Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health

Ellen Cole, Esther D Rothblum, Phyllis Chesler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317764328
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health is by and about the more recent wave of feminist foremothers; those who were awakened in the 1960s and '70s to the realization that something was terribly wrong. These are the women who created the fields of feminist therapy, feminist psychology, and women's mental health as they exist today. The 48 women share their life stories in the hope that they will inspire and encourage readers to take their own risks and their own journeys to the outer edges of human possibility. Authors write about what led up to their achievements, what their accomplishments were, and how their lives were consequently changed. They describe their personal stages of development in becoming feminists, from unawareness to activism to action. Some women focus on the painful barriers to success, fame, and social change; others focus on the surprise they experience at how well they, and the women's movement, have done. Some well-known feminist foremothers featured include:

• Phyllis Chesler
• Gloria Steinem
• Kate Millett
• Starhawk
• Judy Chicago
• Zsuszanna Emese Budapest
• Andrea Dworkin
• Jean Baker Miller
• Carol Gilligan In Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health, many of the women see in hindsight how prior projects and ideas and even dreams were the forerunners to their most important work. They note the importance of sisterhood and the presence of other women and the loneliness and isolation experienced when they don't exist. They note the validation they have received from grassroots feminists in contrast to disbelief from professionals. Although these women have been and continue to be looked up to as foremothers, they realize how little recognition they've been given from society-at-large and how much better off their male counterparts are. Some foremothers write about the feeling of being different, not meshing with the culture of the time and about challenging the system as an outsider, not an insider. These are women who had few mentors, who had to forge their own way, "hit the ground running." Their stories will challenge readers to press on, to continue the work these foremothers so courageously started.Throughout the pages of Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health runs a sense of excitement and vibrancy of lives lived well, of being there during the early years of the women's movement, of making sacrifices, of taking risks and living to see enormous changes result. Throughout these pages, too, sounds a call not to take these changes for granted but to recognize that feminists, rather than arguing over picayune issues or splitting politically correct hairs, are battling for the very soul of the world.

A Leader of Women

Phyllis Chesler Interviewed by Ellen Cole

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the author of seven books including Women and Madness (1972), About Men (1978), Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody (1986) and most recently, Patriarchy: Notes of an Expert Witness (1994). She has published articles in both popular and academic journals, including law journals. Dr. Chesler has been working on a book about the nation’s so-called first female serial killer. She has been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome for 4 years. Dr. Chesler has testified as an expert witness in a wide variety of cases. She is a co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology, The National Women’s Health Network, and the Editor-at-Large for On The Issues magazine.

Correspondence may be addressed to Phyllis Chesler at 732A Carroll Street, New York, NY 11215.

One’s first book takes one’s whole life to write. Maybe I was born to write Women and Madness. I think I would have written it no matter when I’d been born–but without a radical feminist movement moving in the world, you would never have heard of it, no one would have cared about it, other feminists couldn’t have inspired it, blessed it, passed it round, from hand to hand.

I–and my generation of feminists–hit the ground running. We were part of an extraordinary moment in history. I am extremely privileged. Women tell me that my work has saved and changed their lives. Women and Madness has been cited literally thousands of times in hundreds of academic journals, and in the popular media, it’s been translated into many European languages. I have traveled all over the world to lecture, and to meet with other feminists. This is no small thing; this is a miraculous, and wonderful thing.

I don’t know what kind of life I would have lived had there been no modern feminist movement. A lesser life, I’m sure, and a more miserable one. When I was a child, I’d met no woman who’d graduated from college or who’d had a “career,” other than that of teacher, nurse or secretary. In high school, college, and graduate school, I had only a handful of women teachers. I had no female (or male) mentors or role models. Women were not my intellectual comrades–only books were.

Then in 1967, life gained its fourth dimension, the world was suddenly bursting with brave, bold, beautiful, adventurous creatures–and most of them were women. And feminists. How interesting!

In 1969, I was 29 years old. I was a brand-new PhD, a psychotherapist-in-training, an Assistant Professor and a researcher. And I knew almost nothing about how to help another woman save her own life.

Most of what we take for granted today was not even whispered about thirty years ago. For example, none of my graduate school teachers in the 1960s ever mentioned that women (or men) were oppressed or that people suffer when they’re victimized, and then blamed for their own misery. None of my clinical supervisors (or analysts) ever suggested that I use my own experience as a woman in order to understand women and mental health. In fact, no one ever taught me to administer a test for mental health–only for mental illness.

