What do you think?
Rate this book
The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
"A seminal text in the women's movement."
–Ethel S. Person, author of The Sexual Century
"Still the most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration, its re-release is a celebratory occasion."
–Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women and Mortality
"[The Mermaid and the Minotaur] continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere."
–Jessica Benjamin, author of The Bonds of Love
332 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
82 people are currently reading
3622 people want to read
About the author
Dorothy Dinnerstein
5 books11 followersDorothy Dinnerstein was an American feminist academic and activist. She is best known for her book
The Mermaid and the Minotaur
(1976), which was published in the UK under the title The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World (1987). Applying elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly as developed by Melanie Klein, Dinnerstein argued that sexism and aggression are the inevitable consequences of leaving childrearing to women. She proposed an equal sharing of childcare duties between men and women as a solution.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 6, 2008
I recommend reading Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature before grappling with this challenging and deeply psychoanalytic text. Those other two books will put you in a better mindset to really tackle the issues Ms. Dinnerstein raises. On a personal level, this book released a watershed of feelings around my own rearing, and as I read it each day, I had to spend serious time journaling and processing experiences from my past that it evoked. Overall, though, when you are ready, be prepared to love this book as I do, for the immensely personal journey it will take you on.
July 25, 2010
"To realize that one is female, destined to compete with other females for the erotic resources of males, is to discover that one is doomed to renounce one’s first love.”
I was attracted to this book after reading the title in another book and then upon reading the first review on Amazon in which the review told how the book had changed his life so much so that he bought 88 copies to give to people that he knew, and at least 8 of those people came back to tell him that it had also changed their lives. If that isn't great publicity, I don't know what is.
Prior to reading this, I had mostly stayed away from psychoanalysis because of what I knew of Freud's deep chauvinism....I learned about penis-envy in high school and had been turned off ever since. Because of my unfamiliarity with the topic, some of it seemed a little dense, but well worth the work. Dinnerstein argues that Freud and other more contemporary psychoanalysts such as Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown are very correct in their observations, but overlook a key aspect of their theories. That all of their obervations and conclusions are the product of societies and households in which infants are mother-raised. They took this as an inevitable and "natural" structure and did not bother to examine the ways that that particular aspect affected their ideas, and to what extent a change in the way children are raised would produce not only new relations between the sexes, but a new psychology, a new way of interacting with and understanding the world. I could go on and on, because most everything I read was pretty mind-blowing and deserves full description, but basically Dinnerstein discusses the effects that female-dominated childhood has on society and the possibilities that emerge out of that understanding toward a less alienated, healthier society. If you are still wondering, you should read it!
I was attracted to this book after reading the title in another book and then upon reading the first review on Amazon in which the review told how the book had changed his life so much so that he bought 88 copies to give to people that he knew, and at least 8 of those people came back to tell him that it had also changed their lives. If that isn't great publicity, I don't know what is.
Prior to reading this, I had mostly stayed away from psychoanalysis because of what I knew of Freud's deep chauvinism....I learned about penis-envy in high school and had been turned off ever since. Because of my unfamiliarity with the topic, some of it seemed a little dense, but well worth the work. Dinnerstein argues that Freud and other more contemporary psychoanalysts such as Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown are very correct in their observations, but overlook a key aspect of their theories. That all of their obervations and conclusions are the product of societies and households in which infants are mother-raised. They took this as an inevitable and "natural" structure and did not bother to examine the ways that that particular aspect affected their ideas, and to what extent a change in the way children are raised would produce not only new relations between the sexes, but a new psychology, a new way of interacting with and understanding the world. I could go on and on, because most everything I read was pretty mind-blowing and deserves full description, but basically Dinnerstein discusses the effects that female-dominated childhood has on society and the possibilities that emerge out of that understanding toward a less alienated, healthier society. If you are still wondering, you should read it!
June 11, 2011
The author indicates that this book, published in the late 1970s, was the result of decades of thinking. In the last chapter, Dinnerstein tries to project where collective gender attitudes may be going in the future with a bit of analysis of the counterculture, New Left, and Second Wave Feminism; but for the most part, the book is a psychoanalytic examination of what Dinnerstein believed to be an important root cause of both sexual inequality and (most importantly to her) an overall destructive pattern of history that it seemed would imminently end all human life, by wars and environmental degradation.
Basically (I hope I'm summarizing this correctly), Dinnerstein posited that because the contacts that every individual has during his or her infancy are almost exclusively with women, during the formation of personality and gender identity people transfer emotions associated with the early caregiver to women in general. These include longing for protection, jealousy, conflict, etc. These remain during the future course of what Dinnerstein calls "the human project", that is recognition that we shape our own lives (because of our sentience). She says that the ability to divide humanity into two genders and differentiate between what is associated with each one provides many, complex escape routes for people to remain infantile, avoid their ambivalences, protect themselves from emotional conflicts; both genders participate in the construction and maintenance of these, in a way that is "symbiotic". She thinks that being able to thus escape is a bad thing, which "maims and stunts" both genders, and leads to one half of human personality, the expansive "world-making" done by men, being greedy and exploitive.
