Synopses & Reviews
A provocative new perspective on female history, the history of American medicine and psychology, and the history of child-rearing unlike any other.
Table of Contents
Foreword (2004) 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