Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: Jewish Women in Nazi Germany Before Emigration
- Part One A Global Search for Refuge
- Part Two Refuge in the United States
- 12 Women's Role in the German-Jewish Immigrant Community
- 13 “Listen sensitively and act spontaneously - but skillfully”: Selfhelp: An Eyewitness Report
- 14 “My only hope”: The National Council of Jewish Women's Rescue and Aid for German-Jewish Refugees
- 15 The Genossinen and the Khaverim: Socialist Women from the German-Speaking Lands and the American Jewish Labor Movement, 1933-1945
- 16 New Women in Exile: German Women Doctors and the Emigration
- 17 Women Emigré Psychologists and Psychoanalysts in the United States
- 18 Destination Social Work: Emigrés in a Women's Profession
- 19 Chicken Farming: Not a Dream but a Nightmare: An Eyewitness Report
- 20 The Occupation of Women Emigrés: Women Lawyers in the United States
- 21 Fashioning Fortuna's Whim: German-Speaking Women Emigrant Historians in the United States
- 22 Exile or Emigration: Social Democratic Women Members of the Reichstag in the United States
- 23 Women's Voices in American Exile
- Epilogue: The First Sex
- Index
17 - Women Emigré Psychologists and Psychoanalysts in the United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: Jewish Women in Nazi Germany Before Emigration
- Part One A Global Search for Refuge
- Part Two Refuge in the United States
- 12 Women's Role in the German-Jewish Immigrant Community
- 13 “Listen sensitively and act spontaneously - but skillfully”: Selfhelp: An Eyewitness Report
- 14 “My only hope”: The National Council of Jewish Women's Rescue and Aid for German-Jewish Refugees
- 15 The Genossinen and the Khaverim: Socialist Women from the German-Speaking Lands and the American Jewish Labor Movement, 1933-1945
- 16 New Women in Exile: German Women Doctors and the Emigration
- 17 Women Emigré Psychologists and Psychoanalysts in the United States
- 18 Destination Social Work: Emigrés in a Women's Profession
- 19 Chicken Farming: Not a Dream but a Nightmare: An Eyewitness Report
- 20 The Occupation of Women Emigrés: Women Lawyers in the United States
- 21 Fashioning Fortuna's Whim: German-Speaking Women Emigrant Historians in the United States
- 22 Exile or Emigration: Social Democratic Women Members of the Reichstag in the United States
- 23 Women's Voices in American Exile
- Epilogue: The First Sex
- Index
Summary
One might expect precisely those women who had already taken up the systematic study of the conscious or unconscious mind to be especially sensitive to the gendered dimensions of their own experiences. Nancy Chodorow has argued, however, that this is not the case. In an essay entitled “Seventies Questions for Thirties Women,” she reports that in her interviews with émigré women psychoanalysts, her subjects repeatedly denied the significance of their gender for their professional work. Chodorow distances herself from this phenomenon by giving it an abstract sociological name - low gender salience. But she acknowledges that her interviewees forced her to see that ideas are rooted in varying social and cultural conditions and that “differences in women's interpretations of a situation may be understood not only in terms of structural categories like class or race, but also historically, culturally and generationally.”
Implicitly, at least, Chodorow's work also raises questions that are more specific to the lives of these particular women. The following remarks are intended as a preliminary exploration of these issues, focusing mainly on the careers and memoirs of selected émigré women psychologists and psychoanalysts. What did these women émigrés share? How did their multiple identities — as upper-middle-class educated professional women in the patriarchal culture of German-speaking Europe, as Central European Jews, and as members of emerging professions that have become central to twentieth-century culture and society — relate to one another?
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- Chapter
- Information
- Between Sorrow and StrengthWomen Refugees of the Nazi Period, pp. 239 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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