Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  She thought she was gonna come here and mess me up—’cause she wanted me to get sick.

  Only once I had a fight with him. He called the cops and they thought it was just a family argument. Then my husband called them on the side and told them I had been a mental case and all that. Bellevue again.

  He [my husband] thought I wouldn’t let him leave me but he found out different when I changed the lock on the door. My current boy friend lives across the street. He’s a very happy-go-lucky man. He’ll say all of a sudden, “Let’s go to a movie, you don’t have to cook.” I’d say, “Gee, that’s nice, let’s go!”

  LaVerne is in her mid-twenties. She is a part-time college student and secretary. She talks as fast as I do, and sometimes exceeds me in manic gusto. She is very intelligent and twice as explosive. She has been in and out of private therapy for about six years and has been hospitalized three times.

  PHYLLIS: Why did you go to a mental asylum?

  LAVERNE: The first time, it was after a party. I came home very upset and, honey, I had a hallucination you wouldn’t believe. I was not the Virgin Mary, but another Virgin Mary. I had three climaxes in a row and gave birth to another Jesus—the black Christ. It was a virgin birth. It was a virgin birth because I wasn’t having sex with anybody. But he wasn’t around. The child was gone. Now, the mother got to get herself together. If he is gone, I’ve done something wrong. I felt I better do something if I am a mother of Christ so I took a bath.

  Then I made a lot of phone calls. I called Rockefeller because I wanted some things done about black-white relations. I wanted black people to love themselves. I knew, but they didn’t. There was so much promiscuity around—and I mean that. By the time I called Rockefeller I calmed down. I was going to sleep. But my mother started calling neighbors because she was afraid of me. She was always afraid of me. She’s half white and thinks she’s better than me. She’s a fucking whore—yes! She’s had boy friends who’ve felt me up—and she just sits there and denies it. But now she called the neighbors in to sit with her all night.

  Then I started hallucinating again. I thought people were trying to get through the walls at me—oh, shit.

  Then I wanted to be like an American Indian—instincts, instincts is where it’s at. So I turned up the record player and started dancing around the house. And I pulled up the shades—I wanted everyone to see me. My mother, she locks doors. I took a hammer very calmly and broke the locks on my bedroom, my mother’s, my brother’s, and the guest room. I was dancing around—people were looking in. “Hi, kids, how’rya doing?” I told them.

  Then the cops came in. They were obviously afraid of me. “What are you afraid of?” I said, “You want some Kool-Aid?” One cop said, “Oh, God,” and I said, “What are you saying, that’s my Father because I gave birth to another Christ child.” But I’m not going to tell them about the Christ because they’ll think I’m nuts, and I’m not too sure about that scene myself so I’m going to be real cool.

  They [the cops] asked who was responsible for me. “My mother,” I said. But she was already at work. So they got the next-door neighbor. I held on to her. I was afraid, I was scared, and I asked her, “Please don’t leave me, they’re gonna hurt me.” But she pulled away from me. Oh, I didn’t want to go to a hospital. I know what they do to you there.

  PHYLLIS: What happened at the hospital?

  LAVERNE: They stuck me with needles. They feed you—force feeding, or you won’t get out. They put me in a strait jacket. They wouldn’t let me talk to a psychiatrist. Then when I did, I told him about getting too much medication, and I cried, so they gave me more medicine because I was upset.

  PHYLLIS: What kind of medicine did you get?

  LAVERNE: Thorazine, but that made me break out so they gave me something else, but I have a sinus condition so they gave me stellazine, which was the nicest thing but it wasn’t strong enough, so they gave me thorazine again.

  PHYLLIS: Did they give you shock therapy?

  LAVERNE: Oh no. I said if they ever did I would have intercourse with the doctors, spit out my food. Shock therapy is a dangerous thing. I saw what happens—you start forgetting things—I’ve spoken to patients. And you get depressed again anyway.

  After ninety days they can’t keep you. Anyway, I quieted down and never yelled and never said anything. The patients said, “You want to get out—this is what you do,” and so I did it. I helped the nurses and told them how cute they were. I washed the floors. I never washed a floor in my life before.

  PHYLLIS: How did you get into the hospital the second time?

