For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women

Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English go through a century and a half of what doctors, psychologists and household experts told women to do with their bodies, their children and their days, and what those instructions were actually for. Menstruation treated as an illness requiring seclusion, pregnancy as a disability, higher education as a threat to the uterus, clitoridectomy as a behavioural remedy, and the postwar consensus that mothers were the problem. The question the book keeps returning to is why the advice was so readily believed.