Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives - Softcover

Fels, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679758887 ISBN 13: 9780679758884

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2005

Synopsis

Despite the huge advances women have made in recent decades, their ambitions are still undermined in subtle ways. Parents, teachers, bosses, and institutions all give less encouragement to women than men, and women still grow up believing that they must defer to men in order be seen as feminine. If their ambition does survive into adulthood, too often those ambitions must be downsized or abandoned to accommodate “wifely” duties of household chores and child care. As a result, women--unlike men–continually have to re-shape their goals and expectations.

Yet expressing ambition, pursuing it, and getting recognition for one’s accomplishments is critical to identity and happiness. In this groundbreaking work, Anna Fels draws on extensive research and years of her psychiatriac practice to offer an original and deeply useful examination of ambition in women’s lives. In the process, she illuminates just what is necessary for women to articulate--and fulfill--their dreams.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

In this groundbreaking book about how women perceive, are prepared for, and cope with ambition and achievement, psychiatrist Anna Fels examines ambition at the deepest psychological level. Cutting to the core of what ambition can provide—the essential elements of a fulfilling life—Fels describes why, for women but not for men, ambition still remains fraught with often painful conflict. Fels draws on case studies, research, interviews, and autobiographies of accomplished and celebrated women past and present—writers, artists, architects, politicians, actors—to explore the ways in which women are brought up to avoid recognition and visibility in favor of traditional feminine values and why they often choose to nurture and defer to rather than compete with men. She poses invaluable questions: What is the nature of ambition and how important is it in a woman’s life? What are the forces that promote or impede its development? To what extent does ambition go against a woman’s very nature? And she challenges currently held theories about the state of mind and the needs of men.

Incisive and highly readable, Necessary Dreams is a unique exploration of the options and obstacles women face in the pursuit of their goals. It is a book that every woman will want—and need—to read.
From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Anna Fels is a practicing psychiatrist who has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Self, and, most recently, the Science Times section of the New York Times. A member of the faculty of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Fels lives with her husband and two children in New York City.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0679758887
• ISBN 13: 9780679758884
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 297