Femagination » Books

Phyllis Chesler, Feminist and Islamophobe?

Ellen Keim — Thu, 27 May 2010 04:34:37 +0000

Phyllis Chesler

I hate sentences that start with “most” and end with some ridiculous pronouncement about what “most” are doing. Phyllis Chesler appears to be a prime offender, judging by her article on Muslim women and the veil. She writes: “Most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families.” She also writes that “Most Muslim girls and women are impoverished and wear rags.”

These statements are typical of a person who cares more about justifying her own prejudice than in adding something constructive to the debate. Not only that, but they’re just plain ignorant. Chesler cites examples coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan as being typical of the entire Muslim world. She also equates Muslims with Arabs, when in fact this only applies to 20% of all Muslims.

I especially love this statement of Chesler’s: “It is well known that the Arabs and Muslims kept and still keep sex slaves–they are very involved in the global trafficking in girls and women and frequent prostitutes on every continent.” Where does she get her ideas??

But of course Chesler doesn’t care about being objective—or even factual; she has a career to think of. Dr. Chesler (she has a Ph.D in psychology) is primarily a writer and is the author of thirteen books and numerous articles. (Check out her web site for examples of her writing.) She is also a psychotherapist and an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY). By her own account, she was “held captive” in Afghanistan when she went to visit her then-husband’s family, an experience that she says made her an ardent feminist. It also appears to have made her into a rabid Islamophobe.

In a 2003 review of one of her books, Publishers Weekly concluded that “Chesler’s tone and lack of intellectual rigor will not help her ideas to be heard by those who do not already agree with her.” (Source: Wikipedia.) From the samples of her writings, particularly those about Islam and anti-Semitism, I concur.

But what about Chesler’s feminism? Is she really a feminist or a neo-con masquerading as one?

From what I can gather, Chesler is the kind of feminist who blames the victim. One of her books, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, more or less says that women are just naturally competitive with other women, resulting in back-stabbing and general meanness. There is no recognition that women are socialized to be competitive by a patriarchal society that encourages them to stake their identities on the men they can “catch.” (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book, just this USA Today interview with Chesler about it, so I realize I may be misrepresenting her views.)

Yes, I know I’m dangerously close to saying that there is only one way to be a feminist or that there is a set platform all feminists have to espouse (pro-abortion, anti-pornography, pro-gay rights, etc.). Although, like all people, I am more comfortable with people who have the same views I do, I recognize that we all have our own versions of feminism, just as we all have our own versions of religion. Dor instance, Sarah Palin calls herself a pro-life feminist. Some feminists are supportive of pornography and sex work. Many women who hold feminist views don’t identify with the feminist movement because they feel that it is too upper-class and white.

Me? I’m just a feminist who believes that feminism is—or should be—incompatible with any kind of racism, prejudice or hatred. For this reason alone, I find it hard to believe that Chesler is a true feminist.

Friday Videos: Feminist Super Heroes

Ellen Keim — Fri, 21 May 2010 10:00:26 +0000

Sorry, no related posts yet.

National Poetry Month: Feminist Poets

Ellen Keim — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:00:19 +0000

What makes a feminist poet? Is she a feminist who is a poet, like Audre Lourde and Adrienne Rich? Not necessarily. When I looked up “feminist poets” on the Internet I found lists that included Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. As far as I know, neither of those women was ever associated with the feminist movement.

But here we fall into a philosophical argument: is it possible to be a feminist without identifying as one? I think it is. And nowhere is this more evident than in the case of poets who write for and about women. I’m not talking about hearts-and-flowers love poetry or sentimental paeans to motherhood. I’m talking about poetry that describes what it is really like to be a woman. The poet doesn’t have to be a feminist to get inside a woman’s heart, mind and soul and write about what she (or he) finds there.

So we find women on these lists who were never feminists, maybe didn’t even care about feminist issues, but who still were able to access the themes that define a woman’s life: sexuality, gender roles, position in society, relationships, marriage, motherhood, spirituality. Today I’m going to contrast two of my favorites who, although they came from different centuries, both had their fingers on the pulse of a woman’s heart.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The first is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a British poet who lived from 1806 to 1861. I call her a feminist poet even though she was an invalid for much of her life and, on the surface, didn’t accomplish much other than her poetry. She certainly wasn’t an activist of any kind, although she was interested in the world around her. Many people think of her as a Romantic, probably based mostly on her love poems such as the one we are all familiar with that starts: “How shall I love thee? Let me count the ways…”

Browning was married to the poet Robert Browning who wooed her from her invalid bed and talked her into eloping with him. (Her father later disowned her, as he did all of his children who married.) They went to live in Florence where she had their son at the age of 43. (She died when she was 55.) She may not have identified as a feminist, but she certainly “got it” about women in her society. At one point she wrote:

…and is it possible you think a woman has no business with questions like the question of slavery? Then she had better use a pen no more. She had better subside into slavery and concubinage herself, I think…and take no rank among thinkers and speakers.

Anne Sexton

The second is Anne Sexton, an American poet who lived from 1928 to 1974. She, too, was a poet who didn’t have much, if anything, to do with feminism. Her poetry is often called “confessional.” She was a master at tearing out her own guts and displaying them on the page. Like Browning, she was married (1948-1973) and had children, but it was always her poetry which defined her. It may have saved her, too, for a while: she started to write at the urging of both her therapist and her spiritual advisor, but ultimately committed suicide at the age of 46.

Any woman (or man) who reads Sexton’s poetry can’t help but think more deeply about her themes: religious quest, transformation and dismantling of myth, the meanings of gender, inheritance and legacy, the search for fathers, mother-daughter relationships, sexual anxiety, madness and suicide, issues of female identity. She is, in a way, a spokesperson for issues that concern women. I doubt that she thought of herself that way; her poetry was very personal. But as I learned in writing class, it is often the individual experience that speaks to the general public; the personal is made political, as many feminists say.

The following poems illustrate the feel that these two poets had for the female experience. I chose them for what I see as their similarities, in spite of the fact that they were written over a hundred years apart.

Browning’s is from Sonnets of the Portuguese (written around 1845-46) and is titled simply “VI”:

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand / henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore / alone upon the threshold of my door / of individual life, I shall command / the uses of my soul, nor lift my hand / serenely in the sunshine as before, / without the sense of that which I forbore—/ thy touch upon the palm. The widest land / doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine / with pulses that beat double. What I do / and what I dream include thee, as the wine / must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue / God for myself, He hears that name of thine, / and sees within my eyes the tears of two.

This is an except from Sexton’s “The Touch” which was in Love Poems (published 1969):

For months my hand had been sealed off / in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings. / Perhaps it is bruised, I thought, / and that is why they have locked it up. / But when I looked in, it lay there quietly. / You could tell time by this, I thought, / like a clock, by its five knuckles / and the thin underground veins. / It lay there like an unconscious woman / fed by tubes she knew not of…
Then all became history. / Your hand found mine. / Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. / Oh, my carpenter, / the fingers are rebuilt. / They dance with yours. / They dance in the attic and in Vienna. / My hand is alive all over America. / Not even death will stop it, / death shedding her blood. / Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom / and the kingdom come.

2010 Amelia Bloomer Project

Ellen Keim — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:00:44 +0000

The Amelia Bloomer Project was started in 2002 to serve two purposes: 1) to alert young readers to society’s opposition toward women’s equality and 2) to highlight the progress that has been made toward this goal. Books are chosen for feminist content, quality of writing, and appeal to young readers. Subjects include women’s history, female trail-blazers and the identification of problems that women (and girls) face today, along with possible solutions. For 2010 the Project members selected 54 books for children from pre-school/beginning readers through young adult (Grades 7-12).

Children today are certainly more sophisticated than they were when I was a child. For example, one of the books on the list, which is recommended for grades 2-4, is Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story From Afghanistan by Jeanette Winter. This is about a secret school in war-torn Afghanistan where girls seek to gain an education that is forbidden to them by the Taliban government.

Another title, this one recommended for grades 9-12, is Because I Am Furniture by Thalia Chaltas. This novel is about a family terrorized into silence by their father’s sexual and emotional abuses and one daughter’s struggle to find the courage to reveal her family’s secrets.

The Amelia Bloomer Project is part of the Feminist Task Force of the American Library Association’s Social Responsibility Round Table. For pdf and html versions of the lists since 2002, click here.

Death and Taxes (and Old Women)

Ellen Keim — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:28:55 +0000

I’m exhausted. I just got our taxes done, right under the wire (okay, I had one whole day left) and I feel depleted. (So does our bank account.) One reason why I haven’t written much this past week is because I was desperately trying to find ways to cut our taxes. I wasn’t successful. But it could be worse.

I could be dead.

Benjamin Franklin is the one who said “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Apparently, he was thinking about government when he wrote that (the whole quote is “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” )

That’s a pretty negative way to look at life, though, isn’t it? Franklin had a way with words and could make almost anything he said or wrote sound quotable. Like this one: “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”

But nothing compares, in my book, to Franklin’s “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress” (1745), which you can read here. Having reached the advanced age of 58, I found much in it to appreciate, particularly when he advises his friend to choose an old woman over a young one. I may not agree with all his reasons (he lists eight), but I got a kick out of his humor. (At least, I think he was trying to be funny. Maybe not. Hm.)

My brain is going around in circles (can you tell?) so I think I’ll call it a night and hope for more clarity in the morning.

On a more serious note: For more information about Benjamin Franklin’s attitudes about and relationships with women as well as historical views of women of his time, check out Benjamin Franklin and Women, edited by Larry E. Tise. (Read reviews.)

Friday Videos: How to Triumph After 50

Ellen Keim — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0000

The author of The Best of Everything After 50 shares advice on The Today Show:

For more information about the book, read Julia Moulden at The Huffington Post.

Also read “Why Women Should Look Forward to Aging,” written by a man!

Book Review: Another Life Altogether

Ellen Keim — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:00:36 +0000

We all long for “another life altogether” at some point. Thirteen-year-old Jesse Bennett has more reason than most to want to escape into another life. She has lived all her life with her mother’s eccentric behavior, which has just culminated in a suicide attempt and hospitalization. Even though she knows that she will be found out eventually, Jesse tells her classmates that her mother is away on a world cruise that she won in a contest. To bolster her story, she writes detailed letters which are supposedly from her mother (after having researched each destination) and reads them aloud in home room. Of course, in a small town news travels fast and Jesse’s ploy is revealed–and ridiculed. Soon after her mother returns from the mental hospital, her father moves them to an even smaller town in the hopes that they can all get a fresh start.

Jesse is pinning all her hopes on this opportunity to start over. She “providentially” makes friends with a girl who is popular at her new school and she resolves to do everything she can to keep her position in the “in” crowd. At the same time she develops a crush on an older girl and she escapes again into writing letters that she never sends, this time to the object of her affections about their “life together.”

Meanwhile, at home, Jesse worries constantly about her mother, fearing that she will try to kill herself again. She has to take over a lot of the familial responsibilities while her father alternates between denial and hare-brained schemes to help his wife to “snap out of it.” Further complicating her family life is the boyfriend of her aunt who secretly torments her and her jail-bird uncle who comes to live with them after his release from prison.

As her mother falls more deeply into her mental illness and her father more obsessed with making things right, Jesse finds herself fantasizing even more about her “other life” as well as questioning the behavior of her supposed friends in the “in” crowd. When she meets an engaging boy whom she immediately feels a connection to, she’s dismayed to discover that he is ostracized by the popular kids, who rag him about being a “poofter.” When the ostracism turns to violence, Jesse must make a choice.

On the surface this book is about a young girl’s attempt to deal with her mother’s mental illness and her own questions about her sexuality. But beneath the surface it is about so much more. First of all, it is a finely nuanced portrait of a young teen who is trying to find a way to balance her need for acceptance with her desire to be herself. She is beginning to question and explore her sexual identity even though she knows that she might end up becoming an outcast. She is also struggling with her need for a normal family life and with how to accept her family as it is. The normal conflicts between a teen-age girl and her mother are exacerbated by her mother’s illness, with Jesse left feeling that she doesn’t have a mother at all. (This is mirrored by her mother’s extreme reaction to her own mother’s “abandonment.”)

On another level this is about the dilemma that all LGBT people face: whether to hide in hopes of societal acceptance or come out and run the risk of becoming an outcast. Jesse is lucky in a way that she has to come to terms with this decision at an early age. She discovers that being accepted by the “in” crowd doesn’t make you feel “in” if you can’t be yourself. By the end of the novel we see a young lady who has taken a huge step toward living her life authentically.

This book is also about homophobia and the extremes to which some members of society will go to punish homosexuals. It’s also about the bravery of those who take a stand against homophobia, along with their empathy and sense of justice.

Perhaps because Jesse is trying so hard to fit in during the first half of the novel, her personality is somewhat subdued. But as events unfold that threaten to destroy the life she is attempting to make for herself, she becomes more fully-fleshed-out as a character and I found myself fully engrossed in her struggles to make sense of the life she really lives.

The author, Elaine Beale, a British transplant to the U.S. who now lives in Oakland, California, has set the novel in the 1970s along the eroding coastline of East Yorkshire, England. Although the book is not autobiographical, Beale obviously remembers what it was like to be a thirteen-year-old girl. Beale won the Poets & Writers 2007 Exchange Award for a partial draft of this novel. Her previous novel, the well-received Murder in the Castro: A Lou Spencer Mystery, was published in 1997 and her writings have appeared in many anthologies.

Jane Addams: Woman For Her Time

Ellen Keim — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:08:26 +0000

It’s so easy to think of history as something stuffy and irrelevant. This is nowhere more true than when we’re reading about people who lived and died before our lifetimes. But if these same people were somehow transported into today’s reality, we would see more clearly how much influence they had in their own time.

Jane Addams is one of those people. She was born in 1860 and died in 1935. If she had been born a hundred years later she would be considered a Third Wave feminist. But she was much more than that. She started the settlement house movement* here in America. Besides her charitable work, she became a mover and shaker in politics. She was the first vice president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She organized the Women’s Peace Party and the International Congress of Women. She was the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

With her accomplishments, if she were alive today, she would be more influential than all the present-day Third Wave feminists put together. She would be known internationally. And she would only be 50 years old. Her first book, Twenty Years at Hull House, was published exactly one hundred years ago this year and became a bestseller.

We still have the problems she worked so hard to combat: unemployment, lack of medical care and education for the poor, unfair and unsafe labor practices, discrimination against women, African-Americans and immigrants, and last but not least, war. But, unlike most of us, she would be doing something about them. About all of them.

I think what was the most astonishing about Addams was that she was active on so many fronts. Certainly there are women today who are “doing something.” They just aren’t putting themselves on the line the way Addams did. Her International Council of Women traveled to the Hague to try to diplomatically end World War I before the U.S. entered it. She lobbied the state of Illinois to examine laws governing child labor, the factory inspection system, and the juvenile justice system. She raised money for Hull House by lecturing and writing.

She was a mixture of Mother Jones and Mother Teresa (except not as irascible or saintly). In fact, she was not universally loved. There were those who called her a socialist, an anarchist, a communist and unpatriotic. (Sound familiar?) But she didn’t let that stop her. And she led many young people into social work along with her. She believed strongly in the necessity of action, not just for the sake of social justice, but for the sake of the young people themselves. In Twenty Years at Hull House she wrote:

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily…Many of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered vitality and discontent. (pp. 120-121)

When the depression of the 1930′s struck, she saw many of the things she had fought for become policies under President Franklin Roosevelt. She received numerous awards during this time including, in 1931, the Nobel Peace Prize. She died four years later, at the age of 75.

*The settlement house (or community center) that she and one other woman, Ellen Gates Starr, founded in Chicago when she was only 29 (1889) was known as Hull House. It offered medical care, child care and legal aid. It also provided classes for immigrants to learn English, vocational skills, music, art and drama. In 1893, when a severe depression rocked the country. Hull House was serving over two thousand people a week. It still operates to this day.