No matter. I was studying what women “really wanted” when they entered psychotherapy; I planned to present my findings at the 1970 annual convention of The American Psychological Association (APA) in Miami. I went to the convention and decided not to deliver my prepared paper. Instead, on behalf of the newly founded Association for Women in Psychology (AWP), I asked APA members for one million dollars “in reparations” on behalf of women who had never been helped, but who had, in fact, been further abused by the mental health professions: punitively labelled, overly tranquilized, sexually seduced while in treatment, hospitalized against their will, given shock therapy, lobotomized, and deeply disliked as too “aggressive,” “promiscuous,” “depressed,” “ugly,” “old,” “disgusting” or “incurable.” “Maybe AWP could set up an alternative to a mental hospital with the money,” I said, “or a shelter for runaway wives.”

The audience laughed at me. Loudly. Nervously. Some of my two thousand colleagues made jokes about my “penis envy.” Some looked embarrassed, others relieved. Obviously, I was “crazy.”

I started writing Women and Madness on the plane back to New York. I immersed myself in the psychoanalytic literature, located biographies and autobiographies of women who’d been psychiatrically diagnosed or hospitalized; read novels and poems about sad, mad, bad women; devoured mythology and anthropology, especially about Goddesses, matriarchies and Amazons. I began analyzing the “mental illness” statistics and relevant psychological and psychiatric studies. I also began interviewing the experts: women patients.

The ideas in Women and Madness announced, anticipated, many of the next steps in feminist theory and practice, including many of the themes I’d subsequently explore. For example, Women and Madness may have been the first feminist work (in this era), to talk about incest and rape, about female role models, female heroism, in both military and spiritual terms, and about warrior and mother goddesses. (They’re role models–which was precisely the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation “The Maternal Influence in Learning by Observation in Cats and Kittens.” And I published it in Science magazine, in 1969.) The unconscious always moves in rather obvious ways.

In the 1972 Introduction to Women and Madness, I retell the myth of Demeter, a mother goddess, and her daughter, Persephone; their losing each other is what happens to most mothers and daughters in patriarchy. However, their remaining together means that Persephone merely repeats a maternal destiny, and rarely develops beyond her relationship to her mother. Years later, I now see I was also writing about a custody battle! between a mother, Demeter, and a father, Hades, the king of the underworld.

In a sense, although I worked very, very hard to research and write Women and Madness, it’s almost as if I’d channelled the book. How else did I know what I obviously “knew,” and yet had never read or heard about before? However, I was inspired, empowered, by an outpouring of feminist pamphlets, books, articles, conferences, and by meetings with extraordinary women: Ti-Grace Atkinson, Pauline Bart, Rita Mae Brown, Joann Evans Gardner, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Joans, Flo Kennedy, Jill Johnston, Leigh Marlowe, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Marge Piercy, Martha Shelley, Alix Kate Shulman, Kate Stimpson, Gloria Steinem, Elaine Stocker, Naomi Weisstein–to name only a few.

Women and Madness was published in October, 1972. Over the years, it would sell more than two million copies and be translated into many European languages and ultimately into Japanese and Hebrew. For awhile, I was deluged by media requests and interviewed everywhere on every conceivable subject. I received at least 10,000 letters. (I have answered them by continuing to write and act.) Women told me that I’d “saved their lives”; Would I be their therapist? If not, would I recommend one? Could I get them out of a mental hospital or into a better one? Would I testify for them in court, supervise their doctoral dissertations, conduct a workshop at their clinic, lecture at their universities? Would I be willing to talk to their husbands, mothers, children?

Although a lot has changed–after all, here we are; in reality, very little has changed. Today, women psychiatrists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Naval officers are ordered into psychiatric treatment when they allege sex-discrimination or harassment; mothers who allege that their children are being incestuously abused usually lose custody and gain psychiatric diagnoses such as Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy or Borderline Personality.

Women with heart disease and other medical ailments often go undiagnosed and untreated, while impatient physicians, male and female, tranquilize and psychiatrically diagnose their symptoms away. Disabled women, myself included: women with Multiple Sclerosis, Lyme Disease, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, Lupus, etc., are routinely forced into psychiatric exams. Catch-22: If they pass, they lose their disability coverage; if they fail, they win a useless, inaccurate psychiatric diagnosis.

Women in need of treatment: incest and rape survivors, and battered women, for example, can rarely find quality, affordable treatment. The same is true for women alcoholics and drug addicts, and for those who truly suffer from mental illness.

After nearly 30 years of struggle, I and most other radical feminists still have no institutional power. What we know, dies with us. Without institutional power, we can’t pass our knowledge on to the next generations.

My greatest sorrow is that I have, so far, been prevented from continuously teaching the next generations in a hands-on way; and that my work, like so many radical feminist works, has, over and over again, been “disappeared” in my own lifetime.

For example, three of my six books are currently out-of-print: Women, Money and Power (1976), With Child: A Diary of Motherhood (1979) and Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M (1987). [Currently in print: Women and Madness (1972), About Men (1978), and Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody (1986).]

