Women’s Socially Constructed Grief Response
With a backdrop of the socially constructed roles of women on one hand, and the social and cultural context of the loss and grief on the other, it is useful now to merge the two for a better understanding of women’s possible experiences of loss and grief.
The Traditional Woman’s Response to Loss and Grief
Generally, the traditional woman deals with her grief in the most productive manner of the three sex roles (transitional and modern/postmodern being the other two). Her grief is profound and intense. Again this has to do with the traditional woman following the blueprint for what a woman is “supposed” to be, and according to traditional ideology, women are emotional (generally far more emotional than men). Historically, the display of emotion was assumed to indicate weakness; therefore it is appropriate that women (the weaker sex) are the ones who show grief.
The traditional gender role, though constrictive and limiting in most of its other manifestations, does allow for a productive manner in dealing with grief. In fact, it could be taken as a model for grieving because as humans we not only have emotions but also an inherent need to express them. To deny or repress those emotions leads to many physical and emotional problems otherwise easily prevented (Charles-Edwards, 2005). In dealing with loss and grief, the cultural premium placed on stoicism, or “taking it like a man,” is particularly destructive, and a healthy acceptance of our emotional natures is called for. Emotion is not a sign of weakness or of inability to deal with the world. Grief is the natural response to loss and cannot and should not be denied.
Traditional women’s identities are dependent on their relationships, so a loss of those relationships necessitates an immediate confrontation of that loss. It is difficult for a traditional woman to subvert her feelings and divert herself with work. She must deal with the loss immediately. She must confront her role and its dependence on the one or thing that she has lost. The most extreme reaction a traditional woman could have in this situation is typically severe depression or even suicide. Less frequently, she can choose to reevaluate her role, perhaps even assuming the role of a transitional woman—someone whose identity expands beyond the boundaries of the task-specific, caregiver role so tightly bound up within the traditional role.
Because women tend to live longer than men, a very common loss for a traditional woman is that of her spouse. When her husband dies, a traditional woman is likely to face being alone for the first time in her life. For a traditional woman, the most common initial reaction to the death of a spouse is usually shock, numbness, and disbelief (Silverman, 1981). Even when a traditional woman anticipates the death of her spouse (as in “anticipatory grief”), the length and pervasiveness of these reactions may be lessened, but they are seldom alleviated. Intervals of irritability and anger continue in the day or two preceding the funeral. During this time, the woman continues to function in her role as wife. Physically, she may have trouble concentrating and may not feel well. However, the funeral is often a time of breakdown. The widow may cry uncontrollably, fluctuating between agitated distress and silent despair. Following the funeral, she will probably continue to meet her social obligations, but otherwise she is withdrawn. She may have trouble accepting that her husband is really gone, a reaction known as denial. Her emotions may include guilt, depression, insomnia, anxiety, and blaming herself and others. Guilt is a common emotion for the grieving traditional woman. She may feel that she could have done something to prevent her husband’s death, that she should have treated her husband differently. Or she may feel guilt for having felt relieved by his death (if the relationship was a negative one). She may be overcome with executing the acts associated with her husband’s estate, or she may avoid those responsibilities altogether, relying on someone else to deal with them.
In short, a husband’s loss is considered a great one to the traditional woman in terms of her position and dependence (emotional and possibly financial as well) on her spouse.1 She must come to terms with the fact that she is no longer a wife, and so she has lost the identity with which that role provided her. Without her husband to care for, her role as caretaker is drastically reduced, and she may lose self-esteem because of this. For a woman who saw her value as a person as being bound up with being able to please and care for her husband, the death of her spouse often means she is likely to feel less worthy. She must find a new identity or other reason to live and value herself as her self, possibly for the first time in her life. This is no easy task. The grieving process, then, for the traditional woman, is often a long one. (Interestingly, when a woman is widowed, she is five times less likely to remarry than a man.)
