"Sure to spark controversy."
--"Feminist Bookstore News"
The most important book on the psychology of women in this
century. Reading this book is both a personal and intellectual
journey. "Loving to Survive" is an illumination both of abused
women and every woman's experience.
--June Peters, author of "The Phoenix Program"
Dee Graham clearly illuminates the connections between Stockholm
Syndrome, the production of feminine behaviors, and the entire
concept of heterosexuality. Her conclusions are frightening,
breathtaking, and extremely provocative. This book is compelling
reading for any feminist intellectual or activist, any female
victim of violence who is searching for meaning in her own
behavior, and all workers in the area of violence against
women.
--Marjorie Whittaker Leidig, former Clinical Director, Battered
Women's Research Center, Denver, CO
It is a great puzzle why so many women say they are not
feminist, why so many maintain loyalty to men of their own class
and race rather than women of other classes and races not to
mention women of their own class and race, why so many women don't
feel oppressed. Dee Graham's impressive scholarship brings us back
to a basic element of women's material condition: we live in a
society in which men are violent and consider the use of violence
an appropriate means of dealing with difference. Sure to become a
classic, "Loving to Survive" is a fascinating compendium of studies
with a long over- due analysis explaining the persistence of
femininity, heterosexuality, and women's love of men.
--Sarah Lucia Hoagland, author of "Lesbian Ethics: Toward New
Value"
""Loving to Survive" may be the most controversial--and
mostimportant--book written during the past two decades. In
asserting their theory, the authors ask readers to re-consider
virtually all that has been deemed true' about relationships
between men and women. Such a dramatic paradigm shift will
challenge most readers. Whether the reader likes or dislikes this
book, one thing seems certain: it will generate dialogue that will
surely engage people both intellectually and emotionally."
--Donna M. Stringer, feminist author and teacher and President,
Executive Diversity Services Inc.
Women who don't see any way to escape from an abusive man may
become psychologically linked to their abusers much like victims
held hostage by terrorists. According to Dee Graham, who has
surveyed hundreds of abused women, such women fear that if they
resist or try to escape, their partners might kill them. To avoid
further abuse, they try to please their abusers, start to see
themselves through their abusers' eyes, and begin to feel they
deserve abuse.
--"Ladies Home Journal"
Have you wondered: Why women are more sympathetic than men
toward O. J. Simpson? Why women were no more supportive of the
Equal Rights Amendment than men? Why women are no more likely than
men to support a female political candidate? Why women are no more
likely than men to embrace feminism--a movement by, about, and for
women? Why some women stay with men who abuse them? "Loving to
Survive" addresses just these issues and poses a surprising answer.
Likening women's situation to that of hostages, Dee L. R. Graham
and her co- authors argue that women bond with men and adopt men's
perspective in an effort to escape the threat of men's violence
against them.
Dee Graham'sannouncement, in 1991, of her research on
male-female bonding was immediately followed by a national
firestorm of media interest. Her startling and provocative
conclusion was covered in dozens of national newspapers and
heatedly debated. In "Loving to Survive," Graham provides us with a
complete account of her remarkable insights into relationships
between men and women.
In 1973, three women and one man were held hostage in one of the
largest banks in Stockholm by two ex-convicts. These two men
threatened their lives, but also showed them kindness. Over the
course of the long ordeal, the hostages came to identify with their
captors, developing an emotional bond with them. They began to
perceive the police, their prospective liberators, as their
enemies, and their captors as their friends, as a source of
security. This seemingly bizarre reaction to captivity, in which
the hostages and captors mutually bond to one another, has been
documented in other cases as well, and has become widely known as
Stockholm Syndrome.
The authors of this book take this syndrome as their starting
point to develop a new way of looking at male-female relationships.
"Loving to Survive" considers men's violence against women as
crucial to understanding women's current psychology. Men's violence
creates ever-present, and therefore often unrecognized, terror in
women. This terror is often experienced as a fear for any woman of
rape by any man or as a fear of making any man angry. They propose
that women's current psychology is actually a psychology of women
under conditions of captivitythat is, under conditions of terror
caused by male violence against women. Therefore, women's responses
to men, and to maleviolence, resemble hostages' responses to
captors.
"Loving to Survive" explores women's bonding to men as it
relates to men's violence against women. It proposes that, like
hostages who work to placate their captors lest they kill them,
women work to please men, and from this springs women's femininity.
Femininity describes a set of behaviors that please men because
they communicate a woman's acceptance of her subordinate status.
Thus, feminine behaviors are, in essence, survival strategies. Like
hostages who bond to their captors, women bond to men in an effort
to survive.
This is a book that will forever change the way we look at
male-female relationships and women's lives.
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