Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

Phyllis Chesler

• Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781556529467
• eBook ISBN: 9781569762783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on the most important studies in psychology, human aggression, anthropology, and primatology, and on hundreds of original interviews conducted over a period of more than 20 years, this groundbreaking treatise urges women to look within and to consider other women realistically, ethically, and kindly and to forge bold and compassionate alliances. Without this necessary next step, women will never be liberated. Detailing how women's aggression may not take the same form as men's, this investigation reveals—through myths, plays, memoir, theories of revolutionary liberation movements, evolution, psychoanalysis, and childhood development—that girls and women are indeed aggressive, often indirectly and mainly toward one another. This fascinating work concludes by showing that women depend upon one another for emotional intimacy and bonding, and exclusionary and sexist behavior enforces female conformity and discourages independence and psychological growth.

1.
THE ANIMAL WITHIN:
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

Most men are not physically violent. However, the deadliest killers of other human beings on earth are men, not women. Male violence poses a serious threat to human survival and stability. It is, therefore, the recurring, often glorified, subject of literature, cinema, and learned treatises. Because male aggression is both so visible and so deadly, it tends to obscure our view of female violence and aggression, which is more often subtle, less visible, but chronic. Female-female violence has, erroneously, been deemed unimportant because it is unlikely to result in someone’s immediate death or serious physical injury.

Male aggression is spectacular, terrifying. Male soldiers enter a village and shoot everyone in sight. Male pilots bomb an entire city from a plane. Male soldiers torture, massacre, and imprison enemy men and systematically rape and gang-rape the enemy’s women and children. Individual men dominate others by force and through intimidation. Men, not women, are responsible for ninety percent of the violent crimes in our society. Finally, no more than ten percent of all living men own and control most of the world’s resources, thereby condemning all others to lives of poverty and struggle. In comparison, female aggression is barely visible. What can mere women do that is as violent as this?

Women ardently collaborate in the maintenance of this culture. They create homes for such men and socialize children to become—or to marry—similarly successful men. Only the rare woman resists doing so.

British evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell, who is now affiliated with Durham University, and University of Texas psychologists David H. Buss and Joshua Duntley agree that women sustain and help to reproduce patriarchy, by systematically choosing men with more resources and by “favorfing] sons over daughters.” Buss and Dundey argue that female “co-involvement” was crucial in the creation of patriarchy, since women’s evolutionary “preferences [for ‘Alpha’ mates] thus established an important set of ground rules for men’s intra-sexual competition.” Buss and Dundey contend that “neither men nor women are united with members of their own sex,” but, rather, in the main compete with others of their own sex.

Indeed the primary targets of women’s aggression, hostility, violence, and cruelty are other women. As most women know, a woman can make life hell, on a moment-by-moment basis, for any other woman whom she envies, fears, or with whom she must compete for resources. For example, older women and all-female cliques tend to bully girls and women into submission; cliques shun any woman whom they view as prettier, smarter, sexually freer, or “different.”

Female rivalries tend to support, not disrupt, the status quo. Thus, in order to survive or to improve their own lot, most women, like men, collude in the subordination of women as a class.

In addition to exercising brute economic and physical force, I believe that women psychologically tame girls and other women into conformity by threatening to withdraw their considerable capacity for emotional intimacy from any girl or woman whose growth or change of circumstance threatens the status quo. In a sense, women maternally enchant—then terrorize or “turn” upon each other. Fairy tales are fraught with just such Fairy Godmothers and Evil Stepmothers, and should be understood as a history of embattled female relationships and other sudden reversals of blissful, dyadic fortune.

Scientists have only recently begun to study what has been termed “indirect aggression.” Female indirect aggression can be very painful psychologically, socially, and economically. Such aggression is both verbal and nonverbal and includes reputation-wrecking gossip and shunning, which may lead to social “death” and, in some cultures, to real death as well.

Because it is so widespread, male aggression is seen as natural; even when it assumes violent and criminal proportions, it is not necessarily regarded as pathological. Most women, on the other hand, do not engage in male-like aggression. When they do, their behavior is deemed unnatural and therefore pathological—even if what a woman has done is kill in order to save her own life. Women who physically fight other women—or men—are viewed as having “no class.”

