More Reason and Less Emotion: The Self-Help Discourse Addressed to Women

In this paper, from an interdisciplinary point of view, which is based on the theoretical framework of French Discourse Analysis and based on Social Psychology, we analyze the ethos of a self-help book about relationships addressed to women. The analysis reveals that, anchored in the traditional stereotype of women, the self-help discourse adopts a melodramatic tone and especially a didactic tone, proposing to women that they need to be more rational and less emotional¸ collaborating, in a non-obvious way, to maintain the system of inequalities between the genres.

Keywords:
discourse; self-help; ethos; tone; stereotype of woman