Women's Self Esteem

Low self-esteem is not an individual defect or problem alone.
Low self-esteem is the result of the internalization of negative peer,
familial, and/or social messages.

Women's mental health is political and the erosion of women's self-esteem demands feminist analysis and contextualization. At the threshold of the new millennium when self- esteem had gained popularity as a phenomenon of interest to mental health professionals, building self-esteem became an assigned duty of many public health nurses including myself. A feminist qualitative study situated in public health nursing illustrated that the plunge in self-esteem of six North American white women was the outcome of a patriarchal social system that demands narrow gender roles for women and subsequently devalues them. Mental health professionals must shift the problematic lens of self-esteem interventions that are fixed on exposing and ameliorating individual deficits in women's self appraisals. Consciousness-raising as a strategy to bolster self-esteem is proposed: a strategy that shifts the lens on women's self-esteem from the personal to the political.

Shifting the Lens: Resituating Women's Self-Esteem from the Personal to the Political PDF document