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Sad to say for women, this book is timely in our present United States political climate that is striving against social progress. The authors address the ongoing resistance in society and individuals to women’s basic rights to have dominion over their own bodies and minds. This same story of female subjugation goes back at least to the ancient Greeks.† Women themselves alas can echo that conscious or unconscious desire, perceiving it as their best survival strategy.
These tragically abiding struggles in society and individual hostilities generated by treating “female” as a negative “otherness” will be no surprise to most psychodynamic therapists. What is perceived as “other”—in this case embodied women and I believe especially in their procreative roles—calls forth aggressive desires to master and to regulate them.† Such features of women’s lives can be readily exemplified and explored in relation to social history, the law and institutions. These topics are gathered into this wonderful contemporary volume of writings. The collection also encompasses and examines the complex psychic processes that result in many of the contemporary subjective discomforts of being female, and inhabiting the female body in a recalcitrant society.
The editors Ellen Toronto, JoAnn Ponder, Kristin Davisson, and Maurine Kelber Kelly have done an excellent job of maintaining a
balance between offering conceptual guidelines and a structure about how to think more searchingly on the topics, while offering plenty of intimate individual details of personal struggles. People at every level in the mental health profession can benefit from this book. I also recommend the essays as good teaching texts for seminars in psychiatric residencies and psychotherapy and analytic training programs.
The book is arranged in four sections. Each is introduced by one of the four editors. Serially they address the culture of oppression as an overview; women and sexual trauma; women defining motherhood; the ther