Читать книгу Theory and Practice of Couples and Family Counseling - James Robert Bitter - Страница 58

The oldest and most pervasive discrimination in and across the world is the oppression of women. Patriarchy is such a universal part of dominant cultures that it is hard to find a location on the planet where it is not built into the system and treated as normal. We have already seen that very few women were part of the development of the fields of family counseling and family therapy, and the few women who created or contributed to the various models were often dismissed as unimportant. For many years, a focus on the family unit had separated the family from the larger contexts of history, society, economics, and politics (Avis, 1988). Elegant theories of structure, cybernetics, transactions, and interactions had become standard models for interacting with families, and again it was largely men who were developing and enacting these models.

In 1978, Rachel Hare-Mustin pulled the first feminist arrow across the bow of family counseling, naming and exposing the sexism and biases inherent in family systems models. Over the next two decades, feminists would continue to argue that the field had to take into account larger sociopolitical contexts when working with families. They challenged the notion that all parties in a system contributed equally to a problem, especially when the problem involved an assault against women by men. They called for an end to either the implicit or explicit tagging of women as the source of pathology in families, and they called on family practitioners to abandon their neutral stances when the lives of women were being shaped in a negative system (Becvar & Becvar, 2013).

Because patriarchy is so pervasive in all societies, the normal family is not such a great experience for women. Women who stay at home to raise children are regularly underappreciated, too often lack their own economic resources, and may be one heart attack away from poverty. Women who work outside of the home tend to come home to a second career, taking care of a spouse and children and volunteering at schools and in the community. The stress in women’s lives is more than double that of their male spouses. Ten years into the feminist critique of family counseling, the need for actual discussions of gender issues in family counseling, the welcoming of women’s voices and perspectives, and the need for counselors to disclose and address their own limitations and biases were finally acknowledged in family counseling (Goldner, 1985, 1993).

This acknowledgment did not come without strong resistance, especially from those who had pioneered family systems models, but the persistence of feminist voices won out, and today, Nichols and Davis (2020) have noted, these issues are no longer even debated.

The history of feminism is often presented in waves. We date the first wave from the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1792/1989) A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In the United States, the first gathering of the women’s rights movement was held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared that the right of women to vote was essential. Many other social and political reforms were identified, but the women actually had to find a man to read their demands to have them reported in the press. In 1878, Susan B. Anthony’s amendment giving women the right to vote was introduced in Congress. It would take 42 years for often harassed and jailed supporters to get the right to vote ratified in 1920.

Along with the right to vote, women in the first wave also sought access to contraceptives; the right to equal pay for equal work as well as the right to work outside the home; and the right to refuse sex with any partner, even a woman’s own husband. Women of the first wave also gained access to higher education; to safe and legal abortions; and to participation in sports, political office, and careers that interested them; they also fought for freedom from sexual harassment in the workplace.

The second wave of feminism began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s (1963/2001) The Feminine Mystique. This book mobilized women, laid a foundation for consciousness-raising groups, and led to the development of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So many different women contributed to the second wave of feminism that it is impossible to name them all. It was not an approach to life. It was a change in the paradigms of life; it was a movement. Women from this era sought a simply stated equal rights amendment to the Constitution. The backlash to this effort was so strong that the amendment failed to be ratified in the male-dominated legislatures of the states. Gloria Steinem started Ms. Magazine, and women started to get elected to the U.S. Congress. Initially mostly White women led the women’s movement, but over time the movement reassessed its orientation and sought a greater alliance with women of color, sometimes called womanists, and with the lesbian community.

Feminist counseling in general emerged in the second wave in the late 1960s (Brown, 2018), but its impact on family counseling would not be felt for almost a decade. In 1984, Monica McGoldrick, Carol Anderson, and Froma Walsh would organize a meeting called the Stonehenge Conference, which included 50 prominent women in family therapy (McGoldrick et al., 1989). Out of that meeting, four women—Marianne Walters, Betty Carter, Peggy Papp, and Olga Silverstein (1988)—would start The Women’s Project.

Silverstein (2003) pointed out that The Women’s Project was important not only for the critique it produced but also for the way in which the four women worked. Each of these leading female practitioners in family counseling found a way to come to common ground without losing either individuality or respect for one another. Their work placed patriarchy squarely in the middle of the developmental conversations in family counseling.

At the beginning of the 21st century, feminist family counseling was a fully developed model (Silverstein & Goodrich, 2003). Although many women and men who work out of other models and incorporate feminist perspectives and values, some practitioners adopt feminism as a way of life, and it informs every part of their counseling with families. This latter group is dedicated to egalitarian relationships, a belief in the personal as political, a valuing of women’s perspectives and women’s voices in counseling, and a willingness to challenge patriarchal absorption in both personal and family experiences (Luepnitz, 1988/2002).

Because normative processes have not been so good for women, more and more feminist family counselors are adopting a postmodern perspective with its emphasis on multiple realities, multiple truths, and multiple intelligences. The same orientation that leads social constructionists to challenge the dominant culture or dominant knowledge positions pervades the work of feminists in relation to patriarchy (Hare-Mustin, 1994).

Although most feminists believe in and support the competencies of multiculturalism, not all multicultural therapists embrace feminism and support women’s issues. The tendency of multiculturalists to respect and stay neutral in the face of diversity too often leaves them tacit supporters of patriarchal practices. Fortunately, there is no culture, no country, and no nation left that does not have feminist voices in it.