The Myth of Empowerment

The Myth of Empowerment surveys the ways in which women have been represented and influenced by the rapidly growing therapeutic cultureboth popular and professionalfrom the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The middle-class woman concerned about her health and her ability to care for others in an uncertain world is not as different from her late nineteenth-century white middle-class predecessors as we might imagine. In the nineteenth century she was told that her moral virtue was her power;