Research Catalog

Title

Beyond the double bind : women and leadership / Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

Author

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall.

Publication

New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

ix, 283 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

• "I can remember," says lawyer Flo Kennedy, "going to court in pants and the judge remarking that I wasn't properly dressed, that the next time I came to court I should be dressed like a lawyer." It was a moment painfully familiar to countless women: a demand that she conform to a stereotype of feminine dress and behavior - which would also mark her as an intruder, rising above her assigned station (as the saying goes, she dared to "wear the pants" in the courtroom). Kennedy took one look at the judge's robe - essentially "a long black dress gathered at the yoke"--And said, "Judge, if you won't talk about what I'm wearing, I won't talk about what you're wearing."
• In Beyond the Double Bind, Kathleen Hall Jamieson takes her cue from Kennedy's comeback to argue that the catch-22 that often blocks women from success can be overcome. Sparking her narrative with potent accounts of the many ways women have beaten the double bind that would seem to damn them no matter what they choose to do, Jamieson provides a rousing and emphatic denouncement of victim feminism and the acceptance of inevitable failure. As she explores society's interlaced traps and restrictions, she draws on hundreds of interviews with women from all walks of life to show the ways they cut through them. Kennedy, for example, faced the bind that insists that women cannot be both feminine and competent - and then demands that they be feminine first; she undermined that trap with wry wit.
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg attacked the same quandary head-on: when she heard that her law-school nickname was "bitch," she replied, "Better bitch than mouse." Jamieson explores the full range of such double binds (the uterus-brain bind, for example - "you can't conceive children and ideas at the same time"; or the assertion, "You are too special to be equal"), offering a roadmap for moving past these barricades to advancement. Unlike other breakthrough feminist writers, she finds grounds for optimism in areas ranging from slow improvements in women's earnings to newly effective legal remedies, from growing social awareness to the determination and skill of individual women who are fighting the double bind.

Subject

• Sex discrimination against women
• Women > Social conditions
• Double bind (Psychology)
• Double Bind Interaction
• Double-bind-Hypothese
• Frau
• Führung
• Vrouwendiscriminatie
• Leiderschap
• Dilemma's
• Sekserol

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

The binds that tie, -- Hillary Clinton as Rorschach test, -- Double bind number one: womb/brain, -- Double bind number two: silence/shame, -- Double bind number three: sameness/difference, -- Double bind number four: femininity/competence, -- Double bind number five: aging/invisibility, -- Newsbinds, -- The stories we tell.

ISBN

• 0195089405
• 9780195089400
• 9780195115727
• 0195115724

LCCN

94042812

OCLC

• ocm31434626
• 31434626
• SCSB-2047115

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library