Individualism, self‐evaluation and self‐fulfilment in the experience of mature women students

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Abstract
This article explores the responses of 43 mature women students to questions about their experience of higher education. All were interviewed whilst students and 23 were interviewed again almost 10 years later. The responses discussed here were not to questions about practical educational and personal problems which mature students encounter (important though these are), but to questions about the way their experience of higher education, and subsequently of their careers, affected their perceptions of themselves in terms of their sense of status, authority and self‐fulfilment: the ambiguity of their initial response led us to explore what they had to say within a theoretical framework which suggests that the relationship between education and gender in the late 20th century makes the management of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ self a difficult one for women to negotiate. As students they partially resolved the tension by espousing a counter‐cultural view of education stressing the importance of the ‘private’ over the ‘public’ self; ten years later, those in employment had found a more formal, less ambiguous expression of their cultural beliefs in public sector careers, especially in education and social work.

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