within these pages comes from more than just professional experi-
ence. Much of what I know is derived from being a woman in wo-
men’s roles—from being a daughter, a wife, a mother of a son and
daughter. My knowledge also grew through talks with women
friends and in women’s groups. Both are situations in which women
mirror aspects of themselves to each other—we see ourselves reflec-
ted in another woman’s experience, and we become conscious of
some aspect of ourselves we were not aware of before, or of what
we as women have in common.
My knowledge of women’s psychology has also grown out of the
experience of being a woman at this time in history. In 1963, I began
my residency in psychiatry. Two events in that same year led to the
women’s movement of the 1970s. First, Betty Friedan published The
Feminine Mystique, articulating the emptiness and dissatisfaction of
a generation of women who had lived for and through others.
Friedan described the source of this unhappiness as a problem of
identity, the core of which was a stunting or an evasion of growth.
She maintained that this problem is fostered by our culture, which
does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow
and fulfill their potential as human beings. Blowing the whistle on
cultural stereotypes, Freudian dogma, and the manipulation of wo-
men by the media, her book presented ideas whose time had
come—ideas that led to an outpouring of repressed anger, the birth
of the women’s liberation movement, and later to the formation of
NOW, the National Organization for Women.^1
That same year, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s Commission
on the Status of Women published its report, documenting the in-
equalities in the economic system of the United States. Women were
not being paid the same as men for doing the same job; women were
being denied employment opportunities and advancement. This
glaring unfairness was further evidence of how women’s roles were
devalued and limited.
I thus entered psychiatry at a time when the United States was on
the threshold of the women’s movement, and I had my consciousness
raised in the 1970s. I became aware of inequalities and discrimination
against women and learned
There Are Goddesses in Everywoman