Behind the Mask: Destruction and Creativity in Women's Aggression

Drawing from 60 interviews with women from a wide range of social and educational backgrounds, Dana Crowley Jack traces a variety of expressions of aggression, from simple "assertiveness" at work or home to the free pursuit of a woman's own dreams to unprovoked physical violence against others. In her introduction, she explains the "six ways of listening" that she tried to employ while speaking with her subjects and interpreting their responses: "open listening (the body's responses and other nonverbal signals are taken into account as part of reflexivity), focused awareness (meanings are not taken for granted; the speaker is asked to explain key words or phrases), and attending to moral language, to inner dialogues, to the logic of the narrative, and to meta-statements, those places in interviews where people spontaneously reflect on something they just said." These sound like rules for intelligent reading of any text, and Jack goes on to demonstrate the rewards of her receptive attitude in the fascinating disclosures made by her subjects. For example, Jean (age 46, white, potter) recounts a dream in which painful and obstructive "bony structures growing out of [her] jaw" suggest her fears of lashing out verbally, while Gloria (age 34, Latina, unemployed) recalls being beaten to the cement for spreading malicious rumors. "Behind the Mask" is a sensitive and skillfully conducted psychological study with far-reaching social implications.