An examination of popular advice books finds that their more obvious similarities mask very different perceptions-and correspondingly different counselconcerning what success is and how women can, or should, integrate their personal and professional lives.Throughout the history of the United States, both women and men have received advice from popular writers about how to be successful. The focus of this advice usually has varied according to the writers' perceptions of what members of each sex needed to know. For example,, during the rise of industrial capitalism and urbanization in the late nineteenth century, Horatio Alger wrote popular stories for boys depicting individual journeys to financial self-sufficiency, while a separate advice literature for women focused on their medical, psychological, and personal appearance concerns.As Ehrenreich and English demonstrate in For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, women of that period were faced with the choice of either following traditional domestic role models or throwing themselves unprepared and unwelcomed into the public world of business and politics. The resulting "Woman Problem," exemplified by the psychosomatic paralyses suffered by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Sanger, and Jane Addams, became an issue for public discussion. Women turned to expert advisors, usually male, who substituted so-called "scientific" solutions for "women's autonomous sources of
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