Fact: Women are the major consumers of counseling services today. Fact: The average counselor (male or female, secular or pastoral) has little or no specific training in the psychology of women or in understanding women's issues. Result: A widespread therapy gap that reduces respect, hinders healing, and breeds frustration. M. Gay Hubbard writes to close that disturbing gap by exposing common misbeliefs and faulty assumptions about women that can block understanding and perpetuate pain. Her aim in this provocative yet balanced book is to: - Increase women's self-understanding and make them smarter consumers of counseling services. - Challenge the myths of womanhood--old and new--that pervade our culture and can skew the thinking of counselor and client alike. - Expose faulty assumptions about women and therapy that may sabotage a counselor's best efforts--and even increase the risk of sexual abuse. - Examine the politics of gender research--and show why data about sex differences is often manipulated and misinterpreted to further particular agendas. - Encourage women and their counselors to look at the business of healing with fresh hope, deeper understanding, and an abiding sense of compassion. Impeccably researched, highly readable, challenging but never strident, 'Women: The Misunderstood Majority' is designed to open eyes and heal hearts, and to open the way for more women to lead productive and fulfilling lives.