Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  DORIS: Tell me a little about your family background. You know, your relationship with your parents. Something as far back as you can remember, you know. How things were.

  MARY: Relationship with my parents—

  DORIS: Ummmmm.

  MARY: Well, that’s a story in itself, honey, ’cause my father was a pure fuck.

  DORIS: Oh, that’s nice to hear.

  MARY: My mother was a fool ’cause she lived with this fuck until she went foolish.

  DORIS: What do you mean by fuck?

  MARY: Well, he used to beat the shit out of her really. He used to beat the shit out of this woman every Friday, ’cause you know on Friday that’s when the eagle flies. And it used to fly him straight to the liquor store; and he’d come home all sloppy drunk and stone broke and this went on until my mother died.

  DORIS: What did your mother die of, honey?

  MARY: Well, she died, the doctor said she had a heart attack. Well, that’s what the doctor said, but I, me, I personally believe that she just gave up living ’cause her living was hell, baby, and she worked in a white woman’s kitchen for twelve years and that’s just where she died.

  DORIS: What do you mean by “she just gave up”? She said, “Well, oh, I think I’ll die” and just went on? What do you mean by “she just gave up life”? What do you mean by that?

  MARY: Well, when—I mean when you ain’t got nothing more to live for, man, you just give up. If your life ain’t worth shit, you ain’t worth shit, baby.

  DORIS: Wait a minute, do you think she committed suicide or something?

  MARY: No! You don’t understand what I’m saying.

  DORIS: I don’t really.

  MARY: When you give up, you just give up. You can’t take all this bullshit from everybody, especially from somebody who’s supposed to be your husband and all this kind of crap, and you just can’t, you can’t dig on it. That’s all. You know, about two or three weeks before she died my mother told me that she would be free soon. You know, she knew she was going to die and that’s why she said it. It was a term she always used—that she would be free soon. And for me to settle down and get married to someone who I loved and depend on—

  DORIS: Did she mean male or female?

  MARY: Well, she meant male because my mother was a strict, you know, gospel woman and—

  DORIS: Did she know of your experiences?

  MARY: Are you kidding? Of course not.

  DORIS: Are you sure?

  MARY: I’m positive. And you know she was trying to tell me don’t be a slave so I can live a better life than hers but what she was really saying was don’t be a slave but be a free slave. Don’t marry a fuck like she did.

  DORIS: Don’t be a slave but be a free slave. That sounds kinda off the wall. What do you mean?

  MARY: Well, marry a nice fuck. Don’t marry a fuck like she did. Well, my mother was pitiful. The only way she got her freedom was through death and I, when she died, I say this ain’t going to be me ’cause I realized that the only way—

  DORIS: What do you mean? How do you know that your mother didn’t enjoy herself? She stayed with this man for such a long time.

  MARY: That’s right, she stayed there ’cause she had children to support and the only way that I’m gonna get my freedom, you know, to obtain my freedom, was through living the life that I want to, so I stopped pretending to be something that I—

  DORIS: This is what I said. You don’t want to go through the same thing that your mother went through so you chose something else…. Okay, I just want to ask you one more question. With the way the majority of most women are going, do you think there is an alternative to the present lifestyle?

  MARY: You mean the women’s present lifestyle? DORIS: Right, yes.

  MARY: Well how can you have a solution for something that’s been going on for centuries? And the only possible alternative would be for somebody to be Lord and Saviour Christ for a day, and let’s say if I was King Jesus, you know I would place a curse on every man alive and this curse would be a little thing they call a twelve-month pregnancy and each man would produce about seven girls.

  DORIS: Why seven? Seven! My God!

  MARY: Oh one for each day of the week, right. No woman would be without a lover or somebody to talk to, you know, affection.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THIRD WORLD WOMEN

  When I was six years old in Brooklyn, Shirley was my best friend. She was black, and her mother had died in a fire in a country called Africa. She lived in a basement with her father, the janitor, who was always laughing. Shirley and I ran away from home together every afternoon. We also planned to co-captain the best punch-ball team ever. Our plans were ended by a supper invitation.

  “What,” my parents screamed at me, “you want to go down into the basement at night—with her father there, with men, cards, numbers, liquor, God knows what?”

  “Her father lives there,” I explained. “He’s the janitor. But I promise we won’t bother him….”

  Well, I never got to taste any African food in my sixth year (if that’s what we would have eaten). And for years, whenever I went to the ocean, I saw black men laughing dangerously at me in every roaring wave. (The bands of embittered black youths who rove New York City, grabbing “tits ‘n’ ass” in a white rage, haven’t helped me any with that one.)

  And sometimes I wonder what adult uniform they gave Shirley: “welfare mother,” suburban citizen, black militant, Dead on Arrival?

