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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN March 20, 2005 Issue 
For Her Own Good, Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women By Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English Revised edition, Anchor Books, 2005 
The Not-So-Subtle Dominance of Women by Male Doctors For someone raised in an environment permeated with suspicion that the truth of anything is always hidden beneath layers of untruths, I am amazed at how I too am being swept into becoming a trusting American. The newly revised edition of "For Her Own Good, Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English demonstrates how generations of American women accepted debilitating restrictions and constraints on their emotional, sexual and parental life from doctors who invoked false scientific proof for their pronouncements. "For Her Own Good" traces the rise of the Woman Question with the social and economic changes brought on by the industrial revolution. "This book," the authors tell us, "is about the scientific answer to the Woman Question, as elaborated over the last hundred years by a new class of experts - physicians, psychologists, domestic scientists, child raising experts." These experts - mostly men - presumed to tell women how to live their lives by claiming that their authority came from scientific evidence. The extensive research Ehrenreich (a Ph. D. biologist) and English have done encompasses the entire story of women and man's struggle to dominate them by any means, even by fabricating scientific proof. The authors take us back to the witch hunt epidemic in Europe when women healers were accused of witchcraft and were burned at the stake. They also document how later on in a struggle for power and dominance, the male physicians succeeded in eliminating completely the women healers. Male physicians also made a concerted effort to bar women from medical schools. "Male doctors," the authors write, "recognized that women in the profession posed a threat which was far out of proportion to their numbers." They realized that women patients would prefer female physicians always if they were available. As an example of the physically, mentally and emotionally destructive practices of male doctors, the authors cite the 19th century theory "that woman's normal state was to be sick." Upper class women were frequently assailed by a vague illness of inability to function. Most certainly, the dress styles of the times contributed to this. A woman had to put up with a minimum of 21 pounds of corset pressure on her internal organs and carry on her person a minimum of 37 pounds of street clothing in the winter. But most frightening are the theories that subjugated women's minds and emotions to their reproductive organs. "The Uterus," the authors quote a Dr. F. Hollick, "is the controlling organ in the female body." The word hysteria derives from the Greek word for uterus. Thus, such thinking led to diagnosing women as hysterical and to subjecting them to senseless hysterectomies. In the cleverly titled chapter "Microbes and the Manufacture of Housework," the authors discuss the tyranny of the domestic scientists. In "Motherhood as Pathology" they explain how Dr. Spock's theories of permissiveness in child rearing backfired on society with increasing teenage problems. Most interesting is the discussion of the race with the Soviet Union to raise the best children. At that time the 'experts discovered' that American mothers had misinterpreted Dr. Spock and had indulged their children in "overpermissiveness." "Limits" and "values" became essential because the children of communism were raised with limits and as Dr. Spock noted, had a sense "of common purpose" and of making a contribution to the building of a new society. On a personal level, "For Her Own Good" validated my misgivings about the La Maze method of childbirth. In the same way this book will reassure many other women that their suspicions about certain pronouncements and practices by doctors are valid and important. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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