Joyce McFadden

Can we really still be here? Fighting amongst ourselves to determine The Right Way to be a mother?

Sure we can. Because we still live in a culture that struggles to afford women the right to make our own decisions in our highly individualized pursuit of whatever a fulfilling quality...

What do you get when you cross Gloria Steinem with a call for aspirin between the knees? You get inspired.

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of attending a Feminist.com salon hosted by Gloria Steinem, which also featured the sea-changing psychologist and author of In...

Although we don't mean to, we women fuel the fires of self-loathing in our girls every time we express dissatisfaction with our own appearance or dissect it in other women and girls.

I can't think of a single woman I know, including myself, who hasn't grappled with some form...

When my daughter was twelve, I asked her what she and her girlfriends were going to be for Halloween. Among the litany of vampy costumes she didn't even understand were vampy because they're so the norm, she casually mentioned that one of the girls in her class was going to...

Earlier this week on Good Morning America there was yet another story on the body image crisis affecting our pre-pubescent daughters.

We all know our society is hard on girls and women. It values thinness and "beauty" above all else, and propels our girls, at younger...

In her Wall Street Journal article "Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?" Jennifer Moses argues that the reason we mothers let our daughters "dress like prostitutes" is largely due to our own sexual regrets. She goes on to speculate that mothers who came of age in...

Can female desire come from a pharmaceutical company? Check out filmmaker Liz Canner's documentary, Orgasm, Inc., and see what you think.

The film, which opened last week at Quad Cinema, explores the focus our culture places on pharmaceutical intervention for all that ails us -- even on the...

I wanted to piggyback on David Brooks' Op-Ed in The New York Times earlier this week. In "Amy Chua Is a Wimp" he appraises Chua's critique in her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" of the way Americans raise their children to be entitled. However, Brooks takes...

The most important woman in my life is a woman I only met for a couple of minutes.

My sweet daughter Olivia is 14 now, and I'm still so madly in love with her that several times each day I wish I could inhale her. I often think about the...

When someone is desperate, they go to extremes. It's a psychological survival tactic. Like when someone first hears a cancer diagnosis, and they pray to God, promising they'll do anything if only the cancer would go away.

In both the individual and society, desperation is driven by fear. And fear...

Last week was the 37th anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision.

It's a time in our history when the emotional support of a woman's right to choose is still uneasy and unsettled, and insurance coverage for abortion is an active battle fraught with contention.

In many ways politics have...

I can't think of another figure on television who's done more to encourage us as a culture to rise to the highest common denominator.

MacNeil and Lehrer come to mind, but they began as a team and their purview was and is limited to news, whereas Winfrey's platform is broader...

This is not for you if you're one of those people who thinks about the upcoming holidays with your family and considers how very lucky you are to have each other.

This is for the people who think of the holidays with their families and consider opiates.

Aahhh family.

Just...

So let's say it's a random weekday morning and you're getting ready for your day while the morning news is on. Your ears perk up when you hear a story on the "Top Ten Companies" to work for if you're a mother or pregnant; and you think to yourself, "This...

This summer one of my clients and one of my girlfriends gave birth. As they approached their due dates they described the same familiar upset other girlfriends and women in my practice had reported at the end of their pregnancies.

Well meaning women -- family members, girlfriends, colleagues or strangers...

Re: the Kelly Clarkson SELF cover kerfuffle.

Before I address SELF, to be fair, I want to refer to Lauren Collins' article from the May 12, 2008 issue of The New Yorker entitled, "Pixel Prefect" because it has stayed with me since I read it.

In it Collins...

Recently, I attended a discussion about HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Photojournalist Kristen Ashburn, who spent seven years chronicling the devastating impact of the disease in Malawi, shared photos from her book I Am Because We Are. Her work is a powerful call to action and a reminder that...

Does anyone else feel sad that the longstanding DKNY mural at Houston and Broadway is now gone?

Since September 11th I've been hoping they were going to leave it there forever.

I was always fond of that mural as a symbol of a woman not only making it, but soaring...

We as mothers are putting our own fears ahead of our daughters' well being, and we have to confront this crisis of confidence in order to offer our girls more grounding in sexual vitality than we were given by our own mothers.

In not giving them the sexual information they...

As a therapist who works with women and men going through fertility treatments, and as a woman who went through them myself for ten years, I'm really pleased to announce the arrival of FertilityAuthority.com.

It can be an incredibly stressful and lonely experience to strive for a baby....