Customer Reviews

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

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As a "baby boomer" woman, I really appreciated the chance to look back and review the history leading up to the changes we saw in our generation regarding women's rights and women's choices. It was particularly illuminating to have the transformations I myself experienced since childhood encapsulated in such a clear format; it helped me understand how my own grandmother and mother saw their roles. I enjoyed the authors' pithy and practical writing style.

This was a well researched (I spot fact-checked a few of the footnotes) and well written book about the history of the "Woman Question." The "Woman Question" changes over time, but it is a social class centered issue. Ehrenreich and English combine Conflict and Feminist theoretical perspectives without getting technical about it to give a solid backdrop into the history of how the medical and psychiatric/psychological professions came to understand what it means to be a woman and how women are. It takes a very different perspective of the same history we all share than do more traditional perspectives of medical history. People interested in women's issues would find this interesting.

This book deals with the subject of how doctors and experts have influenced the role of women in the US and the western world since the industrial revolution. I think there are better books on similar subjects, but it's probably worth noting that the first edition of For Her Own Good came out in 1978. Since it predates the books that it reminded me of, it could be seen as a trailblazer.

For example, The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, came out three years later, and used examples from the skewed "science" of measuring differences in intelligence between racial groups to skewer the very idea of intelligence as a quantifiable substance. These kind of intellectual gymnastics make The Mismeasure of Man a fascinating must-read.

For Her Own Good is not as gripping as Joan Jacob Brumberg's The Body Project (1997) which examines our society's changing perception of the adolescent female body.

If you want a really timely and shocking book about how the lives of women in our culture are being perverted by the intersection of corporate capitalism and the medical profession, I'd recommend Blaming the Brain by Elliot Valenstein (1998). Some statistics now suggest that over ten percent of American women are currently taking a prescription antidepressant, probably double the number of American men who are likewise medicated.

With the 2005 re-release of For Her Own Good, Ehrenreich and English had an opportunity to expand upon their earlier research, lengthen and deepen their social critique, and really say something interesting and meaningful about how women can and should emancipate themselves from a masculinist (their word), authoritarian, or consumerism-oriented western culture. I'm not convinced they gave it their best shot.

First, I have not read the book, but please keep reading my comment! I plan to read this book because the subject matter reminds me of another book I read three years ago, called "Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford" by Christina Hardyment. It covers three centuries of child-rearing advice, and you can see how trends in "expert" opinion on the proper way to raise children have shifted between permissiveness and order, between indulgence and discipline, between nature and nurture, and today's conflicts over child-rearing methods are nothing new.

I wanted to share this book with people considering Ehrenreich's book, because the material is related. I personally read the Hardyment book when my first child was only a few months old, and it helped me keep my head (and stop turning to "parenting" magazines for direction).

I've read "Nickle and Dimed" and found Ehrenreich to be an engaging and thoughtful author that presents a different perspective on situations (like work, physical labor, and servants) that we don't often get. I am not a democratic socialist, as Ms. Ehrenreich is, but I feel her work enriches my perspective on the world and helps me to "see" other people more.

Did you ever try to have a conversation with someone, but their ideology on unrelated topics kept you from communicating? This book is like that: unreadable.

Co-authored by an academic socialist in 1978, I read the 2005 edition to see if the authors learned anything in the interim. Apparently the Berlin Wall never fell, and the USSR never dissolved. Women's problems accelerated by not following Marx and Engels, the Industrial Revolution harmed and degraded everyone's standard of living, bla, bla.

Skip to the Conclusion and it's still more of the same: the Market (their erroneously definition of it) is the root of all women's problems. Wow.

I enjoyed this book although I found the style slightly less engaging than Barbara Ehrenreich's more recent Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Compared to Nickel and Dimed it is slightly dry and repetitive. However, for those who think feminism is still cool and relevant, there are some interesting themes.