Westchester Community College

This chapter briefly outlines Chopin’s religious biography within a predominantly Catholic environment, as she grew up in a religious family and culture during a time when Catholicism underwent an enormous shift in the United States. This chapter distinguishes her from her Catholic literary peers, who, from 1840 to 1920, infused much of their fiction with Catholic doctrine and pious examples of womanhood. But Chopin appears not to have been interested in converting or preaching to readers; instead, she seems to have been a woman of her time. For Chopin, though she does not appear to have had a particular, intentional religious or social agenda, the fascination with human lives and drama took precedence and her observations and artistic renderings of human behavior subordinated any kind of religious directive within her fiction. Therefore, this chapter demonstrates how, in the midst of this massive shift in Catholic and American culture, she wrote in response to her world, reflective of the people who lived and breathed within it.

This chapter breaks new ground in Chopin studies as it extends the exploration of The Awakening to deeper levels and focuses on specific short stories that depict or suggest mystical experience, including “Two Portraits,” “A Morning Walk,” “After the Winter,” and other stories. This chapter compares the representations of mystical experience to the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, as well as the documented mysticism of other Catholic mystics, including Saint Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich. The mysticism that emerges in several of Chopin’s stories functions similarly to the Catholic aesthetic in her other texts—and perhaps it may even be considered to be an extension of that same aesthetic in that it foregrounds the cultural and societal contexts and obstacles that individuals and human relationships encounter. This chapter, therefore, probes the depths of mystical experience in Chopin’s texts, moving beyond the argument that the Catholic aesthetic is used as a literary tool, but extending that argument to an authorial awareness (or presumption) of multiple levels of existence beyond the temporal world.

Children from different socioeconomic backgrounds have differing abilities to delay gratification, and impoverished children have the greatest difficulties in doing so. In the present study, we examined the role of vagal tone in predicting the ability to delay gratification in both resource-rich and resource-poor environments. We derived hypotheses from evolutionary models of children’s conditional adaptation to proximal rearing contexts. In Study 1, we tested whether elevated vagal tone was associated with shorter delay of gratification in impoverished children. In Study 2, we compared the relative role of vagal tone across two groups of children, one that had experienced greater impoverishment and one that was relatively middle-class. Results indicated that in resource-rich environments, higher vagal tone was associated with longer delay of gratification. In contrast, high vagal tone in children living in resource-poor environments was associated with reduced delay of gratification. We interpret the results with an eye to evolutionary-developmental models of the function of children’s stress-response system and adaptive behavior across varying contexts of economic risk.

This study had two objectives: (1) examine the impact of self-concealment on identity formation and on degree of psychological distress and (2) examine the impact of perceived stigma on identity formation and on degree of psychological distress. Analyses were conducted on a diverse sample of 166 women, ages 18–32 (white lesbian, non-white lesbian, white heterosexual, and non-white heterosexual). Findings revealed that self-concealment was positively associated with psychological distress in stigmatized women, but unrelated to psychological distress in the non-stigmatized group. Furthermore, although perceived stigma negatively impacted identity formation in the heterosexual groups, it did not impact either group of lesbians. Finally, non-white heterosexual women's perception of stigma was associated with psychological distress. Implications and specific psychological health disparities between groups are discussed.

Occupational segregation is one of many reasons why women who move from welfare to employment fail to achieve self-sufficiency. It is particularly acute in occupations such as the uniformed services (the military, police, fire fighting, and corrections), which offer the salaries, benefits, and security necessary to make financial independence a reality. The evidence suggests that women continue to be underrepresented in these occupations, largely as a result of such barriers as bias, stereotyping, and tokenism; the existence of hostile workplace climates and the influence of workplace cultures; and the lack of adequate workplace supervision. The role of social work in addressing this problem is discussed, with particular attention to issues of public education, working with women and organizations, and policy change.

No abstract available.

Abstract Examples of distinctive community college programs, services, and delivery systems indicate just how distinctiue these educational institutions are.