"Get inspired with 50 fascinating stories of powerful female figures from mythologies around the world. From heroines and deities to leaders and mythical creatures, this collection explores figures of myth who can inspire modern readers with their ability to shape our culture with the stories of their power, wisdom, compassion, and cunning. Featured characters include: Atalanta (Greek heroine and huntress who killed the Caledonia Boar and joined the Argonauts); Sky-Woman (the first woman in Iroquois myth who fell through a hole in the sky and into our world); Clídna (Queen of the Banshees in Irish legend); and La Llorona (a ghostly woman in Mexican folklore who wanders the waterfront). Celebrate these game-changing, attention-worthy female characters with this collection of engaging tales"--
Explores the life and work of psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein through a feminist and mytho-poetic lens. Long stigmatized as Carl Jungs hysterical mistress, Sabina Spielrein (18851942) was in fact a key figure in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Born into a Russian Jewish family, she was institutionalized at nineteen in Zurich and became Jungs patient. Spielrein went on to earn a doctorate in psychiatry, practiced for over thirty years, and published numerous papers, until her untimely death in the Holocaust. She developed innovative theories of female sexuality, child development, mythic archetypes in the human unconscious, and the death instinct. In Sabina Spielrein, Angela M. Sells examines Spielreins life and work from a feminist and mytho-poetic perspective. Drawing on newly translated diaries, papers, and correspondence with Jung and Sigmund Freud, Sells challenges the suppression of Spielreins ideas and shows her to be a significant thinker in her own right. This book is a major, perhaps a definitive, contribution to the literature. Angela Sells documents both the demonization of a great psychoanalytic theoristmainly because she was a woman and worse still, was once Carl Jungs patient. The books greatest strength is its power to enlighten and inform and in so doing, to arouse indignation and amazement at Spielreins brilliance and tenacity. Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and Madness This is a pathbreaking piece of research that not only begins to rehabilitate the reputation of a woman patient of Jungs, but also suggests that Spielrein was an important contributor in her own right to the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Carol P. Christ, coauthor of Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology
Joan Childs shows how women of all ages can transform their lives. The Myth of the Maiden explores the evolution of women from helpless maidens to dragonslayers.
Internationally acclaimed as a journalist, war correspondent, interviewer, and novelist, Oriana Fallaci’s public persona reached almost mythic proportions. It is a myth Fallaci herself created, according to Santo L. Aricò, who probes the psychological forces that motivated one of the twentieth century’s most famous and successful women writers. Using his own extensive interviews with the writer, Aricò maps out Fallaci’s journey through life, paying particular attention to her ongoing and painstaking attempts to establish her own mythical status. He first examines her career as a literary journalist, emphasizing the high quality of her writing. From there, he concentrates on how Fallaci’s personal image began to emerge in her writings, as well as the way in which, through her powerful narratives, she catapulted herself into the public eye as her own main character.