Dinnerstein argues that although the systemic factors pointed out by other feminists are important, and although there is certainly a lot of simple resistance by men to giving up privileges and comforts, change cannot come unless the deep-seated psychological contributions to the current sexual arrangements are changed, and that can only happen once men take a major part in infant care (which is now technologically possible). "[Efforts to overthrow tyranny] are inevitably abortive... until we start outgrowing the original dependency, the original terror of eternal helplessness, instead of trying all our lives to keep it at bay. And we will take on this emotional task only when we no longer have the option, at the beginning, of shirking it by running for refuge from the first tyrant to another of a new gender."
It would be nice if this relatively simple prescription contributed toward changing human nature for the better. Unfortunately, it rests entirely on psychoanalytic theories of personality formation, and recent psychological research has shown that minds just don't work that way. But does this mean that there is no point at all in reading this book? I don't think so. It is lucidly written, by a thoughtful critic, who has many interesting observations to make along the way. Her tentative vision of what human nature might be if not divided among genders but rather synthesized in each individual is intriguing; and it is always worth being reminded just how much culture shapes our most "obvious" assumptions.
Here's Dinnerstein's rationale for trying to understand the roots of our attitudes: "Human life is the one piece of nature whose structure is shaped internally by the way we perceive it, the only one on which our awareness works from the inside rather than from the outside. This means that here our perception of what we want to change is not merely a guide in the effort to change it: the perception and the change are aspects of a single development." This insight applies to all psychological understandings, not just the outdated psychoanalytic one.
Basically (I hope I'm summarizing this correctly), Dinnerstein posited that because the contacts that every individual has during his or her infancy are almost exclusively with women, during the formation of personality and gender identity people transfer emotions associated with the early caregiver to women in general. These include longing for protection, jealousy, conflict, etc. These remain during the future course of what Dinnerstein calls "the human project", that is recognition that we shape our own lives (because of our sentience). She says that the ability to divide humanity into two genders and differentiate between what is associated with each one provides many, complex escape routes for people to remain infantile, avoid their ambivalences, protect themselves from emotional conflicts; both genders participate in the construction and maintenance of these, in a way that is "symbiotic". She thinks that being able to thus escape is a bad thing, which "maims and stunts" both genders, and leads to one half of human personality, the expansive "world-making" done by men, being greedy and exploitive.
Dinnerstein argues that although the systemic factors pointed out by other feminists are important, and although there is certainly a lot of simple resistance by men to giving up privileges and comforts, change cannot come unless the deep-seated psychological contributions to the current sexual arrangements are changed, and that can only happen once men take a major part in infant care (which is now technologically possible). "[Efforts to overthrow tyranny] are inevitably abortive... until we start outgrowing the original dependency, the original terror of eternal helplessness, instead of trying all our lives to keep it at bay. And we will take on this emotional task only when we no longer have the option, at the beginning, of shirking it by running for refuge from the first tyrant to another of a new gender."
It would be nice if this relatively simple prescription contributed toward changing human nature for the better. Unfortunately, it rests entirely on psychoanalytic theories of personality formation, and recent psychological research has shown that minds just don't work that way. But does this mean that there is no point at all in reading this book? I don't think so. It is lucidly written, by a thoughtful critic, who has many interesting observations to make along the way. Her tentative vision of what human nature might be if not divided among genders but rather synthesized in each individual is intriguing; and it is always worth being reminded just how much culture shapes our most "obvious" assumptions.
Here's Dinnerstein's rationale for trying to understand the roots of our attitudes: "Human life is the one piece of nature whose structure is shaped internally by the way we perceive it, the only one on which our awareness works from the inside rather than from the outside. This means that here our perception of what we want to change is not merely a guide in the effort to change it: the perception and the change are aspects of a single development." This insight applies to all psychological understandings, not just the outdated psychoanalytic one.
April 2, 2023
4.5/5 (does not score a 5/5 as the last 50 or so pages were incredibly hard to follow and felt less fluidly communicated and thought out than her previous chapters!)
I did not think that 2023 would be the year that I would start appreciating psychoanalysis but alas, here we are. The more I learn about science (through uni more so than through reading), the more I become convinced of its limitations and the more I believe that truly intuitively people gifted with the ability to dynamically (and intersectionally) perceive the world around them (e.g., reminiscent of moscovici's social representations) hold the truth as to why society is organised the way it is/why we are the way we are. The fact that such truths do not lend themselves to 'objective'/empirical realisation and verification does not make them any less true - which is clear in this case considering that Dinnerstein's observations about men and women are sooo nuanced, precise and fully-fledged.
There is too much substance contained within these pages for me to even try to summarise them in a review - even if I wanted to, I don't think I could do it justice (I would need to reread this 2-3 times at the very least). I just wanted to document that I loved this, learned so much and wholeheartedly side with the fact that mothers should not be the sole child-rearers.
