Woman's Inhumanity to Woman Quotes

“Before I began research for this book I was not consciously aware that women were aggressive in indirect ways, that they gossiped and ostracized each other incessantly, and did not acknowledge their own envious and competitive feelings. I now understand that, in order to survive as a woman, among women, one must speak carefully, cautiously, neutrally, indirectly; one must pay careful attention to what more socially powerful women have to say before one speaks; one must learn how to flatter, manipulate, aree with, and appease them. And, if one is hurt or offended by another woman, one does not say so outright; one expresses it indirectly, by turning others against her.
Of course, I refuse to learn these "girlish" lessons.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“For most women, being seen, having others pay attention to you, is imagined and experienced as more desirable and more powerful than commanding an army or seizing control of the means of production and reproduction.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“The idea that women's strong attachments to each other are what make them so vulnerable is horrifying. I count my close friendships with a few girls that I know as one of the best things I have going for me right now. My love for them leaves me open to hurt, but ... all love does, or at least that's the cliche. Perhaps girls and women do come to love each other too quickly, or once they are trapped into appearing as though they love one another, they don't want to back out of it. That is probably true. But a fear of confrontation in relationships is the downside. The ability to love easily is a positive.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“That these girls avoid use of physical violence in resolving conflict, does not mean that these conflicts are resolved in meaningful and enduring ways. Girls might smile, give in, give up - and then continue the conflict behind their opponents' backs. Girls might also smile, give in, make fatal compromises, because their need to belong (or not to be excluded) is more important to them than sticking to their principles.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Men are taught that it is normal, even desirable, to compete and disagree with each other; when they do so, they do not personalize the argument nor do they think that a friendship or working relationship will be jeopardized by a strong difference of opinion.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Psychologically, enviers wish to be the one God loves most, the Chosen One, the one whose being radiates excellence. Many women wish to star in this role, and many do. The male universe has room for many more stars; the female universe is therefore much smaller, and the competition quite fierce for the limited number of starring roles.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“According to Brown and Gilligan, by the third grade,
expressing a "different" view among girls has already become "too dangerous and risky." A pre-adolescent girl is sometimes willing to speak more directly when only one other girl is present; this changes when a third girl joins them. However, even as girls are learning how to be indirect and nice, they continue
to judge one another. Girls are concerned about who is a true friend and who is only faking it. A girl risks losing her entire social world if she dares to think for herself or if she refuses to back her best friend or her clique even when she thinks they are in the wrong.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Human beings tend to forget what is painful or dangerous. Like sons, daughters were once completely dependent on a female caretaker. Perhaps remembering any conflict with another woman might remind a woman of a primary dependence so total that to have even once contemplated losing it was to contemplate death. Perhaps an infant or a child imagines—or has actually experienced—terror and deprivation at female hands. Perhaps one’s mother or female caregiver was largely absent or malevolently present, over-critical, subject to rages. According to some psychoanalytic theorists, daughters, perhaps even more than sons, respond to perceived and real maternal anger with “guilt.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“women all over the world envy what they perceive as the “prettier” girl—the prom queen, cheerleader, movie star—whom they view as capable of stealing away male interest and therefore frustrating their own chances for well-funded reproductive success.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“when women tell stories about other women who are not their friends, whom they envy, with whom they cannot identify, they seek to destroy. As all women know, gossip can be destructive and terrible. Because we have been forced to separate our aggressive and our erotic drives in relation to men, we locate our aggression in our relations with other women.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“similarity in experience does not necessarily make a juror sympathetic . . . [but] may lead to less objective and more harsh responses.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“According to Schafran, many women, including women judges and jurors, “avoid acknowledging their own vulnerability by blaming the victim. This distancing mechanism operates particularly in non-stranger rape cases, because it is in acknowledging the likelihood of these crimes that women jurors feel most at risk.