Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice [Hardcover]

Stephanie Golden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

Slaying the Mermaid addresses the great numbers of women, of all ages, who find themselves constantly disregarding their own well-being to put the needs of others first--even against their will and contrary to their principles--because they cannot face the guilt they would feel if they didn't.
        
Mothers subordinate their smallest needs to their children's; daughters assume the burden of caring for elderly parents; wives sacrifice their careers for their husband's; in the office, women put in extra effort for their coworkers or the boss without making demands for themselves.
        
Despite the great changes over the past thirty years in our ideas about women's role in society and their potential for achievement, many continue to sabotage their own interests, stunt their emotional and intellectual growth, and deny themselves the full richness of life due to excessive self-sacrifice.
        
Drawing on conversations with experts and a diverse array of women, Stephanie Golden examines the dichotomy between selfhood and sacrifice. Using the image of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, the ultimate ideal of the self-sacrificing woman who gave up her voice and her life for an unrequited love, Golden offers a new paradigm for women: in order to run with the wolves, you must first slay the mermaid.
        
Golden helps women become conscious of self-defeating behavior that they may have been blind to or simply ignored. This book will help them reclaim their energy, creativity, and identity, while rediscovering the original, empowering meaning of sacrifice as an expansive and self-fulfilling act.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ah, the nobility--or is it futility?--of sacrifice. Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid willingly traded her voice and sensual, seagoing tail for feet that bled pitifully as she trailed her oblivious, beloved Prince. French philosopher Simone Weil was literally consumed by her fervid wish to be one with all suffering souls. And ordinary women sacrifice piece after piece of their bodies, dreams, and lives every day in search of acceptance or in service of others.

The fluid, engaging prose and high-mindedness of Slaying the Mermaid is a welcome approach to subject matter that could have been the centerpiece of a talk-show trauma fest ("Women Who Give Too Much and Keep Too Little for Themselves"). Stephanie Golden sheds light on the roots of sacrifice and the pleasures reaped from denial while shuttling between myths and religious mysticism, popular culture, and psychology. The women she interviews speak more often of selfless, often depressingly pointless, sacrificial acts than of feminist--or, rather, human--desires for self-realization. The ideal, Golden suggests, is to live mindfully, as in the teachings of Buddhism, walking away from sacrifices that leave one utterly empty and choosing those that connect us to a larger world through a replenishing cycle of nurturance. --Francesca Coltrera

From Publishers Weekly

According to Golden (The Woman Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness), women are often driven to put the needs of others before their own, a behavior exemplified by the "Little Mermaid," who, in the Hans Christian Andersen tale, gave up her life to save the prince she loved. Drawing on scholarly and contemporary research sources as well as interviews with a variety of women, the author presents an informed analysis of the religious, sociological and psychological forces that combine to motivate women to give to others at the cost of denying their own desires. In her empowering self-help guide, Golden argues that this unnatural self-denial has been expected of women historically, culminating in a 19th-century society that idealized "suffering" females. She posits that women can avoid destructive self-sacrifice and still satisfy their urge to give to others and perform altruistic acts by redefining the self not in the Western tradition of opposition to others but from the Buddhist perspective of the interconnectedness of the self to society.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 323 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; 1 edition (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517708124
• ISBN-13: 978-0517708125
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,921,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Got the Girl Scouts' Writer badge (the only one that interested me) when I was 12: that signaled the future. I began writing fiction, but discovered that what really compelled me was literary nonfiction--especially once I developed a way to use a central image as a method of analysis.

An image constrains and focuses thoughts while allowing you to come at your material from many different directions without losing coherence, since the analysis acquires its form from the structure of the image.

I used this method for both my literary nonfiction books:

* For "The Women Outside," a study of homeless and marginal women, it was the figure of the witch.

* "For Slaying the Mermaid," about women and self-sacrifice, it was Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid.

Literary nonfiction didn't pay the rent, but I like writing books, so I became a book collaborator and wrote five other books with experts. (For a series of articles on how book collaboration works, see my website: http://www.stephaniegolden.net.)

And since for a freelancer diversifying = security, I started writing all sorts of other things: magazine articles, newsletters, reports for nonprofits, grant proposals, training manuals, and lately websites.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful discussion of a complex problem, June 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice (Paperback)

I came across this book while looking for something else, and couldn't put it down. As a woman and a former Catholic, I got a double dose of the self-sacrificing ideal. Although I later rejected the notion of female subservience, I felt that the "masculine" ideal of individualism was equally unsatisfactory: in order to achieve self-realization, did one have to reject the positive aspects of self-sacrifice, such as compassion and concern for the good of the community (or humanity as a whole)?
Golden's discussion is the first I've seen that looks at this very complex issue in depth, both intellectually and emotionally, and comes to a balanced conclusion. Rather than urging women to reject self-sacrifice outright, she carefully considers the origins of the ideal and its pluses and minuses, and helps readers to judge for themselves whether self-sacrifice in a particular situation will enrich or deplete their lives. She doesn't give easy answers, but coping with a disabled parent, or trying to assist a mentally ill person to get help, aren't easy problems. This is a truly outstanding book, and I recommend it highly.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative, thoughtful and absorbing, November 9, 1998

By 

Sophia Nilsson (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice (Hardcover)

I came across this book by accident, and only bought it because I'm writing about women and caregiving and thought this might be salient. Well, was it ever! Although she begins with true stories from various interviewees that are a bit tedious, Golden then takes off on an historical and philosophical survey that is utterly compelling. There are many familiar notions here, but I've never seen them so comprehensively and perceptively addressed. I'm recommending this to all my friends, because I want to talk about it!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How Not To Be One of the "Women Who Love Too Much", December 1, 2002

By 

"mlajoue" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice (Paperback)

I assigned Slaying the Mermaid to my college seminar on mermaids and feminism. At first the students were not happy -- "Why must Ariel die?" they wondered. But the view that women need mutual rather than self-sacrificing relationships to be healthy, became convincing to them. Reading the original fairy tale and watching the (altered) Disney movie provided an informative context for appreciating Stephanie Golden's interesting and helpful book. We also read the chapter about The Little Mermaid in the edited book "From Mouse to Mermaid" and I recommend that as well. The current "hot" movement in popular psychology -- 'Positive Psychology' -- is not sensitive to issues of gender and culture, so Golden's book is a worthy contribution.