ABSTRACT
There are groups of young women, middle-aged women, older women; groups for economic development, for saving the environment, for women’s and children’s rights and legal redress, for political action. To confront the backlash, particularly in its religious ideological forms with all their regressive consequences, third-wave feminists have had to keep continuously rethinking their own images of women and children. The mothers invoked in third-wave feminist visions, the ancestral mothers, are idealised mothers, wished for mothers: generative towards the group members as the group members wish to be towards each other and their children. The model or group-ideal of a women’s power group is a female sibling group in which everyone grows up to be equal in opportunity and reward. Dissociative states and various kinds of fragmentations of identity became central to psychoanalytic theory and therapy and were applied to the study of women.