I did not think that 2023 would be the year that I would start appreciating psychoanalysis but alas, here we are. The more I learn about science (through uni more so than through reading), the more I become convinced of its limitations and the more I believe that truly intuitively people gifted with the ability to dynamically (and intersectionally) perceive the world around them (e.g., reminiscent of moscovici's social representations) hold the truth as to why society is organised the way it is/why we are the way we are. The fact that such truths do not lend themselves to 'objective'/empirical realisation and verification does not make them any less true - which is clear in this case considering that Dinnerstein's observations about men and women are sooo nuanced, precise and fully-fledged.
There is too much substance contained within these pages for me to even try to summarise them in a review - even if I wanted to, I don't think I could do it justice (I would need to reread this 2-3 times at the very least). I just wanted to document that I loved this, learned so much and wholeheartedly side with the fact that mothers should not be the sole child-rearers.
July 25, 2019
Holy shit. I cannot say enough terrible things about this book. I have never disliked anything I've ever read but this, this is a waste of matter and time. I tried taking in to account when it was written (birth of super angry feminism) but no, it's still not acceptable. This author is also incredibly rude to her readers, saying how they might be angry or really just not educated enough to understand some things. Her language and grammar was far worse than anything I wrote in college to make my bullshit essays longer. It's like the worst paper I've ever written on steroids and bath salts x 10! I have never not enjoyed anything I've read in my life. From a food label to text book nonsense. It's seriously so bad. I normally donate books I don't want to thrift stores but I am saving this book to actually burn in a camp fire, hopefully it's the last copy on earth.
June 10, 2020
Sometimes it's good to read the enemy. This book is a good example of how terms like 'privilege' and concepts like anti-natalism have seeped from the purely academic to the everyday sphere of public discourse. The benefit of hindsight when reading books that are situated firmly in a Darwinian/Freudian framework is that you know the ideas are mostly bullshit. This is entirely made up of conjecture and cope. Conjecture because there is zero basis for any of the assertions except jerking off other feminist authors. Cope because the author had one child, divorced and then married again, and probably came up with these ideas because of a defective husband.
Nonetheless I enjoyed some of the writing and some of the discussion on the relation between men and women is actually not that far from red pill theories. In terms of fantasy, a bit of fun. If you take it seriously, as the author desires, you'll run into trouble.
Nonetheless I enjoyed some of the writing and some of the discussion on the relation between men and women is actually not that far from red pill theories. In terms of fantasy, a bit of fun. If you take it seriously, as the author desires, you'll run into trouble.
Currently reading
December 16, 2010It's a good book to encourage men participating in raising children. Men participation will change the world view and reduce the gender inequality.
September 29, 2024
This book beautifully explains a part of life which is so large and as she states “omnipresent” that it becomes not even noticed at all, which is that the inequity in child rearing by gender creates and iterates roles, meanings, approaches, and concepts in every other area of culture, home, society, and life. I wondered why it took me so long to find this book. The way Dinnerstein describes the psychological experience of being raised only by mermaids (half human/ half mythical, idealized, mysterious, inaccessible and siren like) in a world of minotaurs (half human/ half mythical, dangerous, competitive, and locked in a game) is frankly dizzying and reorienting. Highly recommend diving in to this masterful book. Also, was able to get the original hardcover on Amazon and I think it added to the experience!
April 22, 2024
This book is about how important it is for men to have a hand in the rearing of their children. Dinnerstein had a theory that if men were more involved it would change them for the better and change children too.
October 21, 2024
New favorite book, really made me reconsider my perspective on everything. I want to read more like it but it’s hard to find more discourse that takes this kind of view of looking at the world. Feel like an open wound a little now on account of how she explains all these issues and how we got here, but leaves it sort of open ended in terms of how we can expect to escape this way of life where we march towards death
April 25, 2007
This book was very interesting and prompted me to better my vocabulary,..
Dotty D writes about how living in our society, where the main auspices are female, causes certain psychological effects which lead to the majority of the problems that exist today, as far as humans go,.....
Good stuff,.. Check it out,.. Keep a dictionary handy.
Dotty D writes about how living in our society, where the main auspices are female, causes certain psychological effects which lead to the majority of the problems that exist today, as far as humans go,.....
Good stuff,.. Check it out,.. Keep a dictionary handy.
Want to read
April 11, 2020Referenced in of 83 of When the Body Says No (4/10/20)
September 12, 2022
This is a book about sex with no sex, a book about thought with no thought of the real world, its a self enclosed mastubatory fantasy. Pleez give us one page about YOUR SEX LIFE to see if you know anything about the subject, or love or anything else. Someone in a review mentioned poetry, if this is a classic of feminism rather than verbal fetishism, heaven and freud help us. oh there is no poetry too
Want to read
February 25, 2023aus: bell hooks - all about love
kapitel: honesty -> men & dishonesty
kapitel: honesty -> men & dishonesty
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews