2015 books: 57-60
Jan. 6th, 2016 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanI'm not quite done the last book on this list, but I'm far enough into it that I'm going to count it towards my 2015 total.
She writes well and it's obvious that she has a huge amount of compassion for her patients. One of the repeating themes in her essays is how the goals of therapists and institutions in their role of "helping" people may often be at odds with the needs and goals of the patients themselves. Mental health professionals generally work towards reducing symptoms to a degree that the mentally ill can learn to "behave appropriately" and therefore live outside an institution, regardless of whether or not that actually increases the happiness of the patient. I frequently found myself being reminded of the conflict between Jung and the other doctors in Timothy Findlay's Pilgrim - many doctors disapproved of Jung's methods because he wanted to understand his patients' delusions instead of spending his time trying to convince them to abandon them. (Or at least pushing them to pretend they had.)
Like most self-help books it's also overwhelming targeted at the upper-middle class. At one point she talks about new mothers going back to work as an example of a woman putting her own needs over the needs of her children without any acknowledgement that for some children; mom doesn't work = junior doesn't eat.
So anyway, I didn't finish it. Into the giveaway pile.
A History of Their Own: Women in Europe From Prehistory to the Present by Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser
I bought this in 1989. These two books start with whatever archaeological evidence is available in pre-literate Europe right up to second-wave feminism in the 1980s. (They are very thick books.)
One of the things I liked about these books is that there is a lot of information about how people actually lived day-to-day. While most history books focus on battles and power struggles, these are all about family structure and how people earned a living. There are seperate chapters on Women's role in politics, religion, industry and social life.
Things that have been consistent throughout history: women have always worked, and they have always been paid shit for their work. I've been reading articles lately about how the recent effort to encourage girls to enter STEM fields has backfired because any profession that experiences a large influx of women immediately sees the work devalued and the wages go down. (There is a reason I no longer work in the biology field.) Conversely when a type of labour become highly valued and well-paid they become "men's work" (Programming, for example.) The people who write those articles should be reading this book, because that's been the case for as far back as people have been writing things down.
I'd really like to read a similar compilation about women from cultures outside of Europe. If there is anything out there, I'd love to hear about it.
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The Dinosaur Man: Tales of Madness and Enchantment from the Back Ward by Susan Baur Purchased in 1991. It's a collection of essays about her experiences with severely ill patients while doing research projects at various mental health facilities. Some of them were were obviously written during different time periods in her career. |
She writes well and it's obvious that she has a huge amount of compassion for her patients. One of the repeating themes in her essays is how the goals of therapists and institutions in their role of "helping" people may often be at odds with the needs and goals of the patients themselves. Mental health professionals generally work towards reducing symptoms to a degree that the mentally ill can learn to "behave appropriately" and therefore live outside an institution, regardless of whether or not that actually increases the happiness of the patient. I frequently found myself being reminded of the conflict between Jung and the other doctors in Timothy Findlay's Pilgrim - many doctors disapproved of Jung's methods because he wanted to understand his patients' delusions instead of spending his time trying to convince them to abandon them. (Or at least pushing them to pretend they had.)
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Title Sweet Suffering: Woman as Victim by Natalie Shainess I bought this in 1990. It didn't age well. Are self-help books still a thing? There was a huge number of them published in the 80s and 90s and quite frankly most of them were crap. This one claims the cultural treatment of women causes us to internalize our own inferiority and seek out situations where we are maltreated or taken for granted. The solution is for women to learn how they are self-sabotaging and correct their behaviour. As far as I'm concerned, this is 1) a great way to excuse the people who are responsible for putting women into untenable situations, and 2) completely glosses over the blowback that women frequently get when they try to stand up for themselves. |
Like most self-help books it's also overwhelming targeted at the upper-middle class. At one point she talks about new mothers going back to work as an example of a woman putting her own needs over the needs of her children without any acknowledgement that for some children; mom doesn't work = junior doesn't eat.
So anyway, I didn't finish it. Into the giveaway pile.
 |
 |
A History of Their Own: Women in Europe From Prehistory to the Present by Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser
I bought this in 1989. These two books start with whatever archaeological evidence is available in pre-literate Europe right up to second-wave feminism in the 1980s. (They are very thick books.)
One of the things I liked about these books is that there is a lot of information about how people actually lived day-to-day. While most history books focus on battles and power struggles, these are all about family structure and how people earned a living. There are seperate chapters on Women's role in politics, religion, industry and social life.
Things that have been consistent throughout history: women have always worked, and they have always been paid shit for their work. I've been reading articles lately about how the recent effort to encourage girls to enter STEM fields has backfired because any profession that experiences a large influx of women immediately sees the work devalued and the wages go down. (There is a reason I no longer work in the biology field.) Conversely when a type of labour become highly valued and well-paid they become "men's work" (Programming, for example.) The people who write those articles should be reading this book, because that's been the case for as far back as people have been writing things down.
I'd really like to read a similar compilation about women from cultures outside of Europe. If there is anything out there, I'd love to hear about it.