Barbara Almond, an educator and psychiatrist known for her work on women’s differing views of motherhood and the pressures society places on them to be perfect mothers, died at her home in Palo Alto, California, on March 6. She was 77 years old and had suffered from bladder cancer.
Dr. Almond was the author of best-selling book The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood (University of California Press, 2010). A reviewer in the Washington Post wrote that “The Monster Within addresses what everybody knows, but almost nobody talks about: Even the best mothers among us will be or have been tormented from time to time by strong feelings of dread, fear, hatred and even revulsion at the whole process of motherhood.”
Dr. Almond was born in the Bronx, New York. She was a graduate of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Yale Medical School. She then studied psychiatry at Stanford University and Georgetown University. She practiced psychiatry in Palo Alto and continued to see patients until just two month before her death. Dr. Almond taught psychiatry at Stanford University and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.