Social Support and Redefinition of the Women Without Spouses as Mothers: A Research in Neighborhoods of Afsariyeh And Abbasabad In Tehran City

In this research, we try to find how taking social-family support affects the women without spouses redefining their maternal identity. this research is conducting in the two neighborhoods of Afsaria and Abbasabad in Tehran and conducted based on the grounded theory approach. Data was gathered by semi-structured interviews and also observation. Findings show that women after being in the position of losing their husbands, going through a period of grief and mourning and stay in different situations. Open coding led to the three categories of happy widows, sad widows, and wondering widows. Happy widows can be categorized as dependent women, independent women, and warrior women. Women without spouses redefine their maternity identity in their new position. During the redefinition process, women without spouses can be found in 5 paradigms of the perished woman, dependent woman, wondering woman, warrior woman, and independent woman.Mothehood is the basical part of ridifining identiry of women without spouses, and having family-social support is efective in redifining the maternal identity of them.As perished women and dependent women can be called perished and dependent mothers.Oriented familie’s support is essential in shaping the identity of dependent mothers.