Interest in Women's Development

I’ve been interested in women’s development over my entire career. Early interests included women and heroism, women’s mental health, and, most recently, women and status. My interest in women and status is reflected in the “Tomboys and Dolls” theme of my presentations during the past ten years.

This interest had a funny beginning. In 1992 I was invited to a women’s traditional tea party. There were twelve professional women present, all with advanced degrees and successful careers. We had tea and cookies and conversation sitting in a big circle in my friend’s log house living room. There was a pause in the conversation and I asked, quite out of the blue, how many of them were tomboys as girls and how did they play with dolls. I had recently read an article about women with Ph.D.’s seeing themselves as tomboy girls and I guess the question came from my curiosity about the topic.

All but one saw themselves as tomboy girls. When asked to share their dollplay experiences, they told some hilarious stories which I’ve included in my article on dollplay.

Shortly after this experience I developed the Women’s Activities and Achievements Questionnaire and began piloting it on samples of college-age and adult women. Then I wrote a proposal and took this project with me to Ukraine where I taught for a year. And so it has grown over the years as I’ve added an Estonian sample and, this year, a sample of women from Denmark.

During this sabbatical, I want to finally write up my research for publication, either as a short monograph or research article.

For more information please e-mail me at: ljackson@bemidjistate.edu

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Last Updated on September 16, 2004