Читать книгу Counseling the Contemporary Woman - Suzanne Degges-White - Страница 79

In Western cultures, the individual is encouraged to develop as an independent and competitive person who measures success through individuation and strength in isolation. Jean Baker Miller, Carol Gilligan, and Judith V. Jordan have questioned this widely accepted perception of human development and argued that this model does not fit for women (Miller, 1984). The differences between women’s experience and portrayed human development in psychological literature appeared to only signify differences in women’s development (Gilligan, 1982).

Women’s identity development as described by Helms (cited in Ossana, Helms, & Leonard, 1992) focuses on how women move from an external, societal definition of womanhood to an internal, personally salient definition of womanhood. The Helms womanist model presents more general development, and its stages resemble Cross’s black identity development model (Boisnier, 2003). Preencounter, stage one, is characterized by conformity to societal views about gender. Women think and behave in ways that devalue females and value males. In encounter, stage two, as new information and experience enters the woman’s life, allowing her to be more salient, she starts to question accepted values and beliefs. Stage three, immersion–emersion, is characterized by the idealization of women and the rejection of male views of women. Women in this stage tend to search for a positive self-affirmation of womanhood and express an intense affiliation with other women. In the final stage, internalization, a woman fully incorporates into her own identity her own positive view of what it means to be a woman. She refuses to be bound by external definitions (Boisnier, 2003). Such transformation results in women adopting positive views of themselves and being able to value themselves as women in whatever role they may choose for themselves rather than any role dictated by any ideology. Despite advance in society and additional choices, there are still gender disparities that occur. For instance, women continue to be paid less them their male counterparts in the workforce and continue to be underrepresented in STEM fields (Kim, Sinatra, & Seyranian, 2018). Social identity theory has been used to explain the different trajectory of women’s lives when it comes to career choice and development. While social membership can change, it is not always an easy process as it begins at an early age (Kim, Sinatra, & Sevranian, 2018). In addition to women’s identity development, early in preadolescent years, sexual identity development starts to take place.