For a traditional woman, the death of a child tends not to challenge her role as a mother to the same extent that the death of a husband challenges her role as spouse. The traditional woman does not rely on her children to create her identity to the same extent as she does her spouse. In the case of the death of a child, the grieving and recovery process will necessarily entail that the traditional woman comes to terms with herself as a person, and although the process of self-discovery may be painful and difficult, it will probably open up possibilities that are both fulfilling and liberating. The fact that lack of an identity outside the relationship (particularly with a spouse) forces the traditional woman to deal with her loss, and is productive in that sense, it is less so in both transitional and modern women’s lives in the sense that it is often easier to suppress grief and avoid dealing with loss because these women’s identities are not so dependent upon their relationships (particularly with spouses or significant others). Avoidance of dealing with loss is not healthy on several fronts. In this regard, an argument can be made for the traditional woman dealing with loss and her grief more productively than women in transitional and modern/postmodern roles.
The Influence of Cultural Diversity on Traditional Roles and Response to Loss and Grief
Many ethnic cultures encourage women to mourn a loss by reacting with hysteria, which is consistent with the view that women are inherently more emotional or even that emotion is a feminine trait that men do not have. Of course we think differently today, but in Western society there is still an emphasis on logic and thinking that is an important part of being human. In other cultures, woman may be encouraged to express their emotions openly, such as in Latin cultures. Caucasian Americans are less involved with dying and death than most cultures, and as a result, have a much more difficult time dealing with grief and loss.
The Transitional Woman’s Response to Loss and Grief
When a transitional woman is undergoing an identity crisis and is then confronted by the loss of someone she loves, the manner in which she reacts is dictated by the role that she most identifies with. She may try to be strong like the modern woman, or she may resort to her traditional role and be more consumed with her grief.
As stated earlier, the traditional woman’s reaction to grief is one of expression. The transitional woman, in some ways, still identifies herself by the people closest to her and is therefore greatly affected by another’s death, such as the death of a spouse. The transitional woman is also already in the process of reevaluating her role in relation to others, so she is not quite as profoundly affected by her sudden state of widowhood, for example, as a traditional woman would be. She thinks of herself less in terms of being someone’s wife.
The death of a parent of a transitional woman may accelerate the woman’s progression through her identity reevaluation, especially if the parent was instrumental in impressing upon her that she must conform to certain values. A key point is that many traditional women, upon experiencing a loss, become transitional women. This is only after a period of intense grieving when the woman is forced to reassess her role now that the person that essentially defined her is gone. Similarly, transitional women are more likely to become modern women once the experience of loss leads them to even more directly confront their sex-role classification. The transitional woman who is in a rapid state of transition is more likely to be preoccupied with her role reassessment and will be distracted by loss. Her emotions, as she tries to analyze them and fit them into the context of her changing role, are confusing to her. She is more likely than the traditional woman to deny the loss. As she fluctuates between the two roles (traditional and modern/postmodern), she alternately adheres to the way each typically reacts to loss. Some days she feels good, putting up the strong front of the modern woman. She is affected, but she feels as if she must attack the problem head-on in order to come to terms with it. Other days she feels devastated. She expresses her anguish as a woman adhering to a traditional role would do.
Because there is a conflict of how she should react, the grieving period may last longer for a transitional woman than a modern/postmodern woman, for example. She may suppress grief and experience delayed reaction and response. The progress of a transitional woman through grief is less smooth than that of the traditional woman, in that she must handle her identity crisis and reconcile her loss simultaneously.
The Modern/Postmodern Woman’s Response to Loss and Grief
The modern/postmodern woman tends to respond to loss and grief as an expected life occurrence. The Internet has exposed her to death and dying in many ways, levels, and cultures around the world. Generally speaking, she is more able than the traditional or transitional woman to put her grief into the context of the universal experiences of loss and death. Although she relies on family and close friends to help her deal with her loss, she is also likely to call on virtual communities for comfort and support. This broader circle becomes important to her, and over time she tends to rely on them less and less as she assimilates her loss into her life. It is not that she is any less affected by loss and grief than women in other role classifications; it is that she is generally more equipped to place it within a larger context. As caregiver, and receiver, regardless of her role at home or at work, her family, friends, and the communities to which she aligns acknowledge that she will need some time to adjust. The extent to which various cultures define her role in grief influences her expression of grief, but cultural influence is ameliorated by her modern/postmodern stance in her own interpretation of her life. Typically, the modern woman pays homage to her cultural role within the context of loss and grief, but she assimilates those expectations into her life and resumes her “regular” life fairly quickly. If she feels more help is required, she will turn to her designated support groups or professionals whose specific expertise she feels she needs.
