AbstractThis study focuses on three generations of Kurdish women's view on honor. The study is a qualitative research based on three individual interviews. The aim of this study is to examine how three generations of immigrant women from a culture of honor is influenced over time by the majority culture and its values together with how these women affect each other mutually both consciously and unconsciously within the family. The study is based on two questions: What does"honor" mean to the three generations of women who are Muslim and Kurdish? Did these three generations of women?s idea of honor change over time as they have lived in Sweden? Results of this study have shown that the concept of honor has its focus on the woman's body, sexuality and chastity.

Ulla Isaksson (1916 ? 2000) wrote many novels, often with a woman or several women as protagonists. In Dit du icke vill (?Where Thou Willst Not?) from 1956 she depicts a crisis of faith in a woman, which would not have been successful had she chosen a contemporary setting. She uses an adequate historical framework, the prosecution of witches in Sweden in the 17th century, well documented in reliable sources.

The aim of this qualitative study was to explore which inner conceptions about the abused older women the professional social workers had and how they experienced the enconter of an abused old woman in an intimate partner relation. The theoretical background is social construction by Berger and Luckmann. This theory was uset to analyze the transcribed interviews. This study is based on nine interviews with five professionals in social services, three volunteers from the voluntary sector and one social worker who worked in a community based support group for abused older women. The result of this study shows that older women were often abused, by a relative they were dependent on, in their home.

AbstractThis study focuses on three generations of Kurdish women's view on honor. The study is a qualitative research based on three individual interviews. The aim of this study is to examine how three generations of immigrant women from a culture of honor is influenced over time by the majority culture and its values together with how these women affect each other mutually both consciously and unconsciously within the family. The study is based on two questions: What does"honor" mean to the three generations of women who are Muslim and Kurdish? Did these three generations of women?s idea of honor change over time as they have lived in Sweden? Results of this study have shown that the concept of honor has its focus on the woman's body, sexuality and chastity.

The estimated number of people living in extreme poverty is 1.3 billion and 70% of those are women. The aim of this study is to explain in what ways and why women are regarded as poorer than men.The definition of poverty has expanded and is now multidimensional. In order to answer the aim of this thesis the following dimensions will be included and work as a theory in which the analysis will be structured after. Through a gender perspective, will the role of woman emerge through a multidimensional definition of poverty. If the balance is a negative in these dimensions, the situation for women will worsen and become permanent.

Work-Life Balance (WLB) is defined as the ability to manage both work-life and non-work life successfully. WLB can be evaluated by examining individual?s experience of Work-Family Conflict (WFC) and Family-Work Conflict (FWC), both of which can be assessed by a questionnaire developed by Netemeyer, Boles and McMurrian (1996). The aim of this study was to explore if responses to the questionnaire, the amount of time spent on studies, household chores and sick leave, were gender related or not, among civil-accountants students. The survey included 138 respondents (74 woman and 64 men).

Emma Eriksson and Christina Henriksson: Mirror mirror on the wall: A study on how ballad texts reflect women as carriers of tradition in nineteenth century Sweden, Växjö: Musikvetenskap C, 10 p 2005.The aim of this essay is to analyze relations between ballad texts and the lives of female carriers of tradition in nineteenth century Sweden. Four carriers of tradition have been chosen, connected by being informants to Gunnar Olof Hyltén Cavallius, a collector of medieval ballads in Sweden around 1850. The four women are Anna Ehrenström (1786-1857), Catarina Andersdotter (1792-1857), Johanna Gustafva Angel (1791-1869) och Wendela Hebbe (1808-1899). Their lives are seen from a women?s historical perspective.Although there are uncertainties regarding to what extent the collected repertoire of the four women reflects their repertoire as a whole, some conclusions can be drawn regarding relations between remaining ballads and their lives as women.

