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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman," pioneering feminist Phyllis Chesler dares to talk about the ways women -- including famous feminists -- stab each other in the back.
Mar 29, 2002 | Comedian Chris Rock does a routine in which he instructs men on how to listen to a wife or girlfriend talk about her day. Actually paying attention, he insists, isn't essential, just remember to look at her, nod your head and at regular intervals say "Uh huh," "Really?" and "I told you that bitch was crazy." That last response might seem overspecialized, but, Rock insists, no matter what a woman does for a living there's always another woman at work who she's convinced is trying to ruin her life.
The thing is, she just might be right. Phyllis Chesler, author of the pioneering 1972 feminist exposé of the psychiatric profession, "Women and Madness," has produced a mammoth volume, based on 20 years of research, arguing that other women can often be a girl's worst enemies. The supporting evidence in "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" comprises primate and anthropological research, workplace studies, sociological data, original interviews, memoir, even literary criticism and fairy tale analysis -- all documenting the usually underhanded and often devastating ways that women attack each other.
To which some readers will say, "So what else is new?" Even Chesler admits that she is hardly the first to write about the subject, and she makes a point of listing such predecessors as Dorothy Allison, Margaret Atwood and even Sophocles (for his characterization of the deadly conflict between Electra and her mother, Clytemnestra). Neither is "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" the definitive book about intrafeminine warfare; despite its heft and the wide range of materials it draws on, it's just too repetitive and rambling to be the kind of galvanizing work that brings a thousand inchoate impressions into crystalline focus.
Yet "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" is still an important book, in large part because of who Chesler is: a veteran and luminary of the Second Wave feminism of the late 1960s and early '70s. She has always been one of the more doctrinaire and unreconstructed members of that generation, a user of the kind of hoary lingo that makes everyone but old-guard true believers wince. Her 1998 book "Letters to a Young Feminist" mostly seemed to piss off its intended audience; writing for the New York Times Book Review, Kim France complained about Chesler's reliance on terms like "womanned the barricades" and "God/dess rest her soul" as well as, more substantively, the book's patronizing tone and general ignorance of young feminists' own culture and interests.
Woman's Inhumanity to Woman
By Phyllis Chesler
Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books
554 pages
All of which makes the step Chesler has taken with "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" more remarkable. Like most of her cohorts, she subscribed to the idea of sisterhood, the belief that women enlightened by feminism would live and work together in perfect, nonhierarchical, mutually supportive solidarity. Later, theories about women's superior skills in communication and forging relationships (spearheaded by Harvard professor Carol Gilligan) burnished that notion, and this idealized vision of how beautifully women get along seeped into all sorts of corners of American society, many of which would hesitate to call themselves feminist.
From the very beginning there have been dissenting voices to this cheery chorus, but they could usually expect to be attacked as anti-woman, often by feminists like Chesler. And in "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman," Chesler not only details the varieties of "indirect aggression" conventional women inflict on each other -- she comes clean about some pretty ugly battles within the ranks of feminism's elite as well.
So when Chesler gives herself credit for courage in publishing this book, she does deserve it. She is breaking ranks with a group that, she writes, gave her "the most romantic and liberating experience of my life," but one that can be merciless to apostates. In her introduction she describes telling "an old feminist friend ... a celebrated writer for whom I have great respect" about her project. To her dismay, her friend took a dim view of it:
"'I think you should be writing about how men oppress women, not about what oppressed people do in order to survive.' She said this smugly, sternly, and sanctimoniously ... I am surprised, a bit frightened for my work. Here was a feminist writer who had pre-judged an intellectual work, who was reluctant to even read a book if it did not seem to espouse the party line."
That Chesler should be astonished by this is in itself astonishing, as anyone who has ever dared to question this party line can testify. Without a doubt, Chesler has responded with the same chilliness to other women who challenged prevailing feminist analyses of, say, women's sexuality, one of the flashpoints of controversy within the movement during the 1980s. Surely she recalls dispensing such treatment herself? Actually, as "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" demonstrates again and again, most women can vividly remember being on the receiving end of this kind of damning, potentially ostracizing disapproval; what we "forget" are the times we've dished it out.
This kind of pressure, as Chesler goes on to relate, is typical of the emotional tactics women use to coerce each other. Groups of women tend to espouse an "illusion of equality" (and uniformity) in which variations from the norm are seen as dangerous betrayals. "Any expression of anger or the introduction of a tabooed subject may result in the group's scapegoating of one or two of its members," she observes. Because one of the biggest taboos is against any overt display of female aggression, these attacks are invariably covert, indirect and maddeningly unexplained -- which makes them especially devastating. "Most women have a repertoire of techniques with which to weaken, disorient, humiliate or banish other female group members," Chesler writes.
Because women tend to place tremendous value on belonging, they can experience exclusion from the group as a kind of death. One of Chesler's interview subjects -- a psychotherapist who made the mistake of frantically appealing to a group of affluent women colleagues when one of her patients, a battered wife pursued by a violent husband, needed emergency shelter -- got dunned by these professional friends for behaving "inappropriately" and being "too needy." But the punishment didn't stop there:
"One day, you think you're part of a community, the next moment, you're all alone, no one you used to know looks you in the eye, no one says anything specific, but you just never see anyone again. It's like having your entire family get wiped out, only they're still alive, and seeing each other. You're the one who's really been wiped out."
