Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  In addition to analyzing the mistreatment of madness and the sexism of mental health care, I wrote about what it means for women to be psychologically mothered—or maternally deprived. I also analyzed the essentially incestuous model of most male-female relations, i.e., most such pairings are with ever-younger daughter-like women and older father-like figures.

  My major themes, first sounded in Women and Madness, unfolded in each of my fifteen subsequent books, and in countless lectures, articles, press conferences, congressional press hearings, lawsuits, and educational, political, and legal campaigns.

  In 1976, in Women, Money, and Power, I analyzed women’s psychological relationship to money and power. Despite enormous gains, this psychological relationship still remains constant. I also wrote about the “psycho-economics of female beauty.” I addressed, early on, the danger of women’s obsession with being thin, young, and beautiful, but I also attributed this to the growing power of advertising and pornography. In the same volume, my coauthor addressed economic realities from a legal point of view.

  Many views attributed to me are based primarily on my work in Women and Madness. It remains a landmark work and I stand by it—but I have also moved on theoretically. I have changed my focus or my emphasis and I have also changed my mind. For example, I developed a more serious appreciation for and understanding of motherhood and the important role it plays in female psychology. My younger Amazon self rejected biological motherhood under patriarchal conditions as too difficult for an intellectual warrior. As I got older, I chose to become pregnant, and to have and to mother a child. Clearly, my views were changing.

  And then, I wrote about motherhood in at least five of my subsequent books. For example, in 1978, in About Men, I wrote about male uterus envy in all its manifestations: psychological, economic, religious, and technological. At the time, I also wanted to understand men. For example, if they were, as a gender-caste, more powerful than women, how can we explain their dreadful conformity and obedience to other men and their utter dependence on women, whom they also needed to despise?

  To correct the mother-blaming literature, I also discussed how fathers “kill” sons—psychologically, symbolically, and sometimes literally; and how male rage and anguish about not being loved and protected by other men is displaced onto women and children. I explored brotherhood, fratricide, and the mother-son bond. I ultimately related many of these themes to the patriarchal worship of death.

  In 1979, in With Child: A Diary of Motherhood, I chose a literary approach to sound the great existential themes of pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn motherhood. I suggested that a psychological hero can also be a woman in labor, laboring; or a child being born; or a mid-wife assisting the process. Years later, when he was twenty-one, my beloved son Ariel wrote a wonderful new introduction to the volume.

  In 1986, I published Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody, and in 1987, I published Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M.

  Under patriarchy, mothers have no rights, only obligations. Mothers are women and as such, have never had custodial rights to their children in any country on earth. This slowly began to change in America at the turn of the twentieth century—but not by much. When fathers contested custody, even of infants, “good enough” mothers would consistently lose children due to (false) allegations of mental illness or sexual promiscuity.

  Most people, including many second wave feminists, (who had enormous psychological ambivalence toward biological pregnancy and patriarchal motherhood), wrongfully assumed that mothers would somehow win their freedom by unjustly losing custody of their children to fathers who had never been primary child caretakers. Many feminists also assumed that paternal custody of children (even when the fathers were violent or neglectful) was still a sign of feminist progress.

  In my opinion, the custody issue is, in a sense, the abortion controversy—but after birth. Thus, Mothers on Trial examines the history and importance of mothers losing custody of children when it was contested either by fathers or by the state. I also studied how mothers under custodial siege fight. They try to do so in heroically nonviolent ways. In Sacred Bond I looked at the psychiatric literature concerning adoption as well as surrogacy.

  In 1985, the incomparable feminist historian and theorist Dale Spender, in an essay about Women and Madness, noted my concern with an absence of sisterhood among feminists and among women in general. Although no one noticed this (even I did not stress it), she was right, the information was already there. In 2002, after working on it on and off for nearly twenty years, I published Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, in which I spend three chapters discussing the mother-daughter relationship.

  The egg, the origin, of this book was contained in Women and Madness. Here, in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, I looked at the “darker” side of the Demeter-Persephone relationship, which is prefigured in the Clytemnestra-Electra relationship.

  Psychologically, we are all also Electra (the Greek daughter who conspired in her mother’s murder); certainly, we are all Electra’s daughters. We too have conspired in psychological matricide and are therefore also mistrustful of our own daughters.

  This material was quite explosive. When I first presented these ideas at a conference of feminist therapists in 1990, the place went wild. Therapists stood up to deny their own matricidal impulses; they also hotly denied that feminists had internalized any sexist beliefs or were competitive or aggressive toward each other.

  And these were the feminist therapists.

  My latest works also continue themes I first raised in Women and Madness. For example, I put together a “dream team” of experts to testify in the case of the so-called first female serial killer who was eventually executed in Florida. I wanted to expand the battered woman’s defense to include prostituted women. I published several law review articles on the case and am still working on an unpublished manuscript.

  In Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site (2002), I discuss the ways in which women’s full and public participation in religious rituals may also enhance women’s self-esteem and authority. In The New Antisemitism: The Current Crisis and What Must be Done About It, I continue my anti-racism work, which, in this instance, concerns Jewhatred among Islamists and among western intellectuals, including feminists.

  Finally, in my newest book, The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, I begin to outline Muslim, Middle Eastern, and Arab female and male psychology. I also analyze the dangers of Islamic gender Apartheid and implore westerners, especially feminists, to take a stand against it, both in principle and in practice. Once understandable, politically correct multicultural approaches have ultimately failed our founding feminist principles of espousing one universal standard of human rights for every woman. In the shadow of the attacks on 9/11 (New York City), 3/11 (Madrid), and 7/7 (London), we can no longer minimize or appease the dangers of Islamist terrorism, which includes misogyny.

  The women who were institutionalized in the nineteenth century wrote with courage and integrity. They were moral, philosophical, often religious. Their frame of reference, and their use of language was romantic—Christian and Victorian. They wrote like abolitionists, transcendentalists, suffragists. The twentieth-century women were keen observers of human nature and asylum abuse—but they had no universal frame of reference. They faced “madness” and institutional abuse alone, without God, ideology, or sisterhood. What or who helped these women? Friends, neighbors, and sons sometimes rescued them; changes in the law did too.

  But what else proved invaluable?

  Phebe B. Davis (1865) wrote that “Kindness has been my only medicine”; Kate Lee (1902) of Illinois proposed that “Houses of Peace” be created, where women could learn a trade and save their money, after which they could “both be allowed and required to leave.” Kate Lee suggested that such “Houses of Peace” “operate as a home-finder and employment bureau … thus giving each inmate a new start in life [which]
in many cases [will] entirely remove the symptoms of insanity.” Margaret Isabel Wilson (1931) wrote that “Nature was her doctor.” Leaving the asylum helped Wilson. She wrote:

  It took me months to get over the effects of my incarceration … Through companionship, my appetite came back; I could sleep in peace, and there was nobody to annoy me. There were no maniacal shrieks to make me shudder; no attendants to yell out orders; no nurses to give me arsenic and physics; no doctors to terrify me … the things [I] sorely missed while institutionalized: (1) liberty; (2) my vote; (3) privacy; (4) normal companionship; (5) personal letters and uncensored answers; (6) useful occupation; (7) play; (8) contacts with intelligent minds; (9) pictures, scenery, books, good conversation; (10) appetizing food.

  I agree with them all.

  Thus, freedom and justice does wonders for one’s mental health. So, in response to my esteemed brother Sigmund Freud’s infamous query, what do women want? For starters, and in no particular order: freedom, food, nature, shelter, leisure, freedom from violence, justice, music, poetry, supportive families and communities, poetry, compassionate support during chronic or life-threatening illness and at the time of death, independence, books, physical/sexual pleasure, education, solitude, the ability to defend ourselves, love, ethical friendships, the arts, health, dignified and useful employment, political friendships.

  MADNESS

  Demeter and Clytemnestra Revisited

  In the beginning, if there ever was such a time, Demeter, the goddess of life, gave birth to four daughters, whom she named Persephone, Psyche, Athena and Artemis. The world’s first children were unremarkably happy. To amuse their mother—with whom they were all passionately in love—they invented language, music, laughter, and many more useful and boisterous activities.

  One morning Persephone menstruated. That afternoon, Demeter’s daughters gathered flowers to celebrate the loveliness of the event. A chariot thundered, then clattered into their midst. It was Hades, the middle-aged god of death, come to rape Persephone, come to carry her off to be his queen, to sit beside him in the realm of non-being below the earth, come to commit the first act of violence earth’s children had ever known.

  Afterwards, the three sisters agreed that he was old enough to be Persephone’s father. Perhaps he was: who else could he be? There were no known male parents … and thus they each discovered that in shame and sorrow childhood ends, and that nothing remains the same.

  Persephone’s sisters came home without her. Demeter raged and wept. Her bones seemed to shrink, her cheeks became wrinkled. She bound up her hair and turned wanderer, but could not find her eldest daughter anywhere on earth. Finally the sun spoke and told Demeter what had happened, that her daughter was married and a queen. He counseled her:

  “Why mourn the natural fate of daughters—to leave their mothers’ home, to lose their virginity, to marry, and to give birth to children?”

  Demeter was grieved beyond and before reasoning. Remembering an oracle’s prophecy of a splitting, a scattering, and an exile, she said to the sun:

  “Yea, if that be the natural fate of daughters, let all mankind perish. Let there be no crops, no grain, no corn, if this maiden is not returned to me.”

  Because Demeter was a powerful goddess, her wishes were commands and Persephone returned. Persephone still had to visit her husband once each year (in winter, when no crops could grow), but her union with him remained a barren one. Persephone was childless. Neither husband nor child—no stranger would ever claim her as his own. Persephone belonged to her mother. That was Demeter’s gift to herself. (In those days, goddesses were still able to perform the miracle of “not choosing.” They were both virgins and mothers, mortal and immortal, forever the same and forever changing.)

  But “oh” and “oh” and “oh” sighed Persephone’s sisters after they had seen everything: the maiden’s helplessness and rape, the young bride’s childlessness, the mother’s suffering—the terrifying simplicity and repetition of it all.

  “Yes,” they said of the maiden and the mother, “yes, she rules both beneath and above the earth, but she cannot keep us here any longer.”

  Psyche was the first to speak. “I am beautiful some say more beautiful than all my sisters, and still no man claims me as his wife.” (Actually, Psyche and Persephone looked quite alike: you could not tell them apart.) “Sisters! I am longing for love. I am lonely and frightened in our mother’s house. I wish a husband—with strong and handsome eyes—and I wish to have a child.”

  Athena spoke next: “I am not beautiful—and care not for such things. (She was in fact exceedingly beautiful, but was very tall—even for the daughter of a goddess.) “Sisters! My childhood is over and must be relived. I wish to be born again—and of man. I wish to plot the clash of heroes from afar, dressed in the finest armor, moved by the finest wisdom. I wish for my own wholeness and not for children or a husband.”

  Artemis spoke last. (She too was tall, and of a darker complexion than her sisters.) “Sisters! Perhaps I wish for the impossible and will have to wander even farther than our mother did in search of it. I, too, want heroic clashes and great deeds. But I also want love and children. My head aches with visions of swords and altars, dazzling cities, and beautiful maidens. There is a music in my ears strange to our mother’s house.”

  Well, as this conversation is common knowledge among schoolgirls, we know what each sister arranged for herself.

