Reviews for A study of the problems of 652 gainfully employed married women homemakers

The average rating for A study of the problems of 652 gainfully employed married women homemakers based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-23 00:00:00 Richard Smith This book is immensely valuable especially if you are interested in psychoanalysis and the history of philosophy / ideas. With impeccable insight and analysis, we are treated to biographical sketches and psychological portraits of some of the greatest minds of Western thought and civilization, including the father of modern philosophy Descartes and his many intellectual heirs in the shapes and guises of Schopenhauer, Sartre and Kierkegaard. Karl Stern also examines the lives and works of Tolstoy and Goethe and even one of Ibsen's characters / prototypes Hedda Gabler in detail. The main observation here is that the world has and continues to become lopsided and is bent in direction of science and scientific thinking and knowledge, the traditionally and symbolically male elements of our building block as opposed to all that is ascribed to the feminine, namely poetic knowledge in the form of intuition and feeling. Particularly with the advent of Descartes and Newton, we have been focusing too much on the hard and exact sciences at the expense of our vital need for an imaginative and poetic view and interpretation of the world. There is a lot of truth in Karl Stern's observations and he insists that we need to have both elements and types of knowledge to be firmly grounded in our existence and to feel complete as a human being. In the case of a lack of balance, our life and world become restless and we cannot be at peace with ourselves. Science and technology in and of themselves are not evil per se, but when they usurp and manipulate nature and begin to control and dictate our lives, we become more and more enmeshed in their ever-growing cogs and bolts. We lose touch with Mother Nature, the eternal female and lose our spiritual connection to ourselves and to the world. In fact, even though the book was written about half a century ago, it is even more valid today with the continuously expanding and absorbing consumer culture of ours. We not only swallow all forms of entertainment and modern convenience, but in turn we are swallowed by them. One may not agree with every detail in this book, but here is timely and highly relevant insight and advice much needed for our current society and lifestyle.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-22 00:00:00 Marc Russell Simply amazing. This is a book by a brilliant Jewish psychologist that fled Nazi Germany before the holocaust, and even converted to Christianity, Roman Catholicism, to be exact. Anyway, it's a brilliant consideration of gender with some of the best of mid twentieth century psychology, and it's explicitly Christian--and he even quotes C.S. Lewis at the beginning and end of the book. But it's more than that. It's a full-fledged critique of modernity as "in flight from woman." I normally hate "modernity is evil" narratives, but this one really isn't of the usual low caliber of that genre. Stern is basically critiquing scientism as a kind of over-masculinized hustling or curiosity. He also avoids critiquing society in general, but talks exclusively about the key minds of modernity, namely, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy (post-conversion), and Goethe. All troubled by women in some sense, all trying to put distance between themselves and the feminine, and failing miserably. Anyway, this is a book I hope to re-read regularly, and I would commend it to someone looking for a good book on gender and on the entire modern world, particularly scientism. Some minor annoyances related to the virgin Mary (but even here he admits the paucity of historical evidence), but those are super easily forgiven.