The Way of All Women

Esther Harding’s foundational phenomenology of the woman’s psyche, first published in 1933 and revised in 1970 with a new preface in which she observes that, while the books and plays cited as illustrations have aged, “the thesis is still valid. For while the form of life changes, human nature does not change, or only very slowly” (Harding 1970, Preface to the Revised Edition, p. ix). The 1970 edition carries Jung’s 1932 Introduction.

The book is organized as a life-arc. Its chapters move through the woman’s relations to men generally (“All Things to All Men”), the inner life of the ghostly-lover, the world of work, friendship between women, marriage and maternity, the extramarital “off the beaten track,” the autumn and winter of age, and finally the chapter on conscious psychological relationship. Each chapter works phenomenologically: cases, dreams, fantasies of patients in analysis, illustrative literary figures, and — sparingly — direct citation of Jung.

What the book does that no prior work in the Jungian literature had done is render the woman’s life-course as an individuation arc with its own internal structure. Jung’s Introduction makes the assessment explicit: “Dr. Harding has drawn up a picture of the feminine psyche which, in extent and thoroughness, far surpasses previous works in this field” (Jung 1932, in Harding 1970). The book is the applied counterpart to Harding’s earlier mythological Woman’s Mysteries Ancient and Modern (1935): where Woman’s Mysteries grounds the feminine in the lunar mythologies of antiquity, The Way of All Women works the same material as it appears in the consulting room.

The book is the primary source for ghostly-lover, for anima-woman in its degraded and redeemed forms, for autumn-and-winter as a structural task, for eros-as-law, and for conscious-relationship as the developed end-state of the man-woman bond.

The Way of All Women

The Way of All Women

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