Unfinished Business Pressure Points in the Lives of Women [Paperback]

“An extraordinary panorama of women’s lives today.”—The New York Times Book Review

In detailed, revealing portraits of women from their teens through their sixties, Maggie Scarf explores the core experiences of women’s lives and discovers what can happen when the days and years scurry by, leaving unfinished the tasks that transform us from child to girl to woman.

Praise forUnfinished Business

“Real-life problems are thoughtfully and sympathetically analyzed inUnfinished Business. . . . Love and loss, deprivation and fulfillment, the pangs of growing up and, worse, the plight of those who never do—these are Scarf’s subjects, and she gives them the attention and respect rightly due such integral threads in the fabric of our lives.”—Cosmopolitan

“No woman or man will be untouhed by Maggie Scarf’s brilliant research. There is a gift for all of us in these pages—that freeing, exhilarating emotion: thank God I read this book—I thought I was the only one.”—Nancy FridayMaggie Scarfis a former visiting fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, and a current fellow of Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University. She was for many years a contributing editor to theNew Republicand a member of the advisory board of the American Psychiatric Press.PROLOGUE
 
Statistics, and a Game of Tennis
 
WHEN I began to gather material for this book, it was to be about the problem of women and depression. The book that I have written is, however, simply a book about women.
 
This happened, I suppose, because the sorts of issues and concerns that kept cropping up in the intensive interviewing that I was doing—with women of differing ages, who were anywhere from mildly to very seriously depressed—were not discernibly different from the sorts l3æ