Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  Since I wrote this, I have published many books and articles that have continued documenting second and third wave feminism and “feminisms.” What’s changed, what’s remained intractably the same? Many feminists of my era are still out there making a difference. They have accomplished many milestones, too numerous to list here.

  But even I could not have anticipated the extent to which the educated daughters of second-wave-feminist-era mothers would have embraced motherhood as a woman’s “right” and taken abortion rights for granted. Heterosexual, lesbian, and bi-sexual younger women, both coupled and single, have increasingly been as interested in creating inter-generational families composed of biological or adoptive children as their mothers’ generation were once interested in putting private family life behind them. Nor could I have anticipated this generation’s fear, amounting to a phobia, about identifying themselves as feminists. However, many younger women are pursuing both careers and private lives in admirable and practical ways.

  Today, feminists, including feminist therapists, identify themselves as “women of color feminists,” “postmodern and global feminists,” “queer and lesbian feminists,” and as “Third Wave feminists.” Academic feminists have become increasingly non- and anti-activist or have defined “activism” as primarily opposing America. (Please see my book The Death of Feminism. What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom for a longer discussion about this.)

  I have had some very good experiences with younger feminists, who are now in their twenties and early thirties; and some very hurtful experiences as well. For me, Sanda Balaban, who was my first reader for Letters to a Young Feminist, and who is now an important and innovative educator, stands out as an intellectual heir, as does playwright and author Courtney Martin, who did a Masters thesis concerning the themes of Women and Madness and who consulted with me about it.

  Many younger feminists (aged 20–45) have described familiar sororicidal battles with each other and infanticidal- or matricidal-like difficulties with older women. They talk and write about being slandered and ostracized by other girls and women. In general, younger feminists have fewer illusions about other women than my generation once did. They take it for granted that women are competitive, cruel, and envious; indeed, some have written useful and practical books on the subject.

  May they all continue to go from strength to strength.

  * In 1969, a group of us formed the Association for Women in Psychology. In 1970, I addressed a crowded convention meeting of the American Psychological Association. I demanded token reparations for female mental patients (for legal fees, education, housing, etc.). The amount of money demanded was equal to the money that women psychologists had paid in membership dues over a five-year period—money which was never used to serve job security or advancement opportunity for these relatively privileged women professionals. The demand was met by very loud and hostile laughter and was followed by the hostile diplomacy of bureaucratic “procedur-ism.” Needless to say, no money was ever received for this purpose—but most of the women involved in the demand found themselves invited speakers to the 1971 convention.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

  FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY IN OUR CULTURE: WOMEN ALONE

  The women say, shame on you. They say you are domesticated, forcibly fed, like geese in the yard of the farmer who fattens them. They say, you strut about, you have no other care than to enjoy the good things your masters hand out, solicitous for your well-being so long as they stand to gain. They say, there is no more distressing spectacle than that of slaves who take pleasure in their servile state. They say, you are far from possessing the pride of those wild birds who refuse to hatch their eggs when they have been imprisoned. They say, take an example from the wild birds who, even if they mate with the males to relieve their boredom, refuse to reproduce so long as they are not at liberty.

  Monique Wittig1

  The women say with an oath, it was by a trick that he expelled you from the earthly paradise, cringing he insinuated himself next to you, he robbed you of that passion for knowledge of which it is written that it has the wings of the eagle, the eyes of the owl, the feet of the dragon. He has enslaved you by trickery, you who were great strong valiant. He has stolen your wisdom from you, he has closed your memory to what you were, he has made you that which is not which does not speak which does not possess which does not write, he has made of you a vile and fallen creature, he has gagged abused betrayed you. By means of stratagems he has stultified your understanding, he has woven around you a long list of defects that he declares essential to your well being, to your nature. He has invented your history. But the time approaches when you shall crush the serpent under your heel, the time approaches when you can cry, erect, filled with ardour and courage. Paradise exists in the shadow of the sword.

  Monique Wittig2

  MODERN FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY reflects a relatively powerless and deprived condition. Many intrinsically valuable female traits, such as intuitiveness or compassion, have probably been developed through default or patriarchal imposed necessity, rather than through either biological predisposition or free choice. Female emotional “talents” must be viewed in terms of the overall price exacted by sexism. It is illogical and dangerous to romanticize traits that one purchases with one’s freedom and dignity—even if they are “nice” traits; even if they make one’s slavery more bearable; even if they charm and soothe the oppressor’s rage and sorrow, staying his hand, or leave-taking, for one more day.

  In Chapter One, I discussed the myth of Demeter, the Earth Mother, and her raped daughter Persephone, the Divine Maiden, whom she rescues and reincorporates into her own biological-maternal destiny.3 Nearly every woman in our culture has relived this myth in her own life. Its meaning still constitutes a powerful guide to our understanding of the female condition.

