Abstract
Like many of us who experienced the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s to early 1970s, Jessica Heriot found herself looking at her life and the lives of other women with new eyes. In Riding the Second Wave: How Feminism Changed Women’s Psychology and Mine, Heriot tells her personal and professional life stories and how feminism influenced counseling services for women.
The first part of the book is entitled, “The Personal is Political,” and traces her own story including her family dynamics, consequences of losing her mother at an early age, adulthood, marriage, and her relationship with her own body. The second part of the book entitled, “Psychotherapy is Political,” discusses her involvement in the development and maturation of women’s counseling programs. She provides an insider’s look at the roots and origins of feminist therapy.
Heriot establishes how the psychotherapy establishment then reinforced traditional gender roles and how the feminist movement proceeded to explode traditional biases. Using herself as an example, she summarizes the double binds defining women’s roles and responsibilities at that time. Women were limited to choosing between fulfilling societal expectations or being demeaned as “masculine” and “unladylike” for wanting a career of their own. Rarely did sacrificing their own wants and needs for others result in receiving appreciation. Furthermore, women were assumed to be more passive and emotional than men, while men’s personality traits were considered to be more active, mature, and socially competent than women’s.
Heriot recounts with much vividness the birth of feminist counseling collectives and what it means to participate in consensus decision-making. These early collectives of professionals, with no models to emulate, allowed therapists to put their politics into action and begin to define feminist counseling. They discovered ways to help their women clients explore their lives in safe and supportive atmospheres. These explorations are the modern roots of empowerment and strengths-based clinical practice.
Considering the majority of her clients were women, Heriot develops expertise in addressing incest, child sexual assault, and the traumatic response of dissociation. While feminist theory can explain how men’s attitudes toward women and girls were responsible for male abhorrent behavior, she was troubled by societal inclinations to blame mothers for allowing incest to occur. She uses this concern as the basis for her PhD dissertation, “Do mothers of children sexually abused by a family member or live-in boyfriends act to protect their children from future abuse?” (p. 90).
This book is a short, easy read and addresses a number of issues that early career master of social work (MSW) students may find helpful to discuss in a field practicum seminar. For example on page 108, Heriot tackles the label of “co-dependency” and the ethical dilemmas inherent in working with women who blame themselves for the behavior of their emotionally abusive or distant partners. Using this book as a required reading would offer an opportunity for social work faculty to take this discussion into the realm of intimate partner abuse and discuss the differences between how family systems theory would address this issue versus how feminist theory looks at the realities as to why some women remain in abusive relationships.
This book provides a written account of the antecedents to feminist therapy. Feminist social workers who lived through this era will find themselves enjoying the acknowledgment of a shared lived experience. Social workers just beginning their clinical careers will benefit from learning how feminist thinking and action shaped gender-sensitive services that are more commonplace today. Heriot’s career development from a nontraditional MSW student to a PhD in social work may also inspire others to look for ways that they can use research to enhance their ability to help other women. Best of all, the book reinforces how clinical practice has political ramifications. As feminists have claimed for decades, “The personal is political and the political is personal.”
This is a self-published book, and it is doubtful that academic publishers in the field would have published it. Heriot’s delight in sharing her story to connect her experience with others provides ample opportunities for learning and discussion. I would have preferred that she delve more deeply into many clinical practice issues and create linkages with more recent research on these topics. Nevertheless, I am glad that Jessica Heriot took advantage of the world of self-publishing so her voice was not silenced.