Young Women Struggling for an Identity

In this article, I propose that many young women in today's world are facing an intense internal struggle to find their identity, and that this struggle is an effect of what they experience as enormous pressure to achieve certain goals. My belief is that, in the contemporary atmosphere of postfeminism in which women seemingly have many more options, the young adult woman experiences these options as expectations. The effect of these demands is an enormous self‐doubt where women feel worthless, unimportant, and often unable to go forward in their lives. This article focuses on the stories of 3 young women and their struggles: a 25‐year‐old White middle‐class woman whose obsessive longing to find the “right” man leads to eating difficulties; a 23‐year‐old lesbian, also White, who is just graduating from college and believes that she is terminally depressed; and a 29‐year‐old Chinese American woman who has fought anxiety and chronic fatigue for most of her adult life. How they find their way clearly exemplifies both the struggle and the road to success—overcoming self‐doubt and challenging the expectations that create the conditions for it.