Mitchell, DavidMiddleton, SueDrewery, Wendy2026-09-162026-09-161995https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18655The concept of development as it is used in developmental psychology and human development requires re-examination in the light of post-Enlightenment doubts about the power of rationality and the possibility of progress. Increasing fragmentation of social life is also a concern raised by postmodern theorists. In this thesis I show how women who have taken primary responsibility for caring for children at midlife face a number of similar difficulties, particularly in relation to the “public” world. I argue that both liberal humanist psychology and liberal feminism are complicit in producing the impression held by many women, particularly women at home, that they are powerless social failures. The study uses a social constructionist framework to examine how five women develop and maintain a sense of themselves as responsible adults, as they negotiate their shifting multiple identities within different contexts of discursive and material constraint and possibility. The focus of analysis is on their decisions about responsible adulthood as they live them out in their personal lives. In each case, it was possible to identify a coherent, sustained sense of purpose or purposes which cut across the usually dichotomised categories of work and family. I argue that by their practical actions in everyday, unremarkable situations, these women demonstrate constrained but consciously ethical positions of concern for the direction of human development. Unlike feminist writers such as Carol Gilligan who suggest that care is a central preoccupation of women, I make no claim about the success of these particular efforts against some grand moral scale. Rather, I claim simply that the problems of plurality, relativism, and conflicting needs which are a feature of the “post-modem” world can begin to be addressed through respectful and care-full relationships at an interpersonal level, and that these women are consciously addressing such problems. The invisibility of women in the discourse of identity formation is seen as a product of the discourse, rather than as an effect of different socialisation, epistemology, or moral focus.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.Thesis