Gendering Women

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licenceGendering Women is an engaging and accessible account of how constructions of femininity fundamentally affect women's mental wellbeing through the life course. Led by women s 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 women s mental wellbeing cut across age and class differences and have profound impacts on the material conditions of women s 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 women s daily lives and will appeal to students and academics in sociology and social sciences.