For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to WomenThis dense, well-argued classic underscores the need to take expert advice with a shaker of salt. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English ably show that many experts gleefully hammer recalcitrant souls into a shape acceptable to society, rather than encouraging people to find their own way. The book plunges into 150 years of misbegotten advice to women and questionable insights into feminine nature that have many modern parallels. In the service of better living through science, women have undergone deprivational rest cures that most war rules would disallow, submitted to surgical bludgeoning of ovaries and uterus to quell a list of unladylike behaviors, and humbly followed childcare advice that amounted to abuse. Though slanted by its bent toward worst cases and offenses against only one sex, it offers much to mull over for hopeful seekers of mix-and-bake directions for a better life. |
Contents
TWO Witches Healers and Gentleman Doctors | 29 |
THREE Science and the Ascent of the Experts | 62 |
FOUR The Sexual Politics of Sickness | 91 |
Copyright | |
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American baby become began behavior biological Charlotte Perkins Gilman child raising child-raising experts Christine Frederick clitoris Congress of Mothers course culture disease domestic science domestic scientists Ellen Richards fact Fanny Wright father female invalidism femininity feminism feminist germs gynecologists healers healing Home Economics homemaking household housekeeping housewife human husband Ibid ideal ideology industrial infant Jane Addams Journal labor laboratory Ladies Lake Placid living male Market marketplace masculine masculinist maternal medical schools ment middle-class midwives moral motherhood nature neo-romanticism never nineteenth century Old Order Olive Schreiner organs ovaries overprotected parents patient patriarchal physician poor Popular Health Movement problem professional psychoanalytic psychology Quoted rationalist reform regular doctors relationship Rockefeller role romantic scientific sexual romanticism sick sixties social society Spock theory thing Thomsonian tion University uterus witch Woman Question women workers wrote York young