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“According to Finnish psychologist Kaj Björkqvist, by the time a girl is eight years old she is unlikely to express frustration and anger toward others physically. Girls are, on the other hand, as verbally aggressive as boys. Instead of hitting or shoving, girls will use verbal, nonverbal, and socially manipulative skills to hurt others—mainly other girls. Girls will insult and denigrate each other; they will also hold grudges for a very long time. Björkqvist and others have shown that girls are “significantly more likely than boys to become friendly with someone else as revenge”; and that girls will gossip and suggest the “shunning” of another girl. According to Björkqvist, indirect aggression is a type of “hostile behavior [that] is carried out in order to harm the opponent, while avoiding being identified as aggressive.” Björkqvist and others developed a scale, known as the Direct and Indirect Aggression Scale, which measures physical aggression (hitting, kicking, tripping, shoving, pushing, pulling), and verbal aggression (yelling, insulting, teasing, threatening to hurt the other, calling the other names), on the one hand, and on the other hand, indirect aggression (shutting the other out of the group, becoming friends with another as revenge, ignoring, gossiping, telling bad stories, planning secretly to bother the other, saying bad things behind the back, saying to others: “let’s not be with him/her,” telling the other’s secrets to a third person, writing notes in which the other is criticized, criticizing the other’s hair or clothing, trying to get others to dislike the person).”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Contemporary adult women, in urban public places, also behave in physically aggressive ways. Like men, women sometimes push and shove each other. However, while doing so, unlike men, women tend not to make eye contact with each other.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“It is in light of such overwhelming (and interesting) research that Anne Campbell questions the myth of the “coy female” and the myth of the “nonaggressive woman.” Campbell writes: It is ironic that some of these myths have been supported by the feminist movement, which has tried to insist that women’s aggression is exclusively a response to male violence. The idea that females could have survived without the motivation and ability to compete for scarce resources is, from an evolutionary viewpoint, untenable. Nonetheless, it is a viewpoint that is congenial to the continuance of male protection and control over women.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“British ecologist Josephine Andrews, now affiliated with the anthropology department at Washington University, reports a case of primate infanticide by a female black lemur in Madagascar. She found that, after an attack by dogs and the subsequent death of the leading female, a fight ensued between two adult females neither of whom was “dominant.” As they fought, one female suddenly picked up the other female’s infant and “ran back up the mango tree with the screaming infant, shaking it violently from side to side in her mouth, smashing the rib cage, and then held the body while eating some of the entrails.” The mother of the dead infant became silent and, although she sat watching the body, she did not ascend the tree to investigate. For the next few days, the female who had lost her infant sat apart from the rest of the group. She did not eat with the others, but waited until they had moved away before feeding. From then on, the killer of the baby lemur and her infant led the troop. The mother of the dead baby trailed some distance behind them.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Female-female aggression (starving, abusing) causes spontaneous abortions. Hrdy notes that dominant, higher-ranking female primates overtly harass subordinate females. Such behaviors are “implicated in delays in maturation, inhibition of ovulation, or in extreme cases, spontaneous abortion by subordinates.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Indirect aggression is characterized by a clique of relatively powerless (compared with their male counterparts) girls or women who exert power “indirectly” by bullying, gossiping about, slandering, and shaming one girl or woman so that she will be shunned by her female intimates, thrown out of her college sorority, perhaps fired from her job, divorced by her husband, and definitely dropped from the A-list of partygoers. Gossip is a chief weapon of indirect aggression. Slandering another girl or woman (“she’s a slut,” “she’s … different,” “she really thinks she’s something”) leads to her being ostracized by her female friends and peers, a punishment that girls and women experience as being put into solitary confinement or as a social death.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Primates – and young humans who lack verbal skills – will use physical aggression to express themselves or to get their way. They will hit, push, shove, spit, kick, punch, and bite. As children grow, they add verbal aggression to their repertoire. They will shout and threaten. As children develop further and gain more social intelligence, they begin to employ indirect and nonphysical forms of aggression. From an evolutionary and anatomical point of view, girls and women are less inclined to attack anyone directly, or physically, than man and boys are – unless, as mothers, their offspring are in immediate physical danger. In addition, girls and women are culturally trained to employ indirect methods of aggression, as a low-risk, low-injury, approach.

