For Her Own Good 150 Years of the Expert

ONE In the Ruins of Patriarchy

The Woman Question • The New Masculinism • Feminist and Domestic Solutions • Science and the Triumph of Domesticity

THE RISE OF THE EXPERTS

TWO Witches, Healers, and Gentleman Doctors

The Witch Hunts • The Conflict over Healing Comes to America • Healing as a Commodity • The Popular Health Movement • Lady Doctors Join the Competition

THREE Science and the Ascent of the Experts

The Moral Salvation of Medicine • The Laboratory Mystique • Medicine and the Big Money • Exorcising the Midwives

THE REIGN OF THE EXPERTS

FOUR The Sexual Politics of Sickness

A Mysterious Epidemic • Marriage: The Sexual-Economic Relation • Femininity as a Disease • Men Evolve, Women Devolve • The Dictatorship of the Ovaries • The Uterus vs. the Brain • The Rest Cure • Subverting the Sick Role: Hysteria

FIVE Microbes and the Manufacture of Housework

The Domestic Void • The Romance of the Home • Domestic Scientists Put the House in Order • The Crusade Against Germs • The Manufacture of New Tasks • Feminism Embraces Domestic Science • “Right Living” in the Slums • Domesticity Without the Science

SIX The Century of the Child

Discovery of the Child • The “Child Question” and the Woman Question • The Mothers Movement • The Experts Move In

SEVEN Motherhood as Pathology

The Expert Allies with the Child • The Doctors Demand Permissiveness • Libidinal Motherhood • Bad Mothers • “Momism” and the Crisis in American Masculinity • The Obligatory Oedipus Complex • Communism and the Crisis of Overpermissiveness

THE FALL OF THE EXPERTS

EIGHT From Masochistic Motherhood to the Sexual Marketplace

Mid-century Masochism • Gynecology as Psychotherapy • Revolt of the Masochistic Mom • The Rise of the Single Girl • Spread of the Singles Culture • Popular Psychology and the Single Lifestyle

Afterword: The End of the Romance (2004)

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments