Quotes from Phyllis Chesler

What matters is that you gain more and more control of the institutions that serve us all so poorly.

Your body and your mind are, together, your primary country of allegiance. As a feminist, you must know - and know how to defend - your country and its boundaries.

Things do not have to last forever to be good, and when they end, it is not always proof that one's principles were wrong.

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.

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.

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

When fathers contested custody, even of infants, "good enough" mothers would consistently lose children due to (false) allegations of mental illness or sexual promiscuity.

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.

similarity in experience does not necessarily make a juror sympathetic . . . [but] may lead to less objective and more harsh responses.

Most women are trained to put their own needs second, the needs of any man—including a violent man—first.

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.

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.

most girls and boys continue to experience childhood in father-dominated, father-absent, and/or mother-blaming families.

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.

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

still behave as if they've been "colonized.

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.

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.

rarely treated as the torture victims they really are.

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.

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.

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.

Medication by itself is never enough. Women who are clinically depressed or anxious also need access to feminist information and support.

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.