Women and Power: Perspectives for Family Therapy

Adolescence, Winter, 1993

Recognizing power as a central organizing principle in families, the contributors address many thorny questions, highlighting the different cultural messages for women and men concerning not only access to power, but also desirability of power, pursuit of power, and ways of exercising power. Throughout the book, ways to address women's typically disadvantaged position with regard to power are explored.

In addition to Goodrich's opening chapter, the first section includes chapters by Jean Baker Miller and Linda Webb-Watson on the social and political context. Romance is the topic of the second section, with penetrating discussions by Rachel Hare-Mustin and Virginia Goldner. In the third section, Cheryl Rampage and Joan Laird show how women gain personal authority through self-stories and ritual. The fourth section focuses on family therapy, with chapters by William Doherty, Nadine Kaslow and Alice S. Carter, and Judith Myers Avis. The final section presents brief clinical vignettes and observations from fourteen well-known family therapists. Each highlights a particular family situation that pushed the clinician to reexamine assumptions and practices around women and power. The men and women writing here demand power (or empowerment) for women while simultaneously challenging what is meant by "power"; they demand full citizenship for women in the family and in society even while challenging the structures and functions of those institutions. Yet they never lose sight of the personal dilemmas with which they and their clients must grapple each day as individuals in the midst of cultural change.