Acknowledgments
The ideas in this book have developed within the context of feminist thought and action of the past two decades, in which l have found my intellectual and political home. Feminist theory and practice have been an endlessly rich source of ideas for me, and I have incurred a debt that I hope I have repaid, at least in part, with my own work. I cannot imagine my work and my life outside of feminist thought and practice or away from the women who make these ideas a way of life.
In addition to this general indebtedness, I owe a particular debt to certain colleagues and friends, without whom my work could not have taken its current form. They are too numerous to thank individually, but they know who they are and I am grateful to them all. The members of the Feminist Therapy Institute have provided a context for my work. My women clients, students, colleagues, and friends have also served as my teachers.
A sabbatical year from San Jose State University allowed me to write a first draft in as uninterrupted a form as my life ever takes. Finally, this book would never have come into being but for the various cafés in the Berkeley- Oakland area, in Paris, and in San José, Costa Rica, in which much of my writing and many of my observations took place.
Finally I must note that this e-book edition is being published some twenty years after the original publication of Engendered Lives. It is both an historical document, a record of the beginnings of a new and revolutionary approach, and still all too relevant. As the culture has changed, it has improved some circumstances while exacerbating others. Academic disciplines are aware of and have incorporated gender into their paradigms. Certain psychological issues, eating disorders, for example, are much more common than we ever could have imagined, as are all the psychological problems of girls and women that are based in appearance. The approach to making meaning and finding models that deepen our understanding of the complexity of these issues in context have stood the test of time and are as meaningful today as they were in I992. I myself have continued along the path that began to appear to me in this book, writing about the tyranny of vision and about meaning or mattering as a meta-principle to bring order, understanding and change to these issues. This path has become even clearer to me over the years, as has the complexity of all that surrounds it.