Based on the assumption that differences in personal meaning and in the social significance of loss predispose widows and divorced individuals to different, specific vulnerabilities during grieving, 410 separated, divorced, and widowed women, aged 23 to 76 years, with at least one child, completed the Multiple Affect Adjective Checklist, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory--Form C, the Attachment Index, and the Measure of Social and Intimate Relating. Process issues and qualitative response were explored with open-ended questionnaire items and a telephone survey with a selected sample of 12 respondents. An analysis of the results showed that future financial expectation significantly predicted positive outcome for all outcome variables and was more consistently related to adjustment than all other predictor variables. For all participants, expectation of future financial improvement was predictive of lower anxiety, hostility, depression, loneliness, attachment to the former spouse, and of higher self-esteem and more frequent social and intimate relating. This finding is interpreted as symbolic of a feeling of hope. (The remainder of the document reviews the literature on hope, including definitions of hope, the dynamics of hope, development of capacity to hope, measurement of hope, and its implications for psychotherapy). (BL)