However, age of the woman is a factor influencing the ease with which she assimilates death into her own life. Women who are middle-aged or elderly may have experienced changing roles in the course of their lifetimes. They may have been exposed to or raised in households that reflected the patterns and values inherent in any of the role classifications, and any one or more of them may have become the norm of how they were raised. So that regardless of the age of the woman at the time of her loss, she may feel obligated to pay some homage to each of the roles she has transitioned through, and perhaps to, the various groups of people that fit those roles (e.g., family members who adhere to traditional roles), as these people are still significant in her life. This makes her expression of grief more complex and in some cases more schizophrenic because of her feeling that she needs to meet multiple role expectations simultaneously. (Age and life circumstance are addressed more fully in Chapter 5: Factors Influencing Grief Response.)
A Word about Gender and Its Influence on Grief Response
Historically, in the Western world, where individuation is prized and autonomy is the goal of human development (Erikson, 1959), little value has been placed on a model of interdependence when it comes to dealing with loss and/or grief. In fact, dependence has been linked to chronic grief as a pathology (Parkes and Weiss, 1983). From a gender perspective, autonomy in grief has been ascribed to masculine (or manly) traits, and dependent behavior has been ascribed to feminine (or womanly) traits (Lassonde, 2002).
In our view, the pathology of grief that has been associated with stereotypical feminine behavior has been mis-assigned (others also support this view, e.g., Silverman and Klass [1996]). We acknowledge that research exists that indicates sex-role conditioning whereby men and women grieve differently and have different needs in grief (Rando, 1988). But even in Kübler-Ross’s last book (2004), she explained that there is no typical response to loss. Grieving is individual. And more recently, Attig (2011) looks at grief from a gender-neutral human, rather than a gender-centric, perspective, a phenomenological perspective.
Some people have successfully integrated the masculine and feminine within themselves and have come to terms with and given significant value to each. These individuals generally experience fewer problems dealing with loss. To them, the emotion does not indicate weakness, but possibly even strength. The woman (or man) who has rejected the feminine tends to experience problems when someone she cares for dies. She rarely permits herself to cry on receiving news of the death and at the funeral, but after this, she may suppress her emotions when she would otherwise be progressing through this difficult time in her life. She adopts a stoic position, keeps a “stiff upper lip,” and though the people around her would certainly comprehend and sympathize with her feelings, she appears to be “handling it well.” This suppression of such strong emotions is not a healthy way to grieve. The unexpressed feelings will manifest themselves in more detrimental ways later. Physical symptoms, which may come from this suppression, include colitis, back pain, severe headaches, ulcers, or other stress-related diseases. In her avoidance of appearing feminine or weak, the woman who has not integrated her masculine and feminine principles experiences an unnecessarily difficult and complicated grieving process.
Gender roles in today’s society seem to make little sense. Rigid role definitions separate rather than unify in the most essential sense: they separate us from ourselves, causing us to suppress characteristics that are inherent to human nature. All of us have both masculine and feminine tendencies—tendencies of equal value and equal weight. In learning to cope with loss and grief, it may, in fact, be the traditional women’s process of coping that can be used as a model for grieving. This would apply to both men and women equally, and to women who have adopted what has traditionally been masculine, antifeminine, anti-emotional characteristics. Our argument is not for the obfuscation of traditional gender roles and standards, but for accepting and valuing the “feminine” capacity to deal with grief and loss. It is a more natural and healthy way of coping than is the masculine mode of denial and suppression. Both feminine and masculine traits are embedded within each human being, so assigning these traits to either women or men exclusively denies the dual capacity inherent in each individual. Both those capacities are important when it comes to grief response.
Note
1. A Kalish and Reynolds study (1976) identified that all age groups except the 40- to 50-year-olds found the death of a man and the death of a woman to be equally tragic. (The 40- to 50-year-old group fit within the traditional role classification, and women were more impacted than men.)