I read this as an undergraduate in college. Away from home and in the company of other women who were passionate about learning, I saw the world open up to me. Reading this book (alongside other books such as Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Anything in Virginia Woolf's collection, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and others) I became extremely aware of the women who fought so hard so that someday I could have an education and the possibility of equality in m...

LJ user pachakuti's review:One of those books that puts into stark reality how patronizing and riddled with errors and judgement the 'advice' given to women over two centuries of American history has been. They look at the medical industry as a whole as well as psychology and child-rearing as a whole.

Actually super interesting, if impossible to summarize to anyone who casually asks "so what are you reading?" without their eyes glazing over. A tour de force through the history of the medical establishment, capitalism, psychiatry, child-rearing, feminism and modern society in general that draws a lot of really interesting connections.

Ehrenreich put together a very comprehensive, well-researched book on the effect of "expert" advice on women over a two-hundred-year span. The chronicle is both hilarious and frightening. We see women being celebrated as frail, delicate creatures whose reproductive organs are the source of every illness... then later women are descended upon by psychologists and deemed too dangerous to run a family, having penis envy and ambition compelling them to kill their children. Mothers were considered th...

An eye-opening and very informative account of how women have been treated over the past two centuries in the medical industry. Ehrenreich takes us through the history of the establishment of the medical industry, how to raise children, how feminism changed and adapted over the centuries, and up to modern society and how women are viewed. There are sections on female health, the 'rise of sick and languishing women', how they were treated, the creation of home economics and its importance, how to...

Finally!Interesting history of the practice of medicine and treatment of women. As a result, "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Mrs. Dalloway" have new meaning.I know why we were constantly have tea parties in home ec class and more understanding for the airs put on by my teacher.I always thought Freud was twisted.The end is - the woman question really is - that the human values that women were assigned to preserve expand out of the confines of private life and become the organizing principles of socie...

Ehrenreich and English look at what kind of advice we've been given for the last two hundred years. Although they provide a good deal of social, political, economic, and general background to the development and evolution of experts, the part I found most fascinating was on the creation of what we consider medical doctors. I hadn't realized how culturally specific, oft-changing, and purposefully created our modern conception of medicine is. For instance, the cultural ancestors of modern doctors

Though the book was originally published in 1978, this edition came out in 2004 with a new foreword and afterward. Given that this is primarily a history, the text holds up very well, and it's one of the rare cases where the subtitle actually gives you a good idea of the topic; "Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women." Ehrenreich and English don't limit themselves to a single discipline, focusing on medicine prior to the 20th century, before expanding to include psychologists, domestic sci...

Well documented history of how the medical industry has ignored, mismanaged and abused women. Relevant, this is still happening today! If I wasn't currently taking a Women's Studies course load I would have found the book more interesting. I found the writing stale, textbook style and cumbersome. I think it has a lot of important information and is a valuable read but it was dull in its presentation.

This book made me so very angry, which I think was the point. How can anyone read what was believed by experts a mere 40 years ago and not have a complete rage aneurysm, especially since so many people are convinced that sexism and misogyny are behind us, or perhaps never existed at all? It definitely focused on white, middle/upper middle class women, which is part the subject matter (the "experts" were probably most concerned with advising this group) but was also really distracting at times, s...

I absolutely loved Witches, Midwives and Nurses, so I thought this would be an expanded version of that. And it's true that For Her Own Good was full of interesting facts. But somehow, when I was done, I felt like I couldn't really summarize much of interest in a few words. In fact, I was quite relieved to be done so I could move on to some light fiction -- although the book was full of interesting, often shocking, facts, reading it almost felt like homework by the end.I did dog-ear a couple of

What an infuriating book! It was well-written and seemingly well-researched. The infuriation didn't come from the writing but by the crap that they unearthed and portrayed. The thesis of the book can be found in the afterward, essentially that the Women Question isn't what is wrong with us, or how should we deal with us/ourselves, but instead how can we change the society so the roles and norms for women don't constrain and appear to be so one-size fits all. What was interesting was that through...

gender roles are social constructs.

I treated this book as an artifact of second wave feminism (originally published 1976) so I took it's perspective and all its lack of discussion of diversity with a grain of salt. A few glaring spelling errors (Johns Hopkins not John Hopkins) and some grammatical snafus aside, this was a three star book that I learned a lot from. I enjoyed the chapters on medicine more than those on domestic science but that is my own bias speaking. The afterword was the most disappointing part. Written in 2004

In January 2019, all hell broke loose in the state of Kerala in India because the Supreme Court allowed women of menstruating age to enter the Sabarimala Temple, which is supposedly a "men-only" club due to the fact that the deity is supposed to be ritually celibate. Among all the brouhaha, a video started doing the rounds, from a lady doctor of Indian origin from the US. This estimable person said, in a highly convincing way, that some temples were centres of "positive cosmic energy" which woul...

This is an interesting exploration of how science intersects with the construction of gender, and how the scientific method was distorted, and women were harmed, by people who worked to make science fit their preconceived notions of gender. If you'd like to be infuriated, pick this up! If you think the feminists are mostly just making things up, and that traditional gender roles are usually for the best, pick this up!

After a rather great and intriguing premise (woman's changing social position in light of the evolution of the economic market/changes of the social system), this book was quite a disappointment.To mention two most prominent let-downs:1. Factual inaccuracies and mistakes, which I noticed especially in the first quarter of the book. Firstly, the completely misleading numbers and facts regarding witch hunts in medieaeval and early modern Europe. Secondly, the picture of medical professionals in th...

Ok, as if being a woman in this society didn't already make you angry at the medical establishment and how they treat women and women's concerns, this book will infuriate you. However, it is highly useful to see where these attitudes come from that are still prevalent in how medical professionals today treat women. From being dismissed as hysteric, to branding something a syndrome without ever trying to get to the bottom of it, to pathologizing the experience of being a woman. Great book, really...

I enjoy Ehrenreich and her ideas about life and work. In this book she gives a research-filled history of how women were seen by medical doctors, psychologists, men, ad agencies, and employers. It's almost vulgar to think of of frailty and sickness were sought-after traits in an upper-class woman. It's fascinating to see how advice on things like femininity, child-bearing and child-rearing has changed. Expert "opinions" aimed at women have largely been based on false assumptions and quackery. Th...

For Her Own Good is a historical survey of the many ways in which women have been told what to do “for their own good” by experts (usually middle-class white men) over the past two hundred years. The book includes sections on medicine, female health and sickness, homemaking, and child-rearing, each one meticulously researched and extensively annotated. The authors' basic argument is that women have predominantly been viewed as incompetent to make their own decisions – even when it comes to their...