Part 4: Chapter 12 Summary and Analysis

"It's All in Your Mind" looks at the chilling contribution popular psychology makes to the 1980s backlash. Melvin Kinder and Connell Cowan make the media rounds, telling women they have pulled away from "caring about relationships" to focus on careers, leaving husbands "rejected". Their advice manuals, Smart Women/Foolish Choices and Women Men Love/Women Men Leave, are classic best-sellers, emphasizing that postponement of marriage is the root of their problems. At the end of the decade, they suddenly contradict themselves: women are obsessed with getting married. They deny that their "protracted scolding" has produced this "disorder", but their highly profitable moralizing has left insecure women feeling completely isolated. It has first knocked down liberated women's independence and then allowed them to "nurse" them back to mental health. Seeing little hope for social or political change, women clutch at...