  Persephone, like her mother, is denied uniqueness, individuality, and cultural potency. Neither Demeter nor Persephone is allowed to become a “heroine”: one represents the earth, the other represents a return to earth. Their single fate symbolizes the inevitable, endless breaking of each individual woman on the wheel of culturally devalued biological reproduction. Women who live in patriarchal settings are defined by certain traits, or by the absence of other traits. For example, like Persephone, most women today are not bold, forceful, knowledgeable, physically strong, active, or sexually potent. Like Persephone and Demeter, women are still naive, helpless, or reactive victims.* Their sexuality is defined for them by men, as an act of incest for procreative purposes. In the myth, Persephone is gathering flowers of forgetfulness (poppies) when she is abducted and raped. Most women “forget” their dreams of individuality when they marry. “Marriage” is the modern counterpart to rape in mythology.

  Unfortunately, most women today do not have Demeters for mothers. Female biology and nature have increasingly been devalued by our culture—but women have not yet been freed from being defined in biological terms. Thus, the modern Persephone is no longer graceful, no longer divine, no longer “saved” by her mother. Demeter exists no more—and certainly not for a daughter. Whatever Earth Mother qualities women retain are lavished almost exclusively on sons and husbands. Persephone has become Cinderella, struck dumbly domestic by a Demeter turned stepmother. This, if anything, is the female version of exile from the earthly paradise. Fairy-tale princes cannot rescue women from their exile; and mothers have become stepmothers. For this reason daughters and (step)mothers today, unlike Persephone and Demeter, are characterized by self-hatred and mutual mistrust. (Step)mothers have not prepared their daughters for pilgrimages, conquests, or reflection. They have put brooms into their hands and romantic or escapist illusions into their heads. Daughters can have no heroic pride in their sex, which seems to survive and fatten on its domesticity.

  We must remember that the original Demeter was free and did have real powers. Demeter was not a terrible Goddess of Death but one of great eart
hly riches, of Life. We must note that it is Persephone, a frail, pale being who as Pluto’s unwilling wife, is the Queen of the Dead in patriarchal mythology. Ancient mythology did not always grant women the truly terrible powers it knew and feared they had. Stepmothers and witches in modern fairy tales are usually defeated. They too are not allowed a true measure of their wrath or power.

  Today, women grow up in households where adult members of their sex do not have Demeter’s powers. Mothers often glorify their servitude, sublimate their sexuality and intellect, and punish their daughters when they rebel against such a role. These conditions lead to the development of certain psychological traits. For example, women are submissive and are not rescued by their mothers when this trait leads to their victimization. Daughters learn to survive as they have seen their mothers survive: through self-sacrifice and “nesty” materialism, and through public protestations of “happiness.”

  Persephone, the purest image of the Divine Maiden, has many mythological reflections. Psyche, the wife of Eros, whom I discussed in Chapter One, is an important variation of the myth and is relevant to modern women in certain ways that Persephone is not. We do not know too much about Persephone’s feelings about or relation to her husband Pluto. What is known suggests a quietly implacable disinterest and sense of utter strangeness. Persephone is known to us through her identification with and love for her mother. Psyche, on the other hand, loves her husband Eros (Cupid), or loves the love of men. In the story, she is quite literally deserted by her mother and sisters and wedded in all darkness (ignorance).4

  Unlike Persephone, Psyche is happily and eternally reunited with her husband, and becomes the mother of a daughter called Pleasure. Psyche, an early prefiguration of the Catholic Madonna, embodies certain traits possessed by many women today. I am talking about female romanticism, tenderness, compassion, and altruism. Studies and common sense suggest that “altruism” in our culture often stems from guilt, fear, and low self-esteem rather than from freedom or self-love. (Margaret Adams has discussed the crippling limitations and definite social function of what she calls “the Compassion Trap” in women.5) Such traits are not devalued by either men or women. However, men benefit from such traits, almost exclusively, and reward them rather poorly. A genuinely compassionate person would have a hard time participating in the spheres of public action. There is a ruthlessness that politics or science demands—but its devotees are never totally destroyed by this demand. The devotees are men, who expect to be revived each night by female compassion in the individual, private family unit. This revival doesn’t always take place—and women are always blamed as nags and bitches, as ungrateful and manipulative albatrosses around their suffering husbands’ necks. This may even be true. However, it is time to blame or examine the public sphere that has exiled compassion or decency into private isolated places—and the ruthlessness involved in enforcing full-time “compassion”-service upon women.

  Apparently there is no place for altruism or compassion in political and military ventures. The kind of training women receive as “compassion”-givers effectively keeps them at home, psychologically. In the twentieth century, the wives of upper-class men organized charity benefits for the poor; the wives of middle-class men organized peace and ecology demonstrations and worked as social workers, nurses, teachers, and psychologists; the wives of lower-class men took care of their families and of other people’s children and husbands, as secretaries, domestics, and prostitutes. And yet poverty does not disappear; neither war nor pollution nor racism is abolished; and the universal female tie to childbearing and rearing remains as constant as ever.

  The composite psychological portrait of Persephone-Psyche is one of a naive and heterosexually romantic victim, an unindividuated, fearful, and conservative being, whose greatest pride lies in either childbearing and compassion or in a return to the ways of the Mother. The Maiden as Cinderella retains most of these traits, but with no glory, with no home, and no princely or maternal “rescue.”

  Cinderella-Persephone-Psyche also embodies certain other unmistakably feminine traits which many women still possess. I am thinking of traits that men—and therefore women—either devalue or consider unimportant. For example, a certain type of “mindlessness” or “superficiality” (as men see it) exists among many women—which is neither mindless nor superficial. Two women talking often seem to be reciting monologues at each other, neither really listening to (or judging) what the other is saying. Two personal confessions, two sets of feelings, seem to be paralleling one another, rather “mindlessly,” and without “going anywhere.” In fact, what the women are doing—or where they are “going”—is toward some kind of emotional resolution and comfort. Each woman comments upon the other’s feelings by reflecting them in a very sensitive matching process. The two women share their feelings by alternating the retelling of the entire experience in which their feelings are embedded and from which they cannot be “abstracted” or “summarized.” Their theme, method, and goal are non-verbal and/or non-verbalized. Facial expressions, pauses, sighs, and seemingly unrelated (or “non-abstract”) responses to statements are crucial to such dialogue. A very special prescience is at work here. On its most ordinary level, it affords women a measure of emotional reality and a kind of comfort that they cannot find with men, and that men do not have with each other. On its highest level, it constitutes the basic tools of art and psychic awareness.

  Thus, the psychological portrait of the individual and powerless woman consists of naivete, compulsive heterosexuality, procreative “pride,” fearfulness, self-hatred, mistrust of other women—and of compassion, passion, and idealism. Let us look at such women in groups to see what happens to these individual themes in a social context.

  FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY IN OUR CULTURE: WOMEN IN GROUPS

  Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed…. The majority, that compact, immobile, drowsy mass, the Russian peasant, after a century of struggle, of sacrifice, of untold misery, still believes that the rope which strangles “the man with the white hands” [the intellectual] brings luck…. Not that I do not feel with the oppressed, the disinherited of the earth; not because I do not know the shame, the horror, the indignity of the lives the people lead, do I repudiate the majority as a creative force for justice or equality…. I wish not to concede anything to them [the masses] but to drill, divide and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

  Emma Goldman6

  The aim of political action and social thought of all kinds is to create a tolerable background and leave people alone. The only tolerable background is an austerely simple one. The important parts of life will always be the things we do in our own small groups and on our own. They are art and science and sex and God and compassion and romantic love. These should be rich and complex. There isn’t one damned thing that society can do to help you with any of these. All society can do is to make sure that it doesn’t prevent them.

  Paul Goodman7

  I learned three and one-half years ago that women had always been divided against one another, were self-destructive, and filled with impotent rage. I thought the movement would change all that. I never dreamed that I would see the day when this rage, masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism under the “pro-woman” banner, would turn into a frighteningly vicious anti-intellectual fascism of the left, and used within the movement to strike down sisters…. I am referring, of course, to the personal attacks … to which women in the movement, who have painfully managed any degree of achievement, have been subjected….

  If you are in the first category (an achiever) you are immediately labelled a thrill-seeking opportunist, a ruthless mercenary, out to get her fame and fortune over the dead bodies of selfless sisters who have buried their abilities and sacrificed their ambitions for the greater glory of feminism. P
roductivity seems to be the major crime—but if you have the misfortune of being outspoken and articulate, you are accused of being power-mad, elitist, fascist, and finally, the worst epithet of all: A MALE IDENTIFIER, AARRGGG!!! …

  To emerge unscathed from this kind of assault is impossible. The effects I have observed, to name just a few, are: gradual or immediate decrease in productivity; an upsurge of self-doubt; depletion of whatever ego-strength had been salvaged from our pasts or recovered during the early stages of the movement; an increase in impotence and passivity, coupled with a rampant paranoia (completely justified); a severe dropping off of self-confidence and faith in one’s ability; a detailed and obsessive self-examination for real or imagined sins which is completely useless since the mind-fucking has destroyed objectivity….

  One last plea: If we women are ever to pull ourselves out of the morass of self-pity, self-destruction, and impotence which has been our heritage for so long as we can remember, then it is perhaps even more important that we be supportive of each other’s achievements and successes and strengths, than it is for us to be compassionate and understanding of each other’s failures and weaknesses.

  Anselma dell’Olio8

  American children are reared to be exceptionally competitive and aggressive but increasingly are expected to “get along” with or be “liked” by others in order to “get ahead.” More and more, people of all generations tend to “look alike” and, despite a potentially destructive and superficial individualism, conform rather than commit individual acts. Individuals in America, as elsewhere, risk ostracism, loneliness, grave self-doubt, and perhaps incarceration.