This master's thesis analyses the concept of equality between men and women in parts ofRegion Västra Götaland's area of operation. With critical policy analysis I analyse how theproblem of inequality is represented in the European charter for equality of women and men inlocal life (CEMR) and the Region Västra Götaland's plan of action for the charter. Throughinterviews with people responsible for gender equality in different areas I analyse, withdiscourse theory, the ways in which the concept of gender equality is articulated in differentareas of Region Västra Götaland, and what kind of politics these articulations enables.In the analysis I show that a discursive struggle of how equality is to be defined canbetter be understood as a discursive negotiation. Equality between men and women isunderstood in several ways at the same time, as antidiscrimination and basic human rights, asbalance between the sexes, and as an approach critical of norms and stereotypes. Within thesenegotiations certain understandings of gender are made possible or impossible.

This thesis discusses the subject of men?s violence towards women present day Sweden. My primary information consists of a national report, including men?s violence against women. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how men?s violence towards women is argued in the above named national report.

There was a silence surrounding homosexuality in the People's Republic of Poland. One can almost get the impression that same sex love, and same sex relationships, did not even exist there; that the communists had successfully removed homosexuality from society. The roots of this silence can be found in the Communist Party´s disdain for anything deemed individualist and deviant, and also in the conservatism and religiosity of the Polish society.In my thesis I study when and how gays and lesbians found a way out of the silence that surrounded their sexuality. Gay men did so by creating subcultures, which found refuge in parks, public bathrooms and a few bars in larger Polish cities, and offered a sense of belonging for them. Lesbians, on the other hand, lacked this access to semi-public spheres, which made it even harder for them to find each other and create a space for their sexuality.

This essay discusses the problems with the high rate of long-term sickness leave among women in Sweden. It is based on interviews with six women suffering from stress-related illness. The results show that these women hardly ever recieved an explicit diagnosis and therefore did not feel that their illness was acknowledged. In the abscense of measurable symptoms they were sometimes stigmatisized and accused of simulating their problems. From this position they tried to legitimize their situation by presenting themselves as respectable women.

The purpose of the thesis is to examine why women face greater difficulties than men in the management consulting industry when advancing as well as to identify potential success factors that enable women to overcome the existing difficulties. In order to fulfil the purpose, a theoretical framework including gender and organisational theory has been applied to a qualitative case study of two Swedish management consulting firms. A number of difficulties have been identified related to women's career advancement, which are the following: the male leader and the stereotypical male leadership, firms having higher expectations on women's performance, women's reluctance to self-promotion and to play "the organizational game", women's preference of social networks, men's tendency to promote other men, and the choice and conflict between a career and family life. The identified success factors that enable women to overcome these difficulties are: adapting the male leadership style, having an extrovert behaviour, becoming more active in professional networks, promoting one self, actively seeking to gain more attention, and prioritising one's career. These success factors can be summarised as women adapting a more male-like behaviour.

This masters thesis aims at a discussion about whether the public library will be an educating and cultivating society institution in the future. The method used is a combination of interviews with library staff in leading position and studies of the public librarys relationship to cultivation and adult education in a changeable society. The work concentrates on two main questions. One is about what, and in which way, changes, that are important for the public library and that take place in society now or within the next ten years, affect the future activities of the library. The other is about the public librarys relationship to cultivation in general and in the future.

This study intends to illuminate women?s experiences of their own self-harm. Self-harm is mostly associated with women and research shows that women mostly are over-represented. This study describes women?s experiences about their self-harm but also how they perceive the elements around them during their illness.

The purpose of this essay was to examine female immigrants of South East Asia who have lived together with a drug addict and how they were affected and let themselves be influenced by that, and to study their reactions to such situations.The main questions were:· How do the women describe their personal relationship matters with their husbands with focus on abuse / co-dependency?· How do they show their co-dependency in actions?· How do the women handle their co-dependency?I chose a qualitative method because my purpose was to get a comprehension and hopefully find a pattern in the life situation in this specific target group. Regarding the collection of dataI used both primary data in the frame of interviews with persons connected to the problem, and secondary data in the form of earlier studies in that field.As the main result I found that these women lived in a severe stress. They were affected both psychically and physically by the abuse of their partners. They developed different strategies of survival to stand the reality and to save the family.