Abstract
Who among us has not experienced periods of sadness, despair, dysphoria, disappointment with oneself or with one's present circumstances, or with future options? Have we not all wanted at times to be better looking, better students, better providers, better friends, better mothers, or better partners/spouses? At times we may look back and blame ourselves for a real or imagined transgression. These are all common responses to the everyday events and happenings that did not turn out as well as we expected.
When these day- to-day mishaps elicit responses of prolonged inertia, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, and lacking energy to get going, we speak of depression. Friends and relatives may tell us to snap out of it, to no avail. Some depressed people turn to psychotherapy, others simply live with constant sadness, and still others fall into deeper despair and may consider drastic means to end the pain.
In this book, Michelle Lafrance takes a feminist look at the everyday realities in the lives of women and concludes that the cultural construction of femininity is unhealthy for women and contributes to their experience of depression. Although constructions of the good woman vary across time and cultures, certain similarities appear consistently. These similarities in expectations of femininity are played out in the book through interview samples from individual women and their reported experiences.
According to Lafrance, the women she interviewed described lives that are dominated by expectations of domestic involvement and expertise (e.g., housekeeping, shopping, cooking, laundry, child care), caring for others to the neglect of self, and constant concerns about their female appearance. Thus, women described pressures for dieting to keep thin and expenditures for fashionable clothes and expensive makeup, with some even resorting to plastic surgery to improve their appearance. The recipe for developing depression lies in the lack of clear standards for accomplishing any of these activities well. Is one ever a good enough mother, housekeeper, or wife? Along with a lack of standards comes the constant effort to continue trying: “Trying to live up to an unattainable standard can lead a woman to feel helpless and perpetually inadequate” (p. 29). Women thus blame themselves and are blamed by others for any real or perceived inadequacies in their culturally determined female roles.
To what does Lafrance attribute these universal expectations for women? She concludes that patriarchy assigns an inferior role to women, defining them as less important than men and not worthy of remuneration for their domestic work. Even when women combine paid employment with domestic activities, they are expected to accomplish both without complaint. For those women who are unable or uninterested in becoming mothers, there are social expectations that nevertheless blame them for being child free. Minority women and women in poverty are faced with even greater disadvantage, leaving more fertile ground for the development of depression.
Following 65 pages of unrelenting depressing dialogue, readers can take hope. Lafrance proceeds to tell us how women resist the sick depressive role and recover into health and wellness. The language of resistance includes personal decisions to take control of their lives. Once that decision becomes firmly entrenched, women are then prepared to construct a new discourse of health and wellness. This new construction includes a crisis of identity and a redefinition of self as strong and empowered. The empowered woman is then in a favored position to reject the depressive discourse of femininity and to redefine her life goals in a more positive light.
What do I like about this book, and what are its positive contributions? Clearly, Lafrance takes a feminist approach to critically evaluating the traditional roles of women as caring for others to the neglect of self. For readers who have never been exposed to this idea, it may be a revelation. The interviews with a range of individual women inject an emotional factor that adds to the impact of the distress stories. For readers who have never considered the damage to women's identity of the confined feminine role, this book will probably enlighten them.
On the other hand, I found some of the language in the book difficult to read. The postmodern terminology and discussions are dense and repetitive. The author is clearly in the discourses-analysis camp in terms of how she analyzes the dialogue of the women she interviewed. As a method for understanding the experience of others, discourse analysis can be a useful tool. When the language of such analysis becomes repetitive and idiosyncratic to the reader, the message begins to lose its appeal.
As an example, the repetition throughout of the phrase “hegemonic discourses of femininity” assumes that readers understand this concept. For readers with limited exposure to the language of discourse analysis, the utility of this continual reference is questionable. To speak of “discourse” seems both to remove the content from reality and to deny the reality of that individual's experience. If a client tells me that she is now standing up for herself with her spouse and children, she may be engaging in a “discourse of self-care” or she may be telling me what she believes she is actually doing in her life. Is this a discourse or a description of one's behavior and are they the same or different? Perhaps the woman believes she is describing her present role (her discourse), but do others perceive her differently? The language of discourse analysis might be more clearly defined here as one useful method rather than as the only method.
I wonder also about the restricted antecedents to depression. We know that there are many contributions to the development of mood disturbances across the life span (Whiffen & Demidenko, 2006), only one of which is touched upon in this book. No mention is made of the prevalence of violence (sexual and physical) in the lives of girls and women, of possible biological contributions, or of other relationship issues that add to the crowd of concerns that beset many girls and women.
Finally, I am curious about the title, which places recovery before resistance. As I understand the author's discussion, clients must resist the feminine discourse before they are ready to recover from it. In that case, perhaps the title should have been reversed to be in compliance with the thrust of the book.