Abstract

Joan C. Chrisler Are you surprised to see a volume of Women & Therapy about including women’s bodies in the therapy context? Thirty years ago the focus of a collec- tion such as this would have been on the necessity of excluding topics such as menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause from diagnosis and deliberation. Early feminist therapists, researchers, and theorists were actively engaged in gathering data and constructing arguments against sexist notions that women’s bodies were essentially defective and the cause of women’s mental, as well as physical, suffering. As a psychology student I was taught that menstruation caused all manner of physical ailments and mental anguish, that women often “went crazy” after giv- ing birth or during the menopausal transition, that rejection of femininity led to dysmenorrhea and infertility, and that many issues connected to women’s re- productive systems (perhaps especially menarche and miscarriage) were best left unmentioned in both personal and professional conversations. I was also taught that pregnancy would cure many of women’s problems, including dysmenorrhea and depression. (Oddly, the fact that pregnancy leads to birth, which we were told leads to depression, was never mentioned. Were women expected to stay pregnant all the time in order