflecting the woman's present moment. This profile of a woman, although corresponding to a woman who breaks away from the traditional society profile and have a power of choice, still incorporates the image of beached, which may indicate the persistence of great conservatism on part of the women themselves.

Esse trabalho teve origem numa monografia de conclusão de curso de graduação em psicologia, e parte da constatação de que atualmente, nos grandes centros urbanos, o grupo de mulheres financeiramente independentes sem um companheiro é cada vez mais numeroso, tornando-se muito presente no nosso cotidiano e na mídia. A pesquisa teve como objetivo descrever, analisar e discutir a representação social da mulher solteira construída por 210 mulheres, com idades entre 20 e 49 anos, habitantes da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A coleta de dados foi realizada pela aplicação individual de um questionário às participantes da pesquisa. O questionário consistiu na solicitação de tarefas de evocação, em seu contexto normal e de substituição, além de perguntas fechadas e abertas, e da obtenção de dados de caracterização sociodemográfica. Os dados coletados por meio da evocação livre foram processados com auxílio do softwareEvoc e analisados de acordo com a abordagem estrutural das representações sociais, segundo a qual os conteúdos cognitivos de uma representação se organizam em dois sistemas internos: um sistema central, também chamado de núcleo central, e um sistema periférico. A análise do questionário envolveu tratamentos estatísticos descritivos das respostas às perguntas fechadas e abertas, tendo sido estas últimas submetidas a um processo prévio de categorização temática. A representação da mulher com 30 anos ou mais, solteira e sem filhos, construída pelas mulheres em geral, é fortemente marcada por elementos contraditórios, mas sem deixar de caracterizar a mulher contemporânea. O conteúdo representacional evidencia uma dimensão imagética muito influenciada pela mídia, e expressa o sentimento de autonomia, refletindo o atual momento da mulher. Esse perfil de mulher, apesar de corresponder a uma mulher que rompe com o seu papel tradicional na sociedade e que tem um poder de escolha, ainda incorpora a imagem de encalhada, o que pode indicar a persistência de um grande conservadorismo por parte das próprias mulheres. / This work had its origin on a psychology graduation monograph, and it sets forth on the finding that nowadays, in large urban centers, the group of financially independent women without a partner is evergrowing, thus becoming very present on our everyday and not only on the media. The research aimed to describe, analyze and discuss the social representation of the single woman built by women. The study included 210 women, aged between 20 and 49 years, inhabitants of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Data collection was performed by individual application of a questionnaire to the research participants. The questionnaire included evocation tasks, on its normal context and tasks of substitution, as well as open and closed questions and attainment of socio-demographical characterization data. The data collected through free evocation were processed using the software Evoc and analyzed according to the structural approach of social representations, whereby the cognitive contents of a representation organizes into two internal systems: a central system, also called central core and a peripheral system. Analysis of the questionnaire involved descriptive statistical treatments of the answers of the closed and open questions, the latter having been subjected to a preliminary process of thematic categorization. The representation of the woman 30 years old or more is strongly marked by contradictory elements, without ceasing to characterize the contemporary woman. The aforementioned elements show an imagetic dimension greatly influenced by the media, and expresses the feeling of autonomy reflecting the woman's present moment. This profile of a woman, although corresponding to a woman who breaks away from the traditional society profile and have a power of choice, still incorporates the image of beached, which may indicate the persistence of great conservatism on part of the women themselves.

Cultural and historical accounts of self-help literature typically describe its development and focus in terms of the autonomous, public male subject of the nineteenth century. This literary study recognizes that as masculine self-help discourse became widely accessible in the mid nineteenth century, mid-Victorian feminist novels, periodicals, and tracts developed versions of self-help that disrupted the dominant cultural view that the single female was helpless and “redundant” if she did not become a wife and mother. I argue that the dual focus of Victorian self-help discourse on the ability to help oneself and others was attractive for Victorian feminist writers who needed to manipulate the terms of the domestic ideal of woman as influential helpmeet, if women’s independence and civic duty were to be made culturally palatable. Chapter One focuses on how Dinah Mulock Craik drew on self-help values popularized in mid-century articles and collective biographies by Samuel Smiles, while rejecting the genre of biography for its invasiveness into female lives. By imagining a deformed single artist heroine in the context of her 1851 bildungsroman, Olive, Craik highlighted and contested the objectification of women within Victorian culture while reproducing other forms of female difference based on dominant constructions of class, sexuality, and race. Chapter Two extends formal and thematic considerations of self-help discourse to a comparison of masculine colonial accounts of class-climbing and the projection of a self-reliant, yet deeply unstable, domestic female by Maria Rye and the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society. Chapter Three exerts critical pressure on the tension between individual and mutual help by charting the debate that raged between liberal individualism and collectivism in the labour movement, particularly in The Women’s Union Journal. Returning to a focus on the binary of female aberrance and normalcy within Victorian culture, Chapter Four analyzes late-century case studies of nervous illnesses alongside Ella Hepworth Dixon’s 1894 New Woman novel that promoted self-help for women as desirable yet unattainable in a society still largely structured around the domestic ideal. At its broadest, this dissertation explores points of convergence and departure between Victorian masculine and feminine self-help texts, and touches on reverberations of this Victorian discourse in today’s self-help works directed at women in Western culture.

Denna studie är kvalitativ och har genomförts med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer. Studien ämnar undersöka unga singelkvinnors upplevelser av att vara singel i dagens Sverige. Uppsatsen undersöker orsakerna bakom kvinnornas singelskap, hur singelskapet påverkar singelkvinnornas identitet samt hur tvåsamhetsnormen i samhället påverkar hur de ser på sitt eget singelskap. Studiens teoretiska ramverk utgår från begreppen stigma och individualisering samt teorin om performativitet. Resultaten tyder på att singelkvinnor upplever singelskapet som en frihet, men även som en ensamhet. Analysen visar även på att det finns flera olika orsaker bakom singelskapet, exempelvis att kvinnorna inte hittat den rätta eller har erfarenheter från tidigare destruktiva parrelationer. Vidare pekar studiens resultat på att det finns både positiva och negativa identiteter som skapas av singelskapet. Resultatet tyder också på att tvåsamhetsnormen i samhället påverkar hur kvinnorna ser på sitt eget singelskap, bland annat genom negativa föreställningar om singlar och förväntningar om att kvinnor ska ingå i en parrelation. Detta gör att singelkvinnor upplever att de är avvikande gentemot tvåsamhetsnormen. Det framkommer även i studien att tvåsamhetsnormen är fortsatt stark trots att det svenska samhället präglas av individualism. / This study is qualitative and has been conducted using semi-structured interviews. The study aims to investigate how young single women experience being single in Sweden today. The essay examines the reasons behind singlehood, how singleness affects single women's identity, and how the couplenorm in society affects how women perceive their own singlehood. The theoretical framework consists of the concepts of stigma, individualization, and the theory of performativity. The results indicate that single women experience singlehood as freedom, but also as loneliness. The study also shows that there are several different reasons behind singlehood, for example that the women have not found the right person or because of previous couple relationships that have been destructive. Moreover, the study indicates that there are both positive and negative identities that are created by singlehood. Findings suggest that the couplenorm affects how women perceive their own singleness in generating negative ideas about singlehood and expectations that women should be in a couple relationship. This means that single women feel different from the couplenorm. Accordingly, it appears that the couplenorm is still strong despite the fact that Swedish society is characterized by individualism.