Girls learn that a safe way to attack someone else is behind her back, so that she will not know who is responsible. This tracks girls and women into lives of chronic gossip and rumor mongering, but it also allows girls and women to fight without physically killing each other outright.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“In 1931 Freud admitted that he did not really understand the mother-daughter relationship. He wrote that a daughter’s “pre-Oedipal attachment” to her mother is “so difficult to grasp in analysis—[it is] grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression.” This insight “came to [him] as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece.” Actually, Freud understood quite a lot, namely, that girls are as attached to their mothers as they are to their fathers and that, in certain circumstances, they might even “retire from the field of heterosexuality” in order to placate or please their mothers. Freud made this admission in a case history published in 1920.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Nini Herman believes that the unresolved issues “which are active at the core of the mother-daughter dyad” are, to some extent, what psychologically holds women back and accounts for women’s unconscious collusion with patriarchal edicts. I agree. Nini Herman believes that the unexamined mother-daughter relationship is precisely where women are “obstinately marking time” rather than moving toward freedom.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“I have found women’s hostility toward women to be related also to lower self-efficacy, lower optimism, lower sense of internal control, higher belief in external control, higher objectification of body, higher loss of self, less intimate relationships with women and with their male partners, less willingness to work with women, more competition with women, and on the violence end: more acceptance of rape myths, acceptance of interpersonal violence, and sexual harassment myths (that women ask for harassment).”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Although an increasing number of girls have begun to participate in team (not individual) sports, most girls still do not compete as a group against another group of girls. Many girls still demand an egalitarian, dyadic reciprocity and are, therefore, more threatened by the slightest change in status. The dyad is the female equivalent of the hierarchically structured boys club. A change in status of one member of the dyad may mean that the entire club is endangered. According to Benenson and Bennaroch, “If a friend is succeeding in school, then the friend might be spending more time studying, or if the friend has a boyfriend, then she might be abandoning other friends to spend time with her boyfriend.” By contrast, boys who are members of the same group feel enhanced by the achievement of any other group member, even if he is a close friend.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Hines and Fry describe a street scene in Buenos Aires—the likes of which I have personally observed (and experienced), in bus and airport terminals all over the world. In the Hines study, “women pushed and shoved each other as they boarded crowded buses, but without making verbal or eye contact with each other.” I have seen Caucasian women “accidentally” bumping into each other in airport bathrooms, as if they were off balance or unclear about personal space boundaries. They act as if they do not know where they end and where some other woman starts.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“According to Finnish psychologist Kaj Björkqvist, there is no logical reason to assume “that females should be less hostile and less prone to get into conflicts than males.” Depending on age, economic class, stress, and tribal custom, girls and women will physically and verbally assault each other. In fact, according to Björkqvist, “with respect to interpersonal aggression, same-sex encounters are more frequent than between-sex encounters.” We may remember that anthropologist Victoria Burbank found female “acts of physical aggression, [which ranged] from slaps to murder, in sixty-one percent of the societies.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Female primates and female humans may both be genetically predisposed to compete against and dominate other females in order to suppress, severely, the next female’s desirability, fertility, live-birth rate. We have seen how primates accomplish this. In a sense, humans do likewise. Advantages of class, caste, race, and geography function in similar ways. For example, I have seen women fight over the same mate or for the same child in truly primal or primate-like ways.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“since infant care is quite labor-intensive, biological mothers also try to enlist other subordinate females in caring for their infants by destroying the subordinate’s capacity to mate or to bear infants of her own. Thus, some female primates will sometimes fight for each other, but, more often, females fight against each other: mother against daughter, higher-ranking female against lower-ranking female, one troop of females against another troop of females. They fight over food, infants, sex, and position in the hierarchy.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“Some believe that the bonobo is the “closest living representative of our earliest known ape-hominid ancestor.” In Jahme’s words, the bonobo is also known as the “make love not war” ape because sex is used by bonobos as a substitute for aggression. When things get tense between males, they stop themselves before things get really nasty and they rub their penises together . . . the females have lesbian sex, known as genito-genital rubbing, or GG rubbing . . . When an adolescent female bonobo tries to ingratiate herself into a new group of bonobos, she looks for a senior female and tries to become her friend. She sits on the periphery of things for a while and sizes up who is who in the hierarchy. The young female bonobo then tries to cement a bond with a high-status older female by engaging in homo-erotic acts with her.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“For years, female-female aggression among primates was ignored or minimized. According to the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, this occurred partly because male-male competition was even more “startling and overt,” but also because “persistent conflicts between females are often more subtle . . . [the] competition is indirect. Two animals who are not even touching or looking at one another may nevertheless be in competition if one of them occupies a place or consumes a resource that would benefit the other.”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman

“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”
― Phyllis Chesler, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman