The present study examined the relationship of women's sex-role identity to self-esteem and ego development. One hundred fifty-three female undergraduate students at the University of Maryland were the volunteer Ss for this study. During class time these persons completed the Index of Adjustment and Values, used to measure self-esteem, and the Sentence Completion Test, ussed to measure ego development. From this pool of Ss four sex-role identity groups were determined: androgynous women, feminine women, masculine women, and undifferentiated women. Twenty-five from each group were randomly selected to comprise a final sample of 100 women. Results of the self-esteem analyses supported previous findings that androgynous women possess a higher degree of self-esteem than stereotypically feminine women and undifferentiated women, but revealed no significant difference in self-esteem between androgynous and masculine women. In contrast, the level of ego development of androgynous women was not significantly different from that of feminine and undifferentiated women but was significantly higher than that of masculine women. Overall results support the theory that a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics is beneficial for women in terms of both self-esteem and ego development.
Ethnic voices, when they speak of oppression, state their theme with authority. Eloquent immediacy distinguishes the literary treatment of oppression in Richard Wrighf s autobiography, Black Boy, and in Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev, a novel about a talented individualist in the Jewish society which Potok, as rabbi, painter, and writer, knows so intimately. 1 The ring of authenticity which informs the experiences lived by the personae in both books is the first of a number of properties these works share.As in many ethnic texts, the perils threatened by the hostile outside world provide a major theme here. The Wright of Black Boy early recognizes the omnipotence of what he calls "the white death"; while Asher Lev, from the time he understands who is is, knows that his heritage has been shaped by the Pharoah, Chmelnitzki and Hitler. In each work, the protagonist is conditioned by oppression which stalks him without quite striking him down. Wright observes, "The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly;... Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew." 2 Asher shudders as he observes of the crowded Brooklyn congregation, "With very few exceptions, every adult inside that synagogue had experienced the tyranny of Stalin" (Lev, p. 89).However, the most significant parallel is the variation these two works strike on the theme of oppression. Both books reach behind the prejudicial attitudes of the outside world to focus on the misunderstanding and the pain suffered by an ethnic at the heavy hands of his own people. The autobiography and the novel each tell an artist's story. In doing so, they demonstrate that an ethnic society is no more tolerant than any other of a member who marches to a different drummer. Indeed, the ethnic nonconformist is shown to provoke a special harshness from his already insecure people who view his differences as baffling and somehow threatening.The incident which opens Black Boy furnishes a mode of the incompatibility between the imaginative Richard Wright and the restraints of 73
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