  Shirley, I dedicate this chapter to everything that was between us—and to whatever revolution changes what couldn’t be into an unremarkable occurrence.

  Dr. Hill acknowledged, in an interview today, that [black] families headed by women were considerably more vulnerable to economic and social ills. An important reason is that women heads of family are likely to earn much less than men…. The report says that “national earnings data do not support the popular conception that wives’ earnings in most low-income black families are often greater than husbands’. It is said that in eighty-five percent of the black families with incomes of $3,000 or less, the husband’s income surpassed the wife’s.”

  New York Times, July 27 and 28, 1971

  In the first national comparative study of its kind, the Census Bureau has found that persons of origin in Spanish-speaking countries earn significantly greater incomes than blacks, even though they have poorer educations….

  Further, statisticians say, while the incomes of both groups still fall far behind those of whites, there is some evidence to suggest that the Spanish group is gaining somewhat faster than blacks are.

  New York Times, October 18, 1971

  Is women’s liberation irrelevant to black women? Of course, as has been pointed out, half of blacks are women; the question might be asked whether the black movement has been relevant to them. The black movement is conceived as primarily directed toward the black man, and programs to meet its demands have reflected this. The Job Corp, with many blacks, was practically all male until a 1966 Act of Congress required at least one-third participation by females; of the 125,000 trainees under the Manpower Development and Training Act in 1968, only thirty-two percent were women; in 1968, in the Job Opportunities in the business sector program, only twenty-four percent of those hired were female; the training program of the National Alliance of Businessmen is restricted to black males.

  Nancy Henley1

  What do black women feel about Women’s Lib? Distrust. It is white, therefore suspect…. They look at white women and see them as the enemy for they know that racism is not confined to white men, and that there are more white women than men in this country and that fifty-three percent of the population sustained an eloquent silence during times of greatest stress…. The problem of most black women is not getting into the labor force but in being upgraded in it, not in getting into medical school but in getting adult education, not in how to exercise freedom from the “head of the house” but in how to be the head of the household…
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  For years in this country there was no one for black men to vent their rage on except black women. And for years black women accepted that rage—even regarded that acceptance as their unpleasant duty. But in doing so, they frequently kicked back, and they seem never to have become the “slave” that white women see in their own history. True, the black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept. And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself….

  … Black women have always considered themselves superior to white women…. Black women have been able to envy white women (their looks, their easy life, the attention they seem to get from their men;) they could fear them (for the economic control they have had over black women’s lives) and even love them (as mammies and domestic workers can;) but black women have found it impossible to respect white women. I mean they never had what black men have had for white men: a feeling of awe at their accomplishments.

  Toni Morrison2

  Unfortunately, there seems to be some confusion in the Movement today as to who has been oppressing whom. Since the advent of black power, the black male has exerted a more prominent leadership role in our struggle for justice in this country. He sees the system for what it really is for the most part, but where he rejects its values and mores on many issues, when it comes to women he seems to take his guidelines from the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Certain black men are maintaining that they have been castrated by society but that Black women somehow escaped the persecution and even contributed to this emasculation. Let me state here and now that black women in America can justly be described as a “slave of a slave.” …

  Those who are exerting their “manhood” by telling Black women to step back into a domestic, submissive role are assuming a counter-revolutionary position. Black women likewise have been abused by the system and we must begin talking about the elimination of all kinds of oppression. If we are talking about building a strong nation, capable of throwing off the yoke of capitalist oppression, then we are talking about the total involvement of every man, woman, and child, each with a highly developed political consciousness. We need our whole army out there dealing with the enemy and not half an army.

  Frances Beale3

  Black ladies, the last thing we have to worry about is genocide. In fact, we could use a little. Look at what’s happened to us in the last hundred years; we’ve been bravely propagating and all we’ve gotten are a lot of lumps and a bad name. On the other hand, there are people like Glazer and Moynihan carrying on about our matriarchy and inferring that we’ve botched up the job long enough and that if we insist on doing something, confine ourselves to standing behind the man of the family and bringing him up to par…. Anyway, there’s the brother nattering away about how we’ve been lopping off balls long enough, it’s time to stand aside. So you stand there looking as pink and white and helpless as is possible under the circumstances….

  Joanna Clark4

  Though it appears that both men and women live together within the institutions of society, men really define and control the institutions while women live under their rule. The government, army, religion, economy, and family are institutions of the male culture’s colonial rule of the female…. A female culture exists. It is a culture that is subordinated and under male culture’s colonial, imperialist rule all over the world. Underneath the surface of every national, ethnic, or racial culture is the split between the two primary cultures of the world—the female culture and the male culture.

