Gendering Women: Identity and Mental Wellbeing through the Lifecourse

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence

Gendering Women is an engaging and accessible account of how constructions of femininity fundamentally affect women's mental wellbeing through the life course.

Led by womens life history accounts of growing up and growing older in the north of England, this book shows how experiences of becoming and being a woman in family life, education, employment, motherhood and situations of violence both enable and erode self confidence and esteem. The challenges to womens mental wellbeing cut across age and class differences and have profound impacts on the material conditions of womens lives throughout the life course. This is in turn a driver of inequality that is often under-recognised in mainstream policy.

Based on feminist and ethnographically informed research with over five hundred women Gendering women provides a critical link between gender theory and the lived realities of womens daily lives and will appeal to students and academics in sociology and social sciences.