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In the context of the #metoo movement and the sobering need for continued attention to gender inequality in today's world, it is moving how optimistic and positive this volume can be. The focus of this collection of essays is broad and includes representations of the female body and psyche, what Helena Vissing has tagged “feminist-embodiment psychoanalysis.”
The most remarkable chapters include personal insights born of deep thinking about life experiences of gender inequality. This book provides a needed contribution, from the psychoanalytic world, to the integration of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking with the literature of gender studies.
This volume would be an excellent textbook choice for undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and psychoanalysis, as well as women's studies, anthropology and sociology. Each essay finds a way to address the need for women to claim what is uniquely theirs, and to struggle with the “binary world” that inevitably places women one down from men. The title's reference to Virginia Woolf may be quickly recognized in academic circles, and this unfortunate play on words (and the cover's inopportune reference to Woolf's suicide) may be a turnoff to prospective readers. To my reading, Woolf's call for women to have space, time and money of their own in order to make meaningful contributions is less nuanced than the clinical work reported here. These essays document the complexity of what women give and contribute, even as they are embedded in situations and cultures that can be misogynistic and unequal.
The book calls on women and men to gather together, to show power, take control over their lives, and speak up about injustices. The essays are presented in four sections: I. A culture of oppression, II. Women and sexual trauma, III. Women defining motherhood, and IV. Mother as therapist/therapist as mother. A meaningful clinical vignette from section I by Richard Ruth “‘We're not pregnant’: Gay men and reproductive rights,” rela