Rivera-Garza and "Tales of Two Women"

Rivera-Garza

• Psychology is not a science that I put a whole lot of credit in; I believe that there are two trends currently: 1)Overdiagnose everything. Especially things such as ADHD and depression. Your kid acts out too much in class? It's because you haven't disiplined him enough. Life didn't turn out the way you thought it would? Join the club! I am not trying to discount true mental illness, such as REAL ADHD and REAL clinical depression, but in my completely uneducated and uniformed opinion, the vast majority of people are simply diagnosed with these "problems" because: 2)Psychiatrists seem to want to prescribe a pill for everything. The reason is two-fold: because medicating someone is much easier than actually treating someone and, most importantly, doctors get PAID with incentives to medicate people; they make money from it. Sorry, that kinda got a little off topic.
  
• Behaviorism has its merits, but that did not arise untill Skinner in the 40s. As evidenced by this article and Freud's writings, along with others, it illustrates the sexual bias that most men had at the time, even the intellectuals. Although Freud had some good ideas, concepts such as "penis envy" show his bias and the inherent bias in Psychology at the time. This article shows the biases as well: if a women is promiscuous then she suffers from "moral insanity", but I did not see any evidence of any men who were diagonsed with the same condition because they were promiscuous. This double-standard continues today, albeit not necessarily in psychology.
  
• I thought this article gave the women in the asylum too much credit for social change, although some of the women wrote letters and such, the article seems to imply that people did not really take them seriously.

"Tales of Two Women"

• Aha, here's an article to my liking!
• According to the rules of the Codigo Duelo, this fight did not consitute as a duel (Esperanza was unarmed). The author makes the arguement that two men fighting a duel over a women would not have been punished as severely as she was, but she was, in fact, a murder. However, I do not disagree that if a similar situation had happened to a man, the punishment surely would have been less severe.
• I wonder, although this is impossible to tell, if María was truly remorseful for their actions or if she regretted what she did due to the punisment she recieved.
  
• In my opinion, she should not have been punished so severely. Her defense was solid for the time: her honor had been called into question. Her method was the problem: she should have challenged her to a duel, rather than murdering her.