Books in Review

The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence by Colette Dowling. New York: Summit Books, 1981. Also available in paperback.

by Ann W. Fales, Ph.D.

The Cinderella Complex is an all too familiar phenomenon in popular literature dealing with the psychology of women: a personal growth episode turned into a universal truth without adequate scholarship and with enormous personal bias. However, it is also a book which surfaces an inner truth with which most women can, in some way, identify.

The central point of the book is that women are their own worst enemies because they are constantly controlled by their own deep-seated psychological need to be dependent on men. The fallacies of the book are that: a) this is unique to women; b) that it is universal for women; c) that is a primarily personal problem; and d) that it is a resolvable issue, once and for all.

All human beings are conflicted at times in their lives by the basic human dilemma of dependence/independence. And early learned social values do reinforce the dependent side of this dilemma for women. The "truth" of the issue is not, therefore, in dispute. But Dowling's interpretation of such dependence as resulting in an overwhelmingly negative, self-destructive, unfulfilled, victim psychology almost universally to women is a gross oversimplification and over generalization. Unfortunately, such an interpretation merely reinforces the learned assumptions and perpetuates the condition.

Dowling's interpretation of the hidden dependency needs of women appears to be based on a number of unarticulated assumptions: