“For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’Advice to Women”

  For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women

            by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (2nd ed. 2005)

            Facilitated by Marge Graham via ZOOM

For Her Own Good “gives us a perspective on female history, the history of  American medicine and psychology, and the history of childhood, unlike any we have had.”  – Adrienne Rich

“Since the early nineteenth century, professionals have been invoking scientific expertise to prescribe what women should do for their own good.  Among the experts’ diagnoses and remedies, menstruation was an illness requiring seclusion; pregnancy, a disabling condition; and higher education, a threat to the longterm health of the uterus.”

Join us this winter/spring for a 9-session seminar in which we’ll read and discuss this powerful and highly regarded contribution to Women’s History, which the Boston Globe said “uses rationality informed by moral insight to meet the ‘experts’ head-on.”

   9 Thursdays: Jan. 9 & 23, Feb. 6 & 20, Mar. 6 & 20 (Apr. 3 no class), Apr. 17, and May 1 & 15.