Review

Well-being and being women

WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE OF FEMINIST THERAPY AND COUNSELLING
Eileen McLeod
Open University Press, 1994

This book offers a welcome critique of feminist therapy and counselling, and provides some limited but useful guidelines alongside a general commentary which take the arguments outside the original narrow parameters of McLeod’s research.

Her research looked at the follow-up forms of women using a ‘feminist therapy and counselling centre’, and the views of the centre’s counsellors and co-ordinator; these yield little that is of critical interest, and so it is to the author’s credit that she succeeds in framing some more challenging questions about the nature of the therapeutic relationship, and how therapy is socially and politically contextualised within feminist values.

She identifies the ways in which the professionalisation of feminist therapy – her chosen generic term for the range of practices to support women’s ‘emotional well-being’ – is in fact not always in the women’s best interests, and can be seen as ill-fitting feminism’s egalitarian ethic. This is shown to be one way in which feminist therapy ‘can-side step or reinforce existing forms of inequality as well as challenging them’.

Much work has already been done to examine how power is exercised within feminist practices, and some of that could have been usefully referred to, perhaps forwarding the debate a little. Similarly, despite the author’s best attempts to avoid the homogenisation of the category ‘woman’, the book cannot address experiential differences using such a small sample. The main benefits women using these services identified derived from their experience of a new freedom of expression and a valuing of their emotional needs – but these are shown to be available only to some few women.

The author recognises that feminist therapy can only be a partial solution to social inequalities, in the context of ‘patriarchy and misogyny’ as she defines it, and that other initiatives outside therapy are necessary for realising women’s happiness – the aim McLeod identifies. Implicitly the book suggests the importance of non-individualistic solutions; nonetheless, the quotations from women relate their greater happiness to therapeutic intervention.

The book’s structure militates against clear conclusions and there is a tension between its narrow frame of reference and the implied broader issues. A wider framework of reference to other research and thinking would have provided a more convincing basis for the findings claimed here, such as the assertion that women’s emotional well-being cannot solely be analysed in terms of subordination through gender.

The author seems to recognise and accept the limitations of her work — which suggests the need for a book which would broaden the range of the enquiry while addressing the author’s valid concern about how women’s emotional well-being is best supported within feminist health care.