  Psyche went home to plead for a husband. Demeter and Persephone were astounded by such a strange desire, yet they knew it must be satisfied. In secrecy, for such a thing had never before happened, Psyche was married to Eros—to Love himself, to Cupid, Aphrodite’s son. Psyche lived alone with her husband, in a splendid palace, set high on a nameless mountain. Silent, invisible servants brought her whatever she wished. At night, and only at night, Love came to visit: Psyche’s husband—but she didn’t know who he was or what he looked like. Love had warned her never to look at him, but to love him in darkness. One midnight, after he had fallen asleep, Psyche lit a small oil lamp for a single, guilty look—and woke Love, who fled the palace. Miserable and frightened, Psyche set out to find him. After many near perilous failures, Love finally rescued his unhappy wife. He brought her to Heaven to live in an even more splendid palace. There, surrounded by the immortals, Psyche, Love, and their daughter, Pleasure, lived happily forever after—the first heavenly Holy Family.

  Athena never returned to her mother’s house. Instead, she went straight to Zeus, the god of gods, and proposed a bargain much to his vain and clever liking: to be re-born of him. She asked him to become her mother. And so Athena became twice-born, the second time of man. She emerged fully grown from Zeus’s head, wearing the armor she so desired. Like Persephone, Athena remained childless and fiercely loyal to her one parent. Unlike Persephone, Athena was never raped, abducted, or made a king’s unwilling queen. She needed no rescuing. If there was rescuing to do, Athena herself would do it. Indeed, she rescued many a male hero, helped him slay hideous monsters, capture unobtainable prizes, win great wars, and destroy ancient cities. This stately daughter of Demeter seemed to have no memory of her earthly and female origins. She never understood why certain men still insisted on sacrificing to her before planting and after harvesting. She smiled to herself. Didn’t they know it was a strange tribute to one who had chosen her own parent—and, in so doing, had stopped turning on the wheel of repetition?

  Artemis, the youngest of Demeter’s daughters, returned to her mother’s house. First she had Demeter consecrate her to the moon, so that no matter how far she’d have to wander, she would never forget, never betray her origins. That done, Artemis quickly perfected the arts of hunting and riding and warfare, of plant healing and midwifery. Then, with the moon for guide, she left to found a city—no, it was a tribe—no, it was a culture, the likes of which the world had never known. Every woman in it was a soldier and a mother, tears were as common as physical bravery, marriage was scorned, rape unthinkable, a
nd the love of young girls praised in poems written by even the most hardened war veterans. Artemis herself had many female lovers, and many daughters, each of whom founded other Amazon cities in Africa, in South America, and elsewhere in Asia.

  Goddesses never die. They slip in and out of the world’s cities, in and out of our dreams, century after century, answering to different names, dressed differently, perhaps even disguised, perhaps idle and unemployed, their official altars abandoned, their temples feared or simply forgotten. What of Demeter and her four daughters?

  Demeter, the goddess of life, and Persephone, her ghostly, embryonic maiden-daughter, were for a long time celebrated in elaborate secret ceremonies by the most sophisticated of the ancients, and more openly by everyone else. But somehow—no one really knows why—such celebrations of mothers and daughters certainly ceased. That which had gone before could no longer be worshiped. Fierce prophets proclaimed martial law against the past. Even fiercer prophets proclaimed martial law against the present. Monotheism changed the fate of mortals and immortals alike.

  Still, not everything changed. Mother worship shifted, ever so subtly, ever so keenly, from Demeter to her daughter Psyche. Gentle Psyche, in love with Love, in love with marriage, was soon enshrined as the gentle Virgin Mother Mary, her daughter, Pleasure, became a son named Jesus. And it happened as quickly as this. Demeter was stripped of her powers, torn from her maidenhood, and exiled into history as a wretched, fearful wanderer. No longer was she a mother-goddess. Now Demeter appeared only as a stepmother, often a cruel one, or as a witch, often an evil one, come to haunt children in their fairy tales and nightmares. Children cried at the sight of her. Their fathers tortured and burned her many times at the stake.