  LAVERNE: I got married, right! and I was working to send him through school. He’d come home at night and tell me about the pretty girls he’d seen. “You’re so ugly without make-up, God, are you ugly,” he’d tell me. “Your breasts are too small.” But he wouldn’t talk to me—oh no! He’d just wanna screw, turn over, and go to sleep.

  Then we’re at a party and I heard him talking to another guy. He said I was cute but stupid. “So whadya want her for, man—pussy?” “Yeah,” he answers. Oh, shit! Since I’m thirteen years old—and he still just wants pussy! I wanted to get a gun and kill him, but I couldn’t get a gun so easy. My brother talked me into taking a job instead, working with children. Well, I left him [my husband] and went back to live with my mother—and we don’t get along, right? So we had a fight—ahh, she doesn’t love me. She told me I was too stupid to go to college.

  She let me just rot in the hospital that first time, she’s a fuckin’ whore, that’s what I told her, that always gets to her. So she put me in the hospital again. She called her boy friend over and he beat me up because I had disrespect for my mother. “You son of a bitch, you try to put me in the hospital, I’ll kill you.” I tried to call my therapist but he punched me to the floor each time. They tied me down and put me in a strait jacket.

  At the hospital—questions! “What’s the matter?” the psychiatrist wants to know. “Wars stink. Prostitution stinks. You stink.” “I think we’re gonna have to keep you,” he says. “No foolin’!” This time I had a beautiful woman doctor from Central America, and she really helped me get out.

  They gave me a lot of psychological tests and, you know, I came out masculine. What does that mean? Like on one test they ask: do you want to be married and happy or rich and single? “Oh, shit! Rich and single,” I said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FEMINISTS

  Why didn’t our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers tell us what battle it was we lost, or never fought, so that we would understand how total was our defeat, and that religion and madness and frigidity were how we mourned it?

  Why were our mothers so silent about rape and incest and prostitution and their own lack of pleasure? Why, when they had so many words, did they not name our heroines for us, tell us about feminists and suffragists and Amazons and great-mothers?

  I wish woman to live first for God’s sake. Then she will not make an imperfect man her god, and thus sink to idolatry. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in Man embodied, she will know how to live and be worthy of being loved….

  Woman, self-centered, would never be absorbed by any relation; it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgar error that love—a love—to woman is her whole existence; she also is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy. Would she but assume her inheritance, Mary would not be the only virgin mother….

  Margaret Fuller1

  But early I perceived that men never in any extreme of despair wished to be women. On the contrary, they were ever ready to taunt one another at any sign of weakness with,

  “Art thou not like the women, who—” The passage ends various ways, according to the occasion and rhetoric of the speaker. When they admired any woman, they were inclined to speak of her as “above her sex.” Silently I observed this, and feared it argued a rooted skepticism which for ages had been fastening
on the heart and which only an age of miracles could eradicate. Ever I have been treated with great sincerity; and I look upon it as a signal instance of this, that an intimate friend of the other sex said in a fervent moment that I “deserved in some star to be a man.” He was much surprised when I disclosed my faith that the feminine side, the side of love, of beauty, of holiness, was now to have its full chance, and that if either were better, it was better now to be a woman; for even the slightest achievement of good was furthering an especial work of our time. He smiled incredulously. “She makes the best she can of it,” thought he. “Let Jews believe the pride of Jewry, but I am of the better sort, and know better.”

  Margaret Fuller2

  Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sell herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution…. It is conceded that woman is being reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex…. “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute,” says Havelock Ellis, “is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.”

  Emma Goldman3

  I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that cannot blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman’s greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes. Are we, then, to believe that two errors will make a right? Are we to assume that the poison already inherent in politics will be decreased, if women were to enter the political arena? The most ardent suffragists would hardly maintain such a folly.

  Emma Goldman4

  The binding force in this collective is feminism … we act as mutual role-models for each other—that is, role-models as feminist professionals—something which we all find hard to come by in our everyday work settings. We are able to identify with each other’s successes: “If good things can happen to this woman in the male-dominated world … then perhaps there’s hope for me.” … The collective acts as a supportive system during individual crises and uncertainties … we provide for each other those vital, informal channels of communication which are used so regularly by male professionals, and from which they so systematically exclude their female colleagues. Men will meet and exchange valuable information over dinner or coffee—but when a woman colleague is “lucky” enough to be included (this once happened to one of our members) they’re apt to say “Pardon us for talking shop” and immediately start talking non-professional trivialities … the collective has provided for all of us a place where we feel comfortable to be ourselves—by this I mean a place where we are not castigated as being “aggressive,” for taking over, being articulate, disagreeing, confronting. We really value each other’s competence….

