In the Western world, Southern white women humiliated and beat their female slaves, while gangs of young women in today’s Mexico and Los Angeles visit mayhem on each other, often in arguments over men. Genital mutilation in Africa, honor killings in Islamic countries, burnings over dowry disputes in India-all take place against women with the enthusiastic support of other women. Japanese, Chinese, and Indian mothers-in-law frequently beat their son’s wives, whom they treat more like slaves than like daughters. Mother lemurs and chimps have been known to kill and even cannibalize their competitors’ babies.Īs for the human side of things, the gentler sex is not always so gentle. Among primates, evolutionary psychologists have found, females often bid for “alpha” status by trying to sabotage the reproductive cycles of their sisters. As she relentlessly argues, women give as good as they get, especially toward each other.Ĭhesler begins with a run-through of the scientific and historical evidence on female violence. Chesler appears to want to overturn at least part of this orthodoxy. As she recently wrote, “It may be 1998, but in my view we are still living in the 1950’s.”Ĭould it be, then, that Woman’s Inhumanity To Woman, Chester’s latest book, represents a conversion, a parting of ways between our era’s most influential social movement and one of its minor stars? Feminists generally have depicted women as empathetic and caring creatures, victims of male aggression and dominance. Her best-selling Women and Madness followed two years later, succeeded over the decades by eight more books on the plight of women under the “patriarchy.” Though her fame eventually waned, Chesler’s radicalism did not. The money was never forthcoming, but Chesler’s stunt was the launch of a brilliant career.

In 1970 Phyllis Chesler strode onto the feminist stage with a speech to the American Psychological Association demanding that the profession pay a million dollars in reparations for all the poorly “adjusted” women whom its members had tranquilized, seduced, hospitalized, raped, electro-shocked, and lobotomized.

Women and madness by phyllis chesler