Phyllis Chesler

Phyllis Chesler (born October 1, 1940) is an American writer, psychotherapist, and professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). She is a renowned second-wave feminist psychologist and the author of 20 books, including the best-sellers Women and Madness (1972), With Child: A Diary of Motherhood (1979), and An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (2013). Chesler has written extensively about topics such as gender, mental illness, divorce and child custody, surrogacy, second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, incest, and violence against women.

Chesler has written several works on subjects such as anti-Semitism, women in Islam, and honor killings. Chesler argues that many Western intellectuals, including leftists and feminists, have abandoned Western values in the name of multicultural relativism, and that this has led to an alliance with Islamists, an increase in anti-Semitism, and to the abandonment of Muslim women and religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries.

Chesler is the eldest of three children raised in a working-class Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Hebrew School from the age of six until she graduated from Marshalliah Hebrew High School, an after-school program for the study of Torah, at 14. As a youth, she was a member of the Socialist-Zionist youth movement HaShomer Hatzair, and later the even more radical left-wing Zionist youth movement Ain Harod. Despite her parents' disapproval, she continued to rebel against her religious upbringing.

She attended New Utrecht High School, where she was the editor of the yearbook and of the literary magazine. She won a full scholarship to Bard College, where she met Ali, a Westernized Muslim man from Afghanistan, the son of devout Muslim parents. They married in a civil ceremony in 1961 in New York State, and visited in Kabul, in the large, polygamous household of her father-in-law. She credits this experience with inspiring her to become an ardent feminist.

According to Chesler, her problems began on arrival in Afghanistan. Afghan authorities forced her to surrender her U.S. passport, and she ended up a virtual prisoner in her in-laws' house. Chesler describes this as how foreign wives were treated. This phenomenon has been documented by others. She reports that the U.S. embassy refused to help her leave the country. After five months, she contracted hepatitis and became gravely ill. At that point, her father-in-law agreed to allow her to return to the U.S. on a temporary visa.

Upon her return, she completed her final semester and graduated from Bard College, embarked on a doctoral program, worked in a brain research laboratory for E. Roy John, published studies in Science magazine and received a fellowship in neurophysiology at the New York Medical College at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. She later earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1969 at the New School for Social Research and embarked on a career as a professor, author, and psychotherapist in private practice.

Chesler obtained an annulment from her first husband and married an Israeli-American, whom she also later divorced. She has one son. She describes their relationship, pregnancy, childbirth, and her first year as a mother in With Child: A Diary of Motherhood. In the 1998 edition, her son wrote the preface to the book.

In 1969, Chesler cofounded the Association for Women in Psychology. In 1972, she published Women and Madness, whose thesis is "that double standards of mental health and illness exist and that women are often punitively labeled as a function of gender, race, class, or sexual preference". The book sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. The book received a front page New York Times review by Adrienne Rich, who described it as "intense, rapid, brilliant, controversial ... a pioneer contribution to the feminization of psychiatric thinking and practice".