  National cultures vary greatly according to the degree of the suppression of the female culture. The veil and seclusion of women and their almost total segregation in Arab culture makes for differences between them and, for example, Sweden. A Swedish woman may not be able to tolerate the suppressed life of Arab women but she also, if she is sensitive, may not be able to tolerate her suppression as a female in Sweden. Crossing national boundaries often awakens a woman’s understanding of her position in society. We cannot, like James Baldwin, even temporarily escape to Paris or another country from our caste role. It is everywhere—there is no place to escape.

  Fourth World Manifesto,5 January 13, 1971

  THESE ARE ALL AMAZING VOICES AND POINTS OF VIEW. Since I quoted them here, African American literary women such as Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace went on to develop a concept of “womanism,” as another version of feminism, while the glorious Toni Morrison went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  African-, Hispanic-, and Asian American mental health researchers and clinicians such as Drs. Teresa Bernardez, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Lillian Comas-Diaz, Oliva Espin, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Beverly Greene, Leslie Jackson, and Gwendolyn Keita, to name only a few, went on to study and teach feminist psychologies from a woman-of-color and multicultural point of view.

  Although not a mental health professional, bell hooks recognized that feminist liberation movements had “radicalized the notion of mental health.” Given the ravages of racism, sexism, and poverty, she believes that African American women must “purge” themselves of the “poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart.” She calls for “self-healing” and “soul healing.” She sees African American women as “wounded,” isolated, opposed to therapy. hooks writes that “any liberation struggle to end domination is fundamentally about a revolution in mental health.”

  Both Shinoda Bolen and Pinkola Estes write about psychological and “goddess” archetypes in all women and envision women’s spiritual development as crucial for mental health. If God is conceived of as a white man, then all women are in psychological trouble, women of color even more so.

  Interestingly, we have learned a great deal about Asian American and Hispanic American female realities from literary works by Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior), Amy Tan (TheJoy Luck Club), and Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate). Anthologies edited by Sonia Shah (Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire) and by Shamita Das Dasgupta (A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America) are also very useful. The National Research Center on Asian American Mental Health at the University of California at Davis provides an important bibliography of research in this area from about 1990 to 2004.

  In the last thirty-forty years, feminist theorists and clinicians of color have researched and treated women and men of color. They have explored every conceivable issue, ranging from depression, suicide, and eating disorders, to domestic violence and the need for spiritual and religious approaches for women of color.

  For example, we now know that most Native American women suffer all the indignities of entrenched poverty, racism, and sexism—which means they suffer from intense domestic violence, preventable diseases, alcoholism, and so on. They also have access to tribal and spiritual approaches to healing.

  We now also know that many African American women are often the victims of intense family violence, including incest, battering, verbal abuse, and homicide. They suffer from poverty, untreated diseases, low-wage, and dead-end employment. Homicide is one of the leading causes of death for African American women ages 15- to 34. According to one controversial estimate, African American women are battered at a rate of 113/1,000 as compared to 30/1,000 among Americans of European origin. This is only the tip of the iceberg, since many African American women are reluctant to report domestic violence given that the police and criminal justice systems are racially biased.

  Reva L. Heron and Diana P. Jacobs present a detailed discussion of the “coping skills” available to low-income battered and suicidal African American women and recommend programs that teach new coping and problem-solving skills, group therapy, partner conjoint therapy, vocational training, and a host of support services. />
  Diane J. Harris and Sue A. Kuba view eating disorders among women of color as an expression of “internalized oppression” and a response to “conflicting cultural demands for beauty and acceptance.” They find that the highest incidence of eating disorders occurs among African American women between the ages of 45 and 54.

  Hispanic American theorists and clinicians such as Drs. Teresa Bernardez, Lillian Comas-Diaz, and Oliva Espin, among others, have defined both the strengths and the dangers of ethnic, Catholic communities.

  An increasing number of Muslim women currently live in the West. I write about Muslim female psychology in The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom. Psychoanalyst and Arabist Dr. Nancy Kobrin, has also written very important work in this area. In addition to issues of immigration, poverty, and racism, the sexism they face, both within their families and in the larger world, are quite formidable. While many exceptions exist, many Muslim women have not been allowed to develop a sense of “self” or individuality. They often suffer from pathologically low self-esteem; are increasingly expected to veil themselves; are usually forced into arranged marriages; and are, traditionally, the victims of honor killings.

  To the best of my knowledge, as yet no feminist clinical practice has addressed the desperate needs of this particular population.

  I still have no single theory to offer of Third World female psychology in America. No single theory will do descriptive justice to women of African, Latin-American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and native American descent. Furthermore, as a psychologist and feminist, I’m really more interested in exploring the laws of female psychology than in exploring their various exceptions and variations.