Olga Silverstein was a renowned therapist and teacher. She specialized in family therapy and wrote several works on the subject of parenting, including The Courage to Raise Good Men. The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, she came to the United States at age seven, married young, and remained home rearing her three children until she was forty. Over the next seven years, she secured a high school diploma, a bachelor’s degree, and then a master of social work degree. In the mid-1970s she was co-founder with Peggy Papp of the Brief Therapy Project at the Ackerman Institute.

During the decade of the 1970s she and Papp joined Betty Carter and Marianne Walters to launch The Women’s Project in Family Therapy. They focused on examining the sexist concerns and theories that dominated their clinical practice, and soon began to offer workshops in the United States and abroad on women’s relationships in families. The pioneering and classic work, The Invisible Web: Gender Patterns in Family Relationships, was written by the four colleagues from this experience.