title: Embodied minds, restless spirits: mid-life rural women speak of their health.
abstract: This manuscript explores mid-life women's views of corporeality and the links that these have to their health. Using ethnographic interview techniques, community based interviewers talked with 24 women from rural settings. Our findings suggest that mid-life women have an embodied view of their minds and spirits, and that dualism is generally reserved for thinking about and interacting with the biomedical system. They have a sense of themselves as unique individuals who have a large role in caregiving, multiple other roles, and have luck but also agency in and control of their health and well-being. Motion was a strong theme throughout the interviews. Women embraced this mobility as a characteristic of their well-being as they coped with multiple changes associated with mid-life. In contrast to what some philosophers maintain, women seem to partner both corporeal changes and metaphor. While the sample was limited in scope, the findings support the importance to women's health of understanding the intersections between compositional and contextual variables in various settings.
authors.affiliation: Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Nursing, Institute for Gender Research, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. thurston@ucalgary.ca
authors.forename: Wilfreda E
authors.initials: WE
authors.lastname: Thurston
authors.forename: Lynn M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Meadows
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D000416:Alberta; D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D001294:Attitude to Health; D005260:Female; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D019222:Mind-Body Relations, Metaphysical; D011788:Quality of Life; D012424:Rural Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012649:Self Concept; D029181:Spirituality; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires