Status of Women

Vivian B. Pender, MD, is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College and a Training Psychoanalyst at Columbia University. At the UN she represents the International Psychoanalytical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Until 2011, she chaired the NGO Committee on the Status of Women. She is the current Chair of the NGO Committee on Mental Health, and a volunteer Asylum Evaluator for Physicians for Human Rights. She is the author of journal articles and a book chapter on affect, motivation, pregnancy, female psychology and women's health. She produced four documentaries of conferences at the United Nations on mental health, human rights and violence.

'The strength and the tremendous impact of this book lie in its clarity, its multifaceted themes, its freedom from ideology, and its deep contact with the real condition of women and children in the world, which is so frequently and dramatically tragic. Vivian Pender, together with highly recognized colleagues, has for years given voice to psychoanalysis at the United Nations. There can be no residual doubt, after having read this volume, about the immensely important social function of psychoanalysis in the contemporary world, promoting an unending work in progress through awareness, humanization and civilization.'- Stefano Bolognini, President of the International Psychoanalytical Association'Vivian Pender has brought together a wonderfully diverse array of authors who examine the role of women in a wide variety of situations from a largely psychoanalytic point of view. This book is terrific, making us think anew about a set of age-old problems that beset all nations and peoples. This book should be required reading for everyone.'- Elizabeth L. Auchincloss, MD, Vice Chair for Education, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College'This book bridges the gap between theory and practice in global feminism in an unusually robust way.'- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, PhD, University Professor in the Humanities and Founding Member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University

• Series Editor’S Foreword -- Introduction -- A woman surgeon: her story -- Simone de Beauvoir and the trauma of sexism -- “Pure heroines” on campus: new wave feminism and popular culture -- Pregnancy: a clinical and cultural experience of pregnancy in the Middle East and North America -- Women and migration: “children on the move” -- Women and power: a developmental perspective -- Maternal genealogy: narcissistic identification in three generations of women -- Abuse of women: relation to the maternal representation -- Atrocities against mother and child re-presented in the psychoanalytic space -- Machismo and the limits of male heterosexuality -- Women and activism: a long history, a complex problem