At first, I never even noticed when one of my books went out of print, I was too busy writing new books, embarking on new campaigns. Only gradually, did I begin to understand that I’d have to campaign, over and over again, to keep each book in print–or it would die.

Ah, even as I write this, I think: women are dying just because they’re women, and I’m talking about books going out of print! How dare I complain? I’m not dead, homeless, or in jail; I’m literate, educated, I do not have to earn my living on my back or in the fields, I’m living in America, not in a war zone … but I am living in a war zone.

What I’m about to describe has happened to every radical feminist lucky enough to have had a university position. And to me, too.

In 1969–70, at Richmond College, now the College of Staten Island, The City University of New York (CUNY), I taught one of the first “accredited” Womens’ Studies courses and co-founded one of the first Womens’ Studies Programs in the country. (If I were a man, perhaps I’d have been rewarded for doing something as innovative and enduring as this.)

By 1970–71, I had also convinced my mainly male colleagues to hire 6–7 women for 9–10 available positions; Drs. Maxine Bernstein, Dorothy Riddle, Nancy Russo and Sandra Tangri were among them. I also helped set up a student-run feminist OB/GYN clinic, a child care center, and a rape crisis center on campus. For good measure, I also persuaded the school to allow women to study self-defense for credit. Early on, I was also associated with the womens’ class action lawsuit against CUNY.

I loved teaching, I loved my students. I lectured with passion and devotion. I “hung out” with my students, invited them over for coffee, just as if they were at Oxford or Cambridge, and not at a working class public institution. (I was often accused of holding extra classes off-campus, and threatened with exposure and expulsion for doing so.)

By 1971, my colleagues, the administration, and some well-briefed students, were constantly bringing me up on “charges” at my own campus: I was anti-male, I used “sexually explicit” language, I forced my students to read feminist works, I didn’t “love” my students (the way a Good Mother should)–how could I? I was too busy publishing! And lecturing, off-campus, and on the airwaves.

Some say: “publish or perish.” I published–in academic journals and in the mainstream media, and I was still forced to battle for tenure: hard; for the right to keep my tenured position: constantly; and for each and every promotion thereafter.

I’ll never forget the questions my Staten Island colleagues asked when I’d formally appeal my non-promotions. Some colleagues who sat in judgement, both male and female, had rarely published anything; and in my view, those who had, had published either mediocre, minor, imitative, or fiercely patriarchal works. But I was not there to judge them. Their comments, upon turning down my various appeals of non-promotion, included: “But you’re only publishing things about women! That doesn’t count”; or “You’re publishing too much”; or “Your reading lists have the wro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• A Leader of Women
• Incest: A Journey to Hullabaloo
• Working with the Light: Women of Vision
• Working on Gender as a Gender-Nonconformist
• By My Sisters Reborn
• Women’s Psychology, Goddess Archetypes, and Patriarchy: A Jungian Analyst, Feminist Activist, Visionary Feminist Foremother
• Notes of a Feminist Therapy “Foredaughter”
• Spiritual Dandelions
• The Fitting Room
• “Weak Ego Boundaries”: One Developing Feminist’s Story
• Judy Chicago, Feminist Artist and Educator
• Becoming a Feminist Foremother
• Pauline Rose Clance: The Professor from Appalachia
• Feminist and Activist
• Fighting Sexual Abuse
• Bridging Feminism and Multiculturalism
• “Fag Hags,” Firemen and Feminist Theory: Girl Talk on Amtrak
• Lesbian Feminist Fights Organized Psychiatry
• A New Voice for Psychology
• On Being a Feminist and a Psychotherapist
• Judy Herman: Cleaning House
• Revolutionizing the Psyche of Patriarchy
• Feminism: Crying for Our Souls
• Progress Notes
• Working with Feminist Foremothers to Advance Women’s Issues
• Enlightened, Empowered and Enjoying It!
• Feminist Reflections from the Wheat Fields
• Who Ever Thought I’d Grow Up to Be a Feminist Foremother?
• When Aphrodite Called I Listened
• Learning from Women
• Adventures of a Feminist
• Foremothers/Foresisters
• Testing the Boundaries of Justice
• Words of Honor: Contributions of a Feminist Art Critic
• Feminist Anthropologist Anointed Foremother!
• Reminiscences, Recollections and Reflections: The Making of a Feminist Foremother
• From Suburban Housewife to Radical Feminist
• Politicizing Sexual Violence: A Voice in the Wilderness
• A Feminist in the Arab World
• A Late Awakening
• Count Me In
• Reclaiming the Sacred
• Steps Toward Transformation: A Conversation with Gloria Steinem
• Catharine R. Stimpson: Charting the Course of Women’s Studies Since Its Inception
• A Woman Undaunted: Bonnie R. Strickland
• Some Contributions to Feminist Research in Psychology
• The Transmogrification of a Feminist Foremother
• An Unlikely Radical