Foreword (2004)
ONE In the Ruins of Patriarchy
The Woman Question • The
New Masculinism • Feminist and Domestic Solutions • Science and the
Triumph of Domesticity
THE RISE OF THE EXPERTS
TWO Witches, Healers, and Gentleman Doctors
The
Witch Hunts • The Conflict over Healing Comes to America • Healing
as a Commodity • The Popular Health Movement • Lady Doctors Join
the Competition
THREE Science and the Ascent of the Experts
The Moral
Salvation of Medicine • The Laboratory Mystique • Medicine and the
Big Money • Exorcising the Midwives
THE REIGN OF THE EXPERTS
FOUR The Sexual Politics of Sickness
A
Mysterious Epidemic • Marriage: The Sexual-Economic Relation •
Femininity as a Disease • Men Evolve, Women Devolve • The
Dictatorship of the Ovaries • The Uterus vs. the Brain • The Rest
Cure • Subverting the Sick Role: Hysteria
FIVE Microbes and the Manufacture of Housework
The
Domestic Void • The Romance of the Home • Domestic Scientists Put
the House in Order • The Crusade Against Germs • The Manufacture of
New Tasks • Feminism Embraces Domestic Science • “Right Living” in
the Slums • Domesticity Without the Science
SIX The Century of the Child
Discovery of the Child •
The “Child Question” and the Woman Question • The Mothers’ Movement
• The Experts Move In
SEVEN Motherhood as Pathology
The Expert Allies with the
Child • The Doctors Demand Permissiveness • Libidinal Motherhood •
Bad Mothers • “Momism” and the Crisis in American Masculinity • The
Obligatory Oedipus Complex • Communism and the Crisis of
Overpermissiveness
THE FALL OF THE EXPERTS
EIGHT From Masochistic Motherhood to the Sexual
Marketplace
Mid-century Masochism • Gynecology as
Psychotherapy • Revolt of the Masochistic Mom • The Rise of the
Single Girl • Spread of the Singles Culture • Popular Psychology
and the Single Lifestyle
Afterword: The End of the Romance (2004)
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Barbara Ehrenreich has written and lectured widely on subjects
related to health care and women's issues. She has contributed
articles to Time, Harper's, and The New York Times Book Review,
among others. She is the bestselling author of nearly 20 books
including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch.
Deirdre English has written, taught, and edited work on a wide
array of subjects related to investigative reporting, cultural
politics, and public policy. She has contributed to Mother Jones,
The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review, among other
publications, and to public radio and television.
“A splendidly bold and readable review of medical, psychological
and social theory since the industrial revolution.”—The Guardian
(London)
"A landmark work: It changes everything one believed before about
doctors, scientists, and all other kinds of patriarchal experts.
The most important work on women since The Feminine
Mystique."--Claudia Dreifus, author of Seizing Our Bodies, The
Politics of Women's Health Care
"For Her Own Good gives us a perspective on female history, the
history of American medicine and psychology, and the history of
childhood, unlike any we have had. I have read it with mounting
intellectual excitement, underlining, marking pages, arguing form
start to finish with its authors in my head. It is humanly and
theoretically fascinating, written with clarity, wit, and verve and
with a deep concern for the future."--Adrienne Rich
"For Her Own Good . . . uses rationality informed by moral insight
to meet the 'experts' head-on."—The Boston Globe
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