Professors Ehrenreich and English, whose kitchen-table pamphlet
Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers is an
underground classic, branch out from healing to other important,
traditionally female tasks in America that have been "scientized"
by the "experts." Moving chronologically from the late 18th century
when "old-fashioned" midwifery was ousted by "scientific" doctors
(who sometimes lost leeches in their patients' vaginas) to the
swinging, morally impoverished present, the authors chronicle the
unhappy search for a solution to "the Woman Problem." As long as
women in colonial America had real work to do (despite their
officially inferior status), no woman problem existed. Only after
the Industrial Revolution moved work to the marketplace did women
get stuck in the "domestic void." Hysteria, neurasthenia, and
(peripherally) the women's movement rushed to fill that space until
expert "domestic science" taught women their duty. Soon after,
scientific child-rearing experts boosted industrial ("scientific")
motherhood and libidinal ("fulfilling") motherhood. But then the
experts turned angrily against "Momism" and the selfish little
brats themselves, launched a dangerous "psycho-gynecology," pushed
drugs on women "diseased" with "resisting their feminity," and
finally came up with "masochism" as the main feature of the
increasingly scarce "true woman." Enter the 1960s single working
girl to catch the experts with their theories down and turn
"housewife" into a dirty word. Now, the authors conclude, millions
of women seek individual "liberation" of one sort or another while
some defensive moms join the right-wing "neo-romantic" campaign
against abortion and equal rights; and rational feminism, shy of
radical solutions, tiptoes around the issues. This highly complex,
fascinating history unfolds in meticulously documented, eminently
readable prose. And it's hard to fault the rational feminist
perspective that seems pure common sense. Bonus: it is often funny,
as some of the milder absurdities of sexism must be. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Are women by their very nature as frail, as prone to disease, as
vulnerable and as inept as the experts appear to believe? In For
Her Own Good, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English dismantle 150
years of scientific and medical advice to women and ask why it was
that women were apparently so eager to accept the opinion of
'professionals' on every aspect of their lives - be it health care,
childcare, motherhood, diet, housework, or sex. Were the rules and
logic of scientific progress, supposedly working for the good of
humanity at large, as impartial as they were claimed to be? Or were
the expert opinions in fact just another weapon in the arsenal of
patriarchy - an effective device to subjugate adn neutralise women?
Ehrenreich and English supply a fascinating perspective on female
history in this brilliant account of pundits and their victims over
the last century and a half.
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