"This cursed womb": The queen as mother on the early modern stage

While an early modern queen was expected to act as a stabilizing presence by giving birth to heirs and thus securing the line of succession, an examination of the early modern drama reveals that queens who were mothers were, on the contrary, perceived as threats to both domestic and political stability. Dramatic representations of queen mothers illuminate the historical and political contexts in which Queen Elizabeth, in particular, had to negotiate her roles as both a queen and mother. Gorboduc and Jocasta were produced in the midst of the succession debate as part of the widespread attempt to persuade Elizabeth to become a wife and mother. Yet paradoxically, these plays, with their monstrously (self-)destructive mothers, could only have reinforced Elizabeth's notion that biological maternity and queenship were incompatible. Despite Elizabeth's ultimate cultivation of a metaphoric maternity, prevailing fears of a queen mother's power remained, as evinced by two plays produced during the third decade of Elizabeth's reign. Shakespeare's King John demonstrates the ability of savvy political women such as Constance and Eleanor, who mirror the battling cousins Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, to exploit prevailing fears about maternity in their quests for political power. But they are killed off, just as Zenocrate, in Marlowe's Tamburlaine , falls prey to Tamburlaine's anxieties about her vast influence as both a queen and mother. Queen Anna, the wife of James I, provides an historical example of a young queen mother who capitalized on the power that maternity afforded her before she was marginalized in the Jacobean court. In the last years of her life, she attempted through masque productions, specifically Tethys' Festival, to recover her position as the Jacobean matriarch. Anna, like the other figures of this study, met a premature death. These portraits of maternity suggest that Elizabeth's decision to forego biological motherhood, rather than ending her legacy, instead may well have preserved it. In a culture in which a queen's maternal power was both feared and resisted, Elizabeth, understandably, elected to cultivate a maternity that threatened neither the patriarchy nor her own physical well-being

Women, work, and family: ways to well-being

The purpose of this research is to identify combinations of variables that most affect well-being among employed women. A hypothesized model of the stress and coping process examines the influence of situational demands on mediators, and mediators on well-being. Job and family strain, as well as coping resources such as spousal support, social support, and coping strategies were proposed to mediate between situational demands, represented by husband’s chore time, number of children, job flexibility, job hours, career stage, and job status and the outcome variable, well-being. Data from a national sample of 277 married, employed women representing dual-employed families were subjected to path analytic analyses using LISREL 7. Findings generally supported the proposed model. Results suggest that both role strain and coping resources mediated the stressor effects of situational demands on well-being.Ph. D