Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women Into Wives

by Dalma Heyn

Book Overview

As featured on Oprah, this groundbreaking book is eliciting as much controversial discussion as the author's highly acclaimed bestseller The Erotic Silence of the American Wife. In Marriage Shock,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385324022
• ISBN13: 9780385324021
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Delta
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Go Dalma! Go Dalma!

Ms Heyn addresses a topic that is kept quite secret in our culture - how women make the transition to what they consider to be "Wives". Finally a book that addresses our own expectations and doesn't lay the blame totally on the patriarchy. This book was quite helpful to me in my first year of marriage, as well as many of my clients.

An "AHA!" Moment!!!

This book provided what eluded me for decades - what turns capable vibrant independent women into Barbies, into Stepford Wives. I stumbled across it in my mid-thirties, great job, great income, feeling strong about myself and my abilities in the wake of a difficult divorce - I had remarried - to someone diametrically opposed in every way to the first hubby - and WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? I'm cooking dinner every night, watering all his houseplants, clucking about dustballs and forgoing bike rides and gym visits and nights out with pals to stay in and WHAT? sew curtains???It wasn't due to husband demands, nor did I have Donna Reed as a mom, - I needed an explanation as to why I was so hellbent on being The Wife - and this book provided an answer. Ms. Heyn's use of interviews and anecdote show how cultural influences permeat our lives, their power rivalling the more direct influences of family and spouse. The accompanying historical evidences were factual and interesting to read. I am amazed that this book has not gained more of a following, as its simple message can be a boon to those newly married, wondering Is this all there is? or What was I thinking? Ms. Heyn has seen the enemy, and shows it to us in a way that allows us to beat it.

This book has the power to change divorce statistics.

This book is absolutely revolutionary. Divorce statistics and the health statistics of married women ar scary, but they need not be if women will read this book! Dalma Heyn has put into writing what most women are thinking and feeling but afraid to talk about. Now we have a chance to understand that we should remain ourselves and dodge the stereotypes of "wives" if we want to keep our marriage alive. For centuries we have been told to do it wrong thus setting the divorce statistics at an all time high and women's self esteem at an all time low. A must read for women of all ages and all marital statuses.

A revolutionary way to save marriage.

This important, quietly subversive book suggests that the only way we can save marriage is by radically overhauling it -- so it has room for real, live, whole women. If you've ever wondered why you (or your wife) felt flat, gray and depressed in the first, supposedly blissful year of marriage, or why over 60 percent of American marriages end in divorce, two-thirds of them instigated by women, you've got to read this book -- it's an eye-opener. Yet it is not even remotely anti-male, or even anti-marriage. Rather, it unmasks a couple of fictional cultural characters -- the preachy Witness and the impossibly Good Wife -- who possess us like dybbuks at the altar. This book is a veritable exorcism that can give you back the self you lost and the lover you married

A compelling, well-written new theory on women and marraige.

I recently had the opportunity to read "Marriage Shock" & was absolutely riveted by this insightful treatise on what happens to women's identities after marriage. The book made me aware of a psychological phenomena peculiar to married women in which I have unwittingly participated for the last 14 years. What an eye-opener! Ms. Heyn's theory that married women subconsciouly & automatically, "edit" their behavior from their prior, single lives in order to conform to the role of "the good wife" is demonstrated by the fascinating, often quirky examples provided by the women who were the subjects of her interviews. The author's personal and refreshingly expressive style is just great. The reader can almost hear Ms. Heyn's voice as she reasons her way through some of the most engaging subject matter recently presented in print. This is a serious book, not a piece of Self-Help How-To fluff. Ms. Heyn is no Martha Stewart, and some of what you read may take you aback, but I think that you will be unable to put this book down. Any thinking woman who doesn't see a little of herself and every married woman she knows in "Marriage Shock" is not looking hard enough