Female-female aggression has been less studied, less discussed, and less recognized than male aggression. Perhaps, in a society that values men over women, what women do to each other is simply deemed less important by both men and women. Similarly, in a society that values beige-colored people, what people of other colors do to each other is viewed as less important.

In 1987, University of Western Australia anthropologist Victoria K Burbank published a study of female aggression in 137 societies: in Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and among native-Indian tribes in North America. The data she used had been gathered by social scientists over a period of more than a hundred years. Burbank looked only at cases in which women initiated the aggression and where the aggression took place in the context of the home or neighborhood. Burbank found that women engaged in physical, verbal, and indirect aggression “around the world.” Women “shriek, scream, scold, revile, and insult their (mainly) female opponents.” For example, in 1870 Aymara women were observed “venting their anger” by “kicking apart the clay cooking stoves of their rivals.” In 1895 Kashmiri women were described as “famous for their vocabulary of abuse.” In 1931 Ona women were observed having “word duels that lasted for several hours.” In 1964 a Kapauku woman who was in a dispute with her husband and co-wife was described as “destroying her [rival’s] house, uproot[ing] part of the garden, and wreck [ing] the fence.” And, in 1974, the data described how a “Ute woman may kill her rival’s horse.”

Burbank writes that one of the “most striking findings of this survey is that women are by far the most common targets of female aggression. Women are targets in 124, or ninety-one percent of the 137 societies; whereas men are targets (of female aggression) in seventy-four, or fifty-four percent of the 137 societies. Women targeted mainly co-wives, sexual rivals, a wife and ‘the other woman,’ and women whose relationships are not specified.”

Because we do not expect women to be physically aggressive and because both men and women view aggressive behavior in women with great alarm, people tend to view women’s aggression as more emotionally and physically out of control than even the deadliest male aggression. To some extent, studies suggest that men are in control when they use violence and that women are not. In addition, women will say that they engaged in violence because they lost control, not because they used violence to get their way. It is also possible that the out-of-control quality that accompanies women’s perceived and experienced outbursts of violence might, according to Campbell, “result either from females’ lack of early training in ritualization” or because women are responding to an impetus so strong that it “overcomes their reluctance to engage in physical aggression.”

Robin Fox, a professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University, quotes the late, great anthropologist Margaret Mead: “It was a good thing that wars were in the hands of men since, although they were very good at starting them, they were equally adept at knowing how to bring them to an end.” According to Fox, Mead thought this was true “because war was always at bottom a status game for men, and men had an inbuilt capacity for ritualizing such games.” Women, on the other hand, “would take war far too seriously. They would see it as protecting their children and nothing but a total fight to the death would satisfy them.”

Although Mead may have a point, she is also missing something important. Consider what the historical and anthropological record has to tell us about the cruelty, for example, of mothers-in-law toward daughters-in-law in classical Japan, China, and India. In Fox’s words, as a rule, the younger women

came under the strict and punitive rule of their mothers-in-law. [They endured] aggression in the form of constant harassment, abuse, and beatings, [which] was used to “train” these unfortunate girls in the ways of their new households. A girl could only hope to have sons quickly to improve her status and eventually put her in the “mother-in-law” position where she could herself become the aggressor.

According to New York anthropologist Ilsa Glazer, family life was torturous for women in China:

In order to save money, parents who gave up daughters for adoption adopted female infants to replace them. For the same cost of rearing a girl, the adopted daughter could later be married to their son, saving the cost of a wedding. Mothers and adopted daughters conflicted, for it was in the mother’s interest to get the maximum work out of her adopted daughter at the least possible cost. Adopted daughters could be sold if need be. Adopted daughters and natural born sisters were “natural enemies.” Higher in status, natural daughters commanded the labor power and obedience of adopted daughters. Beatings of younger women by older women were common. Mothers beat daughters-in-law, daughters, and adopted daughters. Slaves were safe targets for women who vented on them the aggression they dared not express in other relationships. Women in weak positions expressed their aggression in violent temper tantrums, by withdrawing labor, or by complaining to women from other households.

A new bride might be more compliant than an older wife or sister-in-law. They vied for their mother-in-law’s approval and for property for their own sons. They were, in Glazer’s words, “natural enemies.” In addition,

mothers-in-law had rights to the labor of daughters-in-law and to their obedience. Since widows were not permitted to remarry, and since daughters-in-law could be sold or pawned, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law were also “natural enemies.”

Today, in India, young brides are sometimes doused with kerosene and set on fire. Mothers-in-law are often involved. In December of the year 2000, one young Indian wife described being repeatedly beaten by both her husband and her mother-in-law for minor infractions. One day, after she had completed all but one of her non-stop, back-breaking chores, her husband flew into a rage over the single chore left undone.

“I had done everything except this,” she said. “But he was angry with me. He said I was lazy. He said if he could get another wife, she would do everything.” That afternoon, as she walked toward the kitchen, she said, she felt something splash on her back. Then she burst into flames. When she turned around, she saw her mother-in-law holding a kerosene can and her husband with a matchbox.

In addition to such mother-in-law violence toward a daughter-in-law, Burbank notes that “women aggress against their co-wives verbally in twenty-nine percent of the societies and physically in eighteen percent of the societies. Sisters-in-law also “aggress against one another in fourteen percent of the societies; mothers-in law and daughters-in-law are an aggressive dyad in twelve percent of the societies.” Interestingly, sisters who are co-wives sometimes live under one roof with relatively little aggression, but co-wives who have not been thus socialized to get along with each other from childhood on, tend to live separately. Even so, “at least twenty percent of the cases of co-wife aggression may be between ‘sisters.’”

Clearly—given Burbank’s statistics and the examples cited from Japan, China, and India—the cause of women’s discontent is not alleviated, and thus chronic frustration and chronic irritability remain. No male-style ritualized ending is possible because no resolution of the problem is possible. The co-wife has come to stay; the sexual rival is preferred; one’s own children—and oneself—may sink ever further into poverty, danger, illness, death.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning science writer Natalie Angier does not view women as innocent victims. She writes:

They have complied with customs that control female sexuality, such as infibulation, purdah, and claustration, and they have insisted that their daughters comply as well. They may even be the active agents of such customs.

In Ilsa Glazer’s view,

The more subordinate women are to men and the more dependent they are on patriarchal social structures, the more injury they inflict on each other.

Whether female-female cruelty is caused by female opportunism or by female captivity, the harm done is real. Often women are also aggressive in indirect ways.

Indirect (nonphysical) aggression may take many forms. A woman may refuse to return your smile or to talk to you at all; this can be quite unnerving to another woman. Or she may bang the plate down on the table, stalk out of the room, or complain about you to others behind your back. Indirect aggression is often “up close and personal.” It may be accompanied by a smile and by earnest denials that one has intended to harm anyone. Included here are the most hair-raising power struggles between mothers and daughters and between sisters, as well as intense competition for a mate among female intimates. Of course, such competition also takes place between female strangers.

Some feminists have insisted that women are prisoners of men or of a patriarchal system and are, therefore, unable to resist its values and demands. Others, feminists included, have insisted that both women and men have free will and, as such, are responsible for their actions, even if they are forced to engage in an unending war for survival against all others. Thus, although it is true that women do have many things in common with others of their gender, this does not mean that most women are altruistic “sisters.” Like men, women belong to different, often warring classes, races, religions, or political parties. Most women do not identify with or feel compassion for all other women.

Shirley Abbott, the former editor of Horizon magazine and an Arkansas native, reviewed two centuries of African-American slave testimonies. She notes that some slaves speak of their white mistresses as “good” or as “merciful Christian women.” However, Abbott writes, as a group “White mistresses were demanding, harsh, impatient, capricious, and quick to call for the laying on of the lash. Some were even sadists, with no redeeming qualities.”

The writer Alice Walker describes an incident in the 1930s, in which her mother, an impoverished sharecropper in a small Georgia town, walked into town, wearing a used, donated dress and bearing a voucher to obtain food and flour from the Red Cross. When Walker’s mother presented her voucher “she was confronted by a white woman who looked her up and down with marked anger and envy.”

“What’s you come up here for?” the woman asked.

“For some flour,” said my mother, presenting her voucher.

“Humph,” said the woman, looking at her more closely and with unconcealed fury. “Anybody dressed up as good as you don’t need to come here begging for food . . . the gall of niggers coming in here dressed better than me!”

Delia Aguilar, a professor of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, describes her experience teaching feminism to Asian-Pacific women in the Philippines. Initially—and to her consternation—her students proudly espoused a Second Wave, Western, “essentialist” vision of global sisterhood. Aguilar had to remind her students that they were not academic Western women, that they faced other realities which included

Massive [Asian] rural to urban migration, ever-increasing poverty and homelessness, militarization, dominance of multinationals, [and] external debt, migration overseas as domestics, or … staying home to do backbreaking labor . . . low-paid employment on the assembly line; [becoming] mail-order brides or working in the “entertainment industry.”

Thereafter, when Aguilar’s students identified themselves as feminists, the “tone was not celebratory.” They understood that feminist ideology did not change the fact that some women are more privileged than others.

These are only three examples of interpersonal cruelties and structural difference between women who belong to different classes, races, and geographical regions. Where can we find examples of woman’s inhumanity to woman within the same race, class, and country? Just about everywhere. Instances abound in our most beloved novels and poems, in countless studies, even in popular plays, musicals, and operas. We rarely notice them. They do not register.

For example, most readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter remember it as being about sexual immorality and hypocrisy among eighteenth-century Puritan Americans. Hawthorne’s fictional hero, Hester Prynne, has been tried for the crime of having a child out of wedlock. The male magistrates sentence Prynne to wear a scarlet letter upon her breast. The women in the novel, however, feel that the sentence is too lenient.

“‘Goodwives,’ said a hard-featured dame of fifty, ‘If the hussy stood up for judgement before us would she come off with such a sentence? Marry, I trow not.’” Hawthorne’s women feel that the men have been too “merciful.” One woman thinks the men should “at the very least [have] put the brand of a hot iron on [her] forehead.” Another woman calls for Prynne’s death. Hawthorne presents these “dames of elevated rank” as “ugly” and therefore “jealous” of Prynne’s beauty and nobility: Prynne refuses to disclose the name of her child’s father, a clergyman. Although the women employ Prynne “for her expert sewing,” they continue to shun and torment her.

These women are not cruel to Prynne because they fear they will be punished, collectively, for one woman’s sin: Prynne alone has already been tried and sentenced. These women are in their fifties; thus they are no longer competing with a much younger Prynne for a mate. Perhaps the women are unhappy and mistakenly assume that Prynne has stolen their happiness; perhaps they suffer from excessive envy and are using whatever little power they have to inflict pain on a vulnerable innocent. Their cruelty is gratuitous; it does not lessen over time, nor is it ever sated. Prynne’s female employers

were accustomed to distill drops of bitterness into [Prynne’s] heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenseless breast [like] a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound.

Jane Austen and, in this century, Margaret Atwood have also portrayed the ways in which polite women of the same class and race can destroy each other’s reputations and peace of mind, and exploit other women as reproductive and domestic handmaids.

In the essay, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” the writer Audre Lorde discusses internalized self-hatred and “horizontal hostility” among black women. Lorde is haunted by a black woman library clerk who once kept her waiting, who refused to recognize her. “Otherwise motionless,” Lorde writes,

[the clerk] slowly turns her head and looks up. Her eyes cross mine with such a look of incidental hostility that I feel pilloried to the wall … What makes her eyes slide off of mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face off when her eyes do not meet mine? Why does she wear my sister’s face?

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the 2009 Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Animal Within: The Female of the Species
• 2. Indirect Aggression Among Girls and Teenagers
• 3. Woman’s Sexism
• 4. The Mother-Daughter Relationship in Fairy Tale, Myth, and Greek Tragedy
• 5. Some Psychoanalytic Views of the Mother-Daughter Relationship
• 6. The “Good Enough” Mother and Her Persecution of the “Good Enough” Daughter
• 7. Sisters and the Search for Best Friends
• 8. Women in the Workplace
• 9. Women in Groups
• 10. Psychological Ethics
• Endnotes
• References
• Index
• About the Author