Satter, who died in 1965 at the age of 49 (when I was six years old). My next project began with my curiosity about my father, attorney Mark J. It also interrogated the alternatively self-aggrandizing and self-blaming tendencies of the “New Thought” belief that one’s mental outlook was responsible for one’s situation. My first book, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (University of California Press, 1999), described the national scope of a now forgotten religious movement led by women and showed its complex impact on Progressive Era reform. I went to graduate school so that I could uncover the history of women as thinkers and activists. Feminism made immediate sense to me as a lens through which to understand my world. I trace my intellectual development to my discovery of feminism as a teenager in the 1970s. Yet given Americans’ tendency to favor personalized over structural analysis, I believe that elucidating the differences between the two is crucial to our future as a nation. Institutions are run by people who have their own complex allegiances, needs and understandings of the problems they confront. My work has a dual focus: analyzing the history of psychologically-based approaches to reform, on one hand, and uncovering the structural, institutional mechanisms that create inequality on the other.
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