“Molfino explores female empowerment in her zesty debut. Women searching for ways to increase their self-worth and confidence will find many gems.” —Publishers Weekly Women: it’s time to break the good girl myths that are holding you back and share your true gifts with this groundbreaking book from Stanford University-trained designer and women’s leadership expert Majo Molfino. For thousands of years, women have been taught to be “good” instead of powerful. But when we embody the good girl, we hold back their voices and gifts in a world that desperately needs female perspectives. Drawing on countless coaching sessions and conversations with female leaders, Majo identifies five self-sabotaging tendencies (“the five Good Girl Myths”) every woman must overcome to unleash her power and design a more purposeful life: The Myth of Rules The Myth of Perfection The Myth of Logic The Myth of Harmony The Myth of Sacrifice While there are many women’s leadership books, Majo uses her knowledge and training in design thinking (which is used by the world’s most innovative people and companies) to help you build creative confidence and break free from these disempowering myths once and for all. Discover how each myth negatively affects your relationships, career, and well-being and identify your primary good girl myth—the blindspot that’s zapping most of your power as a creative badass. “An elegant, powerful framework for female liberation.” —Amber Rae, author of Choose Wonder over Worry “Smart, empowering, and practical . . . guides you in creating a better future for yourself—and the planet.” —BJ Fogg, PhD, New York Times–bestselling author
A love goddess who was imprisoned and betrayed by love, a wife who returned again and again to her childhood home, a mother who left her children, a writer who preferred silence, Dagny Juel Przybyszewska existed in a borderland between myth and reality. Born into an upper-class Norwegian family in 1867, she died at the age of thirty-three, estranged from everyone and everything she had known, shot by a neurotic young man in a hotel room in Tiflis near the Black Sea. He wrote, “She was not of this world, she was far too ethereal for anyone to understand her true nature.” Dagny Juel was one of four beautiful and talented daughters of a prominent doctor who was attendant physician to the king of Sweden. In 1893 she went to Berlin to study piano, and soon she became the central figure in an avant-garde group of writers, painters, and patrons of the arts known as Zum schwarzen Ferkel (“The Black Piglet). She was painted by Edvard Munch and was the model for the destructive woman of many of Strindberg’s writings. In the Berlin circle, she met and married the brilliant, mercurial Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. But Dagny was more than the mysterious and provocative muse of two of the major European cultural centers, Berlin and Krakow. She herself wrote revolutionary plays and poetry and acted as cultural agent for Scandinavian artists on the Continent. During her lifetime her plays and poems were published in Norwegian, Polish, and Czech, and a collection of her plays came out in Norway as recently as 1978. At once an engrossing, elegantly narrated biography and a work of meticulous scholarship, Mary Kay Norseng’s book is the first full-length study in English to examine Dagny’s writings and to explore her relationships. Attempting to sort fact from the sensationalized fiction that has grown up around this remarkable woman, Norseng has consulted all available letters and memoirs of Dagny, her husband, her family, and her acquaintances, as well as Dagny’s own writings and the wealth of material written about her. The book resulting from this intensive study will change the way the world has viewed Dagny Przybyszewska, while it provides new insights into the literary and artistic environment of fin-de-siecle Europe.
Nominated for the 2012 Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology! Why are women more likely to be positioned or diagnosed as mad than men? If madness is a social construction, a gendered label, as many feminist critics would argue, how can we understand and explain women's prolonged misery and distress? In turn, can we prevent or treat women’s distress, in a non-pathologising women centred way? The Madness of Women addresses these questions through a rigorous exploration of the myths and realities of women's madness. Drawing on academic and clinical experience, including case studies and in-depth interviews, as well as on the now extensive critical literature in the field of mental health, Jane Ussher presents a critical multifactorial analysis of women's madness that both addresses the notion that madness is a myth, and yet acknowledges the reality and multiple causes of women's distress. Topics include: The genealogy of women’s madness – incarceration of difficult or deviant women Regulation through treatment Deconstrucing depression, PMS and borderline personality disorder Madness as a reasonable response to objectification and sexual violence Women’s narratives of resistance This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of psychology, gender studies, sociology, women's studies, cultural studies, counselling and nursing.
While national crime rates have recently fallen, crimes committed by women have risen 200 percent, yet we continue to transform female violence into victimhood by citing PMS, battered wife syndrome, and postpartum depression as sources of women?s actions. When She Was Bad convincingly overturns these perceptions by telling the stories of such women as Karla Faye Tucker, who was recently executed for having killed two people with a pickax; Dorothea Puente, who murdered several elderly tenants in her boarding house; and Aileen Wuornos, a Florida woman who shot seven men. Patricia Pearson marshals a vast amount of research and statistical support from criminologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists, and includes many revealing interviews with dozens of men and women in the criminal justice system who have firsthand experience with violent women. When She Was Bad is a fearless and superbly written call to reframe our ideas about female violence and, by extension, female power.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One million copies sold! “A deeply spiritual book [that] honors what is tough, smart and untamed in women.”—The Washington Post Book World Book club pick for Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society’s attempt to “civilize” us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.
