Understanding women's lived experience of inferiority

Understanding inferiority and the issues arising from it is one of the important concerns of social sciences. The most important groups that always experience and live with inferiority are children, women (especially female heads of households), and elderly people. The current research aims to study the lived experience of female heads of households covered by positive life centers of the Kashan Welfare Organization. The theoretical approach of the research is influenced by the findings of Freire, Gramsci and Margaret Ledwitt. By combining Freire, Gramsci’s, ideas, and Ledwit’ points to a model of community-oriented development and bottom-up development that has elements of appreciation for getting rid of poverty, critical awareness of people involved in poverty, emphasis on the issue of social justice and environmental sustainability.

The research approach is of a qualitative type, and in-depth interviews were conducted to collect data, and thematic analysis method was used for data analysis.

The findings show that women experience inferiority in the themes and concepts such as belief in the existence of discrimination in society, feelings of helplessness, insecure economic conditions, feelings of powerlessness, unstable family relationships, thirst for external support, and non-empowering organizational supports.

Due to their unstable economic conditions and the fact that they are discriminated in the society, such women are deprived of access to the sources of power in the society and they always feel helpless, and this factor causes them not only to get out of this cycle of poverty and They do not take action, but their dependence on external support increases.