Quotes from Phyllis Chesler

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.

Women have lost custody of their children for these very reasons—pronounced unfit by courtroom psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers.

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.

trauma suffered by women at home in violent "domestic captivity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All men are not rapists - but almost all rapists are men.

Only the powerless live in a money culture and know nothing about money.

Feminism is a way of understanding reality, not just a series of things to do. Feminism challenges our predilection for one right answer, one right God, one size fits all.

Good people in the West have often failed to distinguish between Islam and Islamism.

Time is life. Anyone who wastes my time is killing me. Please don't!

The West has funded the war against itself by buying Arab oil. It is as simple and as tragic as that.

for every marriage that is made in Heaven, there is a marriage made in Hell.

Sons or fathers, poor men or rich men, sacred or secular: all are homosexual in their worship of everything phallic.

Women must begin to "save" themselves and their daughters before they "save" their husbands and their sons; before they "save" the whole world.

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

Most mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children.

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.

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.

The chowdry, or burqa -- the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud -- is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman's already low self-esteem. It may also lead to vitamin D deficiency diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease. Sensory deprivation officially constitutes torture and is practiced as such in the world's prisons.

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.

Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people.