For the Love of Women

Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America

By: Dorothy Littell Greco, Beth Allison Barr - introduction

Narrated by: Nan McNamara

If we hope to fight and eventually heal from misogyny, we must first be able to identify and understand it.

Despite the undeniable progress for women and girls in the 20th and 21st centuries, misogyny is still alive and well in today's culture—often in ways that are more subtle and more insidious than the outright sexism of the past, and in spaces that we overlook or excuse as normative.

Misogyny has shape-shifted through the generations while maintaining a consistent through-line: it blinds individuals and cultures from seeing women as equal image-bearers, fosters hierarchies rather than partnerships, disdains vulnerability, and prevents all of us—women and men alike—from fully thriving.

In For the Love of Women Dorothy Littell Greco draws on in-depth research, interviews, biblical concepts, and vulnerable personal experience to explore how misogyny continues to impact six spheres of contemporary culture:

1. Healthcare
2. Government
3. The workplace
4. Media and entertainment
5. The church
6. Intimate relationships

While recent movements succeeded in raising consciousness and initiating important changes connected to misogynistic practices, alarming trends and rhetoric are on the rise in America today. We still have a lot of work to do—and the battle is more urgent than ever.

Like other deeply rooted, systemic injustices, misogyny is neither morally neutral nor random. It's pernicious and calculated. For the Love of Women is for anyone who wants to educate, inspire, and empower themselves and women collectively to affect real change for everyone's benefit.

Important read for the love of women AND men

Well written and researched with relevant real life stories . A must read for both men and women!

Beautiful, Healing, Well Read

This was a phenomenal book. Highly recommend. The narrator is easy to listen to and the material was well researched.

Grateful for Scholarship

The Church often decries conversations of gender as capitulating to the culture. Greco helps the reader understand it’s the opposite.

Think misogyny is eradicated from our culture? Think again!

This book is great for the Christian who doesn’t think misogyny is still running rampant in our church (or even non church) cultures. I was filled with holy rage in places, but also hope and encouragement by the end. Please please read this book and pass it along to your Christian friends of all religious and various backgrounds so we can all be educated together and change the future of the world for ourselves and especially for our daughters!

Required Reading for Such a Time as This

In For the Love of Women, the author brings her signature style to a critically important and tragically timely topic. I view this new book as required reading for our times, wherein the many significant signs of women’s progress can readily mask the fact that misogyny is still very much alive in our culture. Greco removes the mask.

I know this author, and I know her writing. As in her previous books, she bravely and transparently shares her own journey, and she powerfully portrays the experiences of many other women. She also documents her research with scholarship worthy of academic praise (over 450 references), but she does so with the skill and passion of an accomplished storyteller—enabling the reader to experience the depth and scope of the relevant issues.

Misogyny literally means “hatred women.” However, Greco is careful to base her approach on a reasoned, comprehensive definition: “A persistent, insidious belief that men’s ideas, wants, needs, and experiences are more important than women’s and that legal, religious, and social systems, as well as intimate relationships, should uphold this principle. This belief system subsequently influences the laws, policies, practices, and ethos of a given culture.”

She then presents evidence for the validity of her perspective by exposing misogyny’s influence in healthcare, the workplace, the government, media and entertainment, sexual relationships, and—perhaps most appallingly—within the Church. Thereafter, she also offers constructive thoughts on healing these wounds and on eradicating this systemic evil against women—a daunting but absolutely essential task. In doing so, she offers genuine hope for a better tomorrow, for women and for men, who are both harmed by misogyny’s far-reaching effects. I pray that many will not only read this book but will also share it, and more importantly, act on it—for the love of women.

Jeff Bjorck, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Psychology
Retired Licensed Psychologist
Fuller Theological Seminary
School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy