Women and Madness Quotes

“For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Mary, mother of Jesus, pays for her maternity by giving up her body, almost entirely: she foregoes both (hetero) sexual pleasure (Christ's birth is a virgin and "spiritual" birth) and physical prowess. She has no direct worldly power but, like her crucified son, is easily identified with by many people, especially women, as a powerless figure. Mary symbolizes power achieved through receptivity, compassion, and a uterus. (There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a consciously willed "receptivity" to the universe; on the contrary, it is highly desirable, and should certainly include "receptivity" to many things other than holy sperm and suffering.)”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Once Lola Pierotti earned $24,000 a year and worked long hours as an administrative assistant on Capitol Hill. Now she works longer hours and has even more responsibility- but no pay. What happened? Was she demoted? No, she just married the boss. Her bridegroom, of four years this month, was the senior Republican Senator from Vermont- George D. Aiken. "All he expects of me is that I drive his car, cook his meals, do his laundry and run his office," she enumerated, with a grin.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Even if a psychoanalytic understanding of one’s life is potentially liberating—and I think it may be—psychoanalytic therapy, by itself, cannot overcome trauma, or human nature. Nor can psychological healing take place in isolation.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Perhaps most important, we need to support women who have fought back against their batterers and rapists and are wasting away in jail for daring to save their own lives. They are political prisoners and should be honored as such—not seen as pathological masochists who “chose” to stay until they “chose” to kill.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“A feminist therapist believes that women need to hear that men “don’t love enough” before they’re told that women “love too much”; that fathers are equally responsible for their children’s problems; that no one—not even self-appointed feminist saviors—can rescue a woman but herself; that self-love is the basis for love of others; that it’s hard to break free of patriarchy; that the struggle to do so is both miraculous and life-long; that very few of us know how to support women in flight from—or at war with—internalized self-hatred.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“subjection of the wife to the husband’s will.” Her “therapy” consisted of imprisonment and domestic servitude”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“sister-victims of the patriarchy.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Battering, drunken husbands had their wives psychiatrically imprisoned as a way of continuing to batter them; husbands also had their wives imprisoned in order to live or marry with other women.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“When fathers contested custody, even of infants, “good enough” mothers would consistently lose children due to (false) allegations of mental illness or sexual promiscuity.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“trauma suffered by women at home in violent “domestic captivity.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“We now understand that women and men are not “crazy” or “defective” when, in response to trauma, they develop post-traumatic symptoms, including insomnia, flashbacks, phobias, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, dissociation, a numbed toughness, amnesia, shame, guilt, self-loathing, self-mutilation, and social withdrawal.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Women have lost custody of their children for these very reasons—pronounced unfit by courtroom psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“They do not pathologize women who have full-time careers, are lesbians, refuse to marry, commit adultery, want divorces, choose to be celibate, have abortions, use birth control, choose to have a child out of wedlock, choose to breast-feed against expert advice, or expect men to be responsible for 50 percent of the child care and housework.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“feminist therapist believes that a woman needs to be told that she’s not crazy; that it’s normal to feel sad or angry about being overworked, underpaid, underloved; that it’s healthy to harbor fantasies of running away when the needs of others (aging parents, needy husbands, demanding children) threaten to overwhelm her.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Medication by itself is never enough. Women who are clinically depressed or anxious also need access to feminist information and support.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“given how insurance and drug companies, managed care and government spending cuts have made quality psychotherapy totally out of reach for most people. This means that just when we know what to do for the victims of trauma, there are very few teaching hospitals and clinics that treat poor women in feminist ways.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“rarely treated as the torture victims they really are.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Women who have been repeatedly raped in childhood—often by authority figures in their own families—are traumatized human beings; as such, they are often diagnosed as borderline personalities.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Colonization” exists when the colonized has valuable natural resources that are used to enrich the colonizer, but not the colonized: when the colonized does the colonizer’s work, but earns little of the colonizer’s money; when the colonized try to imitate or please the colonizer, and truly believe that the colonizer is, by nature, superior/inferior, and that the colonized cannot exist without her colonizer.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“still behave as if they’ve been “colonized.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“cumulative effect of being forced to lead circumscribed lives is toxic. The psychic toll is measured in anxiety, depression, phobias, suicide attempts, eating disorders, and such stress-related illnesses as addictions, alcoholism, high blood pressure, and heart disease”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“most girls and boys continue to experience childhood in father-dominated, father-absent, and/or mother-blaming families.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“are psychopaths. They form cults around themselves, isolate cult members from their friends and family, teach that “sexual encounters” with the leader are both an honor and an occasion for spiritual enlightenment.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Most women are trained to put their own needs second, the needs of any man—including a violent man—first.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“Mothers are often psychiatrically accused of alienating a child from the child’s father if that child does not resent or hate the mother, or prefer the father.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness

“The clinical distrust of mothers, simply because they are women, the eagerness to bend over backwards to like fathers, simply because they are men is mind-numbing.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness