Complaints and Disorders: Sexual Politics of Sickness - Softcover

Barbara Ehrenreich And Deirdre English

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0904613259 ISBN 13: 9780904613254

Publisher: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976

Synopsis

"Complaints and Disorders; The Sexual Politics of Sickness" is a short book (95 pages) but that's part of what made it such a good read. Once you start reading it, you won't want to stop until you're to the last page. And there's a lot of info packed into th page 37, the author wrote, "The entire mystique of female sickness - the house calls, the tonics and medicines, the heatlh spas - served, above all, to keep a great many women busy at the task of doing nothing."

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara Ehrenreich is author of the 2002 New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. She has written nearly twenty books, and has been a columnist for Time magazine and the New York Times. She has contributed to The Progressive, Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, and Salon.com.

Deirdre English is the former editor of Mother Jones magazine. She has written for the Nation, New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Magazine, S.F. Chronicle Sunday Magazine, Vogue, and public radio and television. Currently, English is a professor at University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The surgical approach to female psychological problems had what was considered a solid theoretical basis in the theory of the "psychology of the ovary." After all, if a woman's entire personality was dominated by her reproductive organs, then gynecological surgery was the most logical approach to any female psychological problems. Beginning in the late 1860s, doctors began to act on this principle....widely practiced was the surgical removal of the ovaries. Thousands of these operations were performed from 1860 to 1890....As we have seen, surgery was often performed with the explicit goal of "taming" a high-strung woman, and whether or not the surgery itself was effective, the very threat of surgery was probably enough to bring many women into line.

About this edition

• Publisher: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0904613259
• ISBN 13: 9780904613254
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96