Psychology of Women Quarterly

How does a modern woman react to being defined by the role of wife? In our study, the authors examined the experiences, benefits, and challenges encountered by wives of college and university presidents. In a relationship where the husband has a prestigious and well-defined role, the female partner may still be expected to play a traditional role on a regular basis, bringing both benefits and challenges. Through focus groups, interviews, and a survey, women shared their experiences. Cluster analytic techniques identified six groups of women that were involved in, adjusted to, or conflicted by serving in the presidential spouse role. The authors employ the voices of the women themselves to illuminate their experiences, satisfactions, challenges, and frustrations. Wives indicated that they had to deal with loss of privacy, conflicted personal relationships, and increased ambiguity about their own identity. Interestingly, wives did not allow these challenges to undermine their marriage; instead, for those who had difficulty meeting these demands, the loss was to their own sense of self-worth. The results suggest that the role of presidential wife should be examined through the intersectional lens of gender and class. This intersection can be seen to shape the expectations of the wife herself, as well as the demands made by her spouse and others in her community. Her previous experiences, education, and career preparation provide insights into how she approaches the public role. Recognizing and giving voice to the complex sociocultural issues involved may help wives thrive in their roles as a college or university president’s wife. Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ’s website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental

Many rape victims are unacknowledged rape victims—they report an experience meeting researchers’ operational definitions of rape but do not label their experience as rape. The purpose of this study was to investigate women’s decisions about whether to label their experiences as rape. Participants were 77 college women (predominantly White; mean age = 19.23) who had experienced rape according to the study’s operational definition. The researchers used open-ended questionnaires and interviews to explore participants’ explanations for labeling or not labeling their experience as rape. Explanations were related to match—whether the incident matched their rape script (e.g., whether the man fit their image of a rapist; whether they fought back)—and to motivation—the perceived consequences of using the label (e.g., discomfort with thinking of the perpetrator as a rapist; feeling less self-blame vs. feeling less control or more traumatized). Over time, participants were more likely to label their experience as rape. Results suggested that individuals differ in the meanings that they ascribe to the label rape. For some individuals, labeling their experience as rape may be adaptive; for others, it may be unhelpful or even harmful. Researchers, clinicians, and advocates should use caution in imposing their own preferred labels on other women’s experiences.

Young sexual minority women disproportionately experience pregnancy, repeat pregnancy, and become parents, when compared with their heterosexual peers. Black sexual minority women who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are a part of three demographic groups likely to experience adolescent pregnancy. A paucity of research has examined why these young women become pregnant. The authors begin to address this gap by examining the meaning of pregnancy from young women’s perspective. Modified grounded theory was used to analyze data from interviews with 14 young Black sexual minority women, aged 16–24. Pregnancies, intentional and unintentional, were common among the participants and within their sexual minority community. Pregnancy affirmed sexual identity and same-sex relationships as well as garnered sexual and reproductive agency. Participants’ pregnancy experiences contradicted the belief that young women sought or valued pregnancy because it provided access to heterosexual privilege. Although the main functions of intentional pregnancies did not differ drastically from those of young heterosexual women, we argue that these young women’s pregnancy and parenting desires may be magnified because of the particular realities they face as sexual minority women. Further, we situate our analysis within the context of a Black cultural environment and argue that pregnancy and motherhood may be adaptive subsistence strategies for women who are largely socially devalued.

Many rape survivors seek help from the legal and medical systems post-assault. Previous studies have examined how social system personnel treat survivors, but less attention has been paid to how survivors attempt to shape their interactions with these systems. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine rape survivors’ agency—the active process in which they engaged to alter their experiences with the legal and medical systems. In-depth face-to-face interviews were conducted with 20 female rape survivors who had contact with the police and a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program. Analytic induction was the guiding analytic approach. Findings indicate that this group of survivors engaged in three agentic processes in their interactions with the legal and medical systems: compliance in order to increase the likelihood their case would achieve what they deemed to be a successful outcome, defiance through noncompliance in order to protect themselves from further harm, and defiance by challenging the response to their case in order to alter the response to their case. Based on these findings, possible strategies for facilitating survivors’ participation and agency during their help-seeking experiences (e.g., systemic changes to empower survivors, improving the responsiveness of system personnel to survivors’ needs) are discussed. Implications may be of particular interest to rape-victim advocates and legal and medical personnel.

Prior research suggests that rape victims who do not disclose or report to the police give reasons including self-blame and fear of judgment; however, this research has not been conducted with incarcerated women. Female offenders are a unique population because they experience high rates of sexual assault prior to incarceration. This study recruited 74 women at a U.S. state prison, who experienced sexual assault prior to incarceration to explore the associations among rape myth acceptance (RMA), disclosure, and reporting of sexual assaults to the authorities. Participants were asked open-ended questions regarding why they chose to disclose their sexual assaults to others, to report to the police, or to remain silent. Narratives were audiotaped, transcribed, and coded for thematic content. Women’s narratives, particularly those of women who indicated that they remained silent, frequently included a variety of rape myths that involved blaming themselves for the rape, fearing not being believed, believing that familiar perpetrators cannot be rapists, and questioning whether the event was really a rape. Women often described such rape myth beliefs with greater frequency than discussing situational characteristics of the rape as reasons for nonreporting. Implications for these findings in clinical, research, and social justice contexts are discussed.

People in distress often turn to friends for emotional support. Ironically, although receiving emotional support contributes to emotional and physical health, providing emotional support may be distressing as a result of emotional contagion. Women have been found to be more susceptible than men to emotional contagion in certain contexts, but no studies examined the context of providing support to a troubled friend in a naturalistic setting. Our exploratory study aimed to test for gender differences in emotional contagion as a result of offering emotional support to a troubled friend. We studied naturalistic informal supportive interactions among 48 pairs of friends. Following an 8-min interaction with a troubled friend, (a) women were more likely than men to experience a deterioration in their positive emotional state and (b) changes in women’s emotional state were positively correlated with changes in their troubled friends’ emotional state, whereas changes in male support providers’ emotional state were unrelated to changes in their troubled friends’ emotional state. These results suggest that women are more susceptible than men to emotional contagion following brief interactions with a troubled friend, thereby highlighting the importance of conducting additional research into the costs and benefits of exchanging emotional support among friends.

The primary aim of our study was to examine the influence of media exposure on body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in middle-aged women. A sample of 101 women, aged between 35 and 55 years, completed questionnaire measures of media exposure, thin-ideal internalization, social comparison, appearance investment, aging anxiety, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating. Television, but not magazine exposure, was positively related to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. In contrast, both television and magazine exposure were positive correlates of all four proposed media-processing variables (internalization, social comparison, appearance investment, and aging anxiety), which were themselves positive correlates of both body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Structural equation modelling revealed that the influence of media exposure was fully mediated by the proposed media processes. The analyses also indicated that our proposed sociocultural model of disordered eating provided a reasonably good fit to the data, suggesting that sociocultural theory can be extended to women of middle-age. An important practical implication of this finding is that strategies aimed at challenging and minimizing these media processes may reduce some of the negative impact of media exposure in middle-aged women.