For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

305 Pages·2012·1.62 MB·English

Barbara Ehrenreich AND Deirdre English
For Her Own Good
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 author of Re-making Love: The Feminization
of Sex (with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs); Blood Rites: Origins and History of the
Passions of War; Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class; The Hearts of Men:
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment; Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in
America and Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (co-
edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild).
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 former editor in chief of Mother Jones
magazine, she taught at the College at Old Westbury at the State University of New
York, the City College of New York, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. She
currently directs the Editing Workshops program at the Graduate School of Journalism
at the University of California at Berkeley.
ALSO BY Barbara Ehrenreich
AND Deirdre English
Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers Complaints and Disorders: The
Sexual Politics of Sickness
ALSO BY Barbara Ehrenreich
Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex
(with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs)
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy
(co-edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

SECOND ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2005
Copyright © 1978, 2005 by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New
York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Anchor Books/Doubleday in
1978.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76416-4
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
To our mothers,
Fanita English and Isabelle Isley
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Authors
Other Books by These Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
Asked for or not, advice is all around us—on the best-seller lists, in the self-help
sections in bookstores, crowding “history” and “literature” to the back, in magazines
and those sections of the local paper that used to be called “women’s” but now are
called “lifestyle” or “leisure.” Our not-so-distant ancestors were likely to depend on
neighbors and relatives to get them through the hazards of courtship, marriage,
childrearing, and various turning points in the life cycle; we are more likely to turn to a
physician, psychologist, therapist, or, most recently, a “life coach.” Even though we
know that reading another diet book will not make us thin, that understanding child
development will not substitute for time spent with our children, and that the hectoring
pop psychologist on TV cannot save our marriages, we are gluttons for disposable
information, especially when it comes labeled as the best that the “experts” have to
offer.
In many ways, our reliance on experts makes sense. As well-educated and experienced
people, they seem a source of advice far superior to anything a grandmother or aunt
might o(cid:643)er: they present themselves as objective and unbiased, basing their instructions,
implicitly or explicitly, on scienti(cid:633)c studies. If they sometimes turn out to be wrong, it is
only because the science underlying their advice evolves from month to month and year
to year, and new studies topple old ones. They have no axes to grind, no agendas to
advance—or so we are encouraged to believe.
But this trust has again and again been betrayed. Consider the medical profession,
which is the paradigmatic advice-giving guild in our society, and the one on which
other, often dodgier, advice-giving professions often model themselves. Currently
popular advice-givers, for example, call themselves “Dr. Phil” or “Dr. Laura,” although
most Ph.Ds avoid the title. One attraction of medicine is that it’s based on the natural
sciences, which should contain no room for bias, ideology, or subjective judgment.
Yet doctors routinely err. Individually they make mistakes, typically in prescribing
drugs, that account for as many as 98,000 deaths per year. Such a high volume of
mistakes should surely prompt a reexamination of medical training and the conditions
under which doctors work. More alarming though, as far as the scienti(cid:633)c claims of
medicine are concerned, are those cases in which doctors have collectively leapt on—or
clung to—beliefs that conform to their biases or have made for pro(cid:633)table practices, yet
have no basis at all in science.
The recent Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) scandal looks, at (cid:633)rst glance, like
an intellectually honest error. It had been known for some time that menopause ends
the female advantage vis-à-vis coronary heart disease, and since menopause involved a