Catfight: Rivalries Among Women--from Diets to Dating, from the Boardroom to the Delivery Room - Softcover

Tanenbaum, Leora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060528389 ISBN 13: 9780060528386

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2003

Synopsis

Women often behave toward one another in sneaky, underhanded, ruthlessly competitive ways. Catfight is a remarkably researched and insightful foray into the American woman's world of aggression, rivalry, and competition. Tanenbaum draws on real-life examples and the most important studies to date in psychology, human aggression, psychoanalytic theory, and social movements to uncover the pressures that leave women regarding one another as adversaries rather than allies.

Most women highly value female approval and friendship, but the darker side of sisterhood can evoke covertly competitive behavior:

• A career woman quits to become a full-time mom. Although she misses her job and the income, she belittles you, a working mother, as selfishly unconcerned with your children's welfare.
  
  
• You're at a party in mid-conversation with your boyfriend when an attractive woman comes over to mingle. You move closer to him, touching him and glaring at her.
  
  
• A female colleague "accidentally" misplaces your files and "forgets" to e-mail you about an important upcoming meeting.

What is the state of "sisterhood" today? And how much progress have we really made?

About this title

About the Author:

Leora Tanenbaum is the author of Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation and a rising young talent of journalism today. She has written for Newsday, Seventeen, Ms., and The Nation, among others, and appears regularly on a variety of national television programs. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

From Publishers Weekly:

Tanenbaum's first book (Slut!) examined how social competition causes some female teenagers to attack others for real or imagined sexual behavior. In this follow-up, she branches out, taking on adult women and their struggles to look prettier, land better boyfriends or husbands, be more popular with co-workers and be considered better mothers than other women, sisterhood be damned. Although Tanenbaum provides the latest in academic research, she also includes an entertaining mix of examples from pop culture, newspaper and magazine articles and original fieldwork. She makes the subject personal, sharing her own frustrations with breast feeding, office gossip and living with a body that doesn't match contemporary beauty norms. Although many women feel no choice but to endure constant pressure and self-doubt, Tanenbaum counters that competition is a learned behavior, not human nature, and the consequences are rarely worth the meager rewards. "We can see that competition between women serves only the status quo," she laments. "And the status quo keeps us from gaining more power over our lives, our work, and our relationships." The closing chapter highlights the potential for women to collaboratively strive for success in the arenas of political activism and team athletics, but even there, Tanenbaum says, as in the business world, women must face the prospect of being judged "unfeminine" if they show too aggressive a desire to win. The book's accessible approach to the contradictions between feminist rhetoric and women's real experiences, especially in the still-controversial realm of working mothers, is sure to attract even more attention for this fast-rising social critic.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060528389
• ISBN 13: 9780060528386
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352