Separation and the Sense of Competence-Loss in Women

The changing status of women in recent years has brought about a change in the ego ideal to which women aspire. For the new generations of women, the traditional value system of passivity, dependency, and submission are disdained and have become ego dystonic. In their place, assertion, independence, and achievement have become the acceptable norm.1 Women have had to reevaluate their ideas and incorporate this new norm into their definition of the competent woman. This reevaluation confirms earlier notions by Thompson,2,3 Horney,4‘5 and Zilboorg6 that psychic development occurs with and is influenced by social factors.

Cultural permission to succeed is now more available to women. For many women, to be considered competent by their peers means they must emphasize instrumental needs and career over affiliative needs and family life. Women can no longer depend on the secondary gains social permission to withdraw from competition once provided. This new emphasis becomes problematic because generations of traditional parenting still set the cultural pace of women's developmental climate. Parents continue to perpetuate dominant patriarchal notions. They teach and demonstrate to their daughters that the feminine woman must be passive, dependent, loving, conciliatory, and child-bearing. The feminine woman must relegate aggression, competition, and control to a minor, conflict-ridden place within the matrix of her personality. The products of such a developmental milieu contribute support to well-documented research findings that women have high affiliative needs. These needs motivate them to avoid success and to fear deviation from traditional values in order to avoid social rejection for being unfeminine.7-10