  The Chicago Women in Psychology Collective

  WHY DID FEMINISM RESURFACE IN AMERICA? Why did so dangerous an idea as female humanity, or equality, or supremacy, or rights, surface as a potentially mass movement? Is modern feminism essentially a byproduct of certain changes in material reality such as birth control technology and planetary overpopulation? Is modern feminism one of many survival-responses to the changing nature and/or diminishing availability of agricultural and industrial work, at a time when, barring warfare, starvation, and ecological disasters, more people are living longer? This might explain why women are being encouraged or even forced to talk about “sharing” their spheres of domesticity and emotionality with men: the work for which men have been made into “men” and women into “women” is disappearing.

  To the extent to which feminism is conceived of as a collective rather than an individualist ideology; to the extent to which it is tribal and pleasure-oriented, rather than unique and heroically oriented—it is feared as “barbaric,” or “fascistic,” by women as well as men. Certainly I fear it, if the “rituals” are anything less than bold and true, if the rituals impose mediocrity and conformity, rather than unique and diverse deeds and works of the imagination.

  Is the American feminist movement a “return of the repressed”: is it an old religion, an old polity, whose time has mysteriously come round again? Or is it a genuinely new mythology, technologically rendered, whose consequences are unforeseen? Will the structures of human psychology remain unchanged if women should “win” the sex war—should directly control the means of production and reproduction? Or if men should become social and biological mothers? Or if women ceased being the psycho-biological representations of birth—and, consequently, of death? Or if women became biological mothers and social fathers? Or if gender ceased to exist as a significant, identifying dimension?

  Can women “win” the sex war, or banish such a war entirely, without becoming the dominant sex? If women were to dominate, would biological men then be as oppressed as biological women have been—and if so, would this matter to women? There must be some good or at least some overwhelming reasons why the injustice of female oppression has never mattered enough to men for them to banish it.

  Is the sex war at the root of other major evils such as race and class slavery, capitalism, puritanism, imperialism, and warfare? And if so, can such evils be exiled from the mass human condition forever by any but a non-violent and feminist method? (What is a feminist method?) Given our conditioning as women, can we ever become feminist revolutionaries (or human beings), without becoming lesbians? As women, can we wage any sort of revolution if we are psychosexually bound to men or marriage or full-time child care? Many men can scarcely be revolutionaries under such conditions, even though their relationship to women, marriage, and child care is a far less committed one. But why even wage a struggle, if its goals are simply revenge or power? What if we “won” and became as removed from emotion and sexuality as so many men are?

  With great intensity, women in groups are asking these and many other questions. It was in “consciousness-raising” groups that women began to break the twentieth-century silence between mothers and daughters. The small group provided a way and a place for women to name their common plight. It also served as a model of cooperative society, and extended family, especially for women whose experience with extended families or female kinship and living arrangements (or with genuine cooperativeness) was minimal.

  Relatively privileged white middle-class women discovered that privilege was not freedom; that love was a foreign country with few survivors; and that the female body was as colonized as any ghetto or Third World country. They also discovered that neither men nor women liked women, especially strong or happy women. A discontented, complaining, “weak” woman, although disliked, is far more acceptable than a contented and/or powerful woman—who is experienced as dangerous, and is ostracized and “killed” far more quickly and inevitably than her male counterpart especially if she is in any way sexually knowledgeable, independent, or “aggressive.”

  Women in small feminist groups also talked, often endlessly, about sexual orgasms. Their tones were informative, comic, relieved, angry, and joyful—as they began to reclaim their bodies. Women’s acceptance and enjoyment of their bodies is an absolute prerequisite for their self-development: and I am not talking abou
t an American mechanistic “sexual sell,” or about any type of male-originated or fantasied group or “free” sex. I suppose that women will only be able to experience their sexuality fully when their mothers have controlled the means of production and reproduction.

  This “talking about orgasms,” which was initially derided as bourgeois self-indulgence and “racist,” actually constitutes a valid example of “giving” women what they “need” before, or as a way of talking “politics.” (It goes without saying that neither female sexual orgasms nor ghetto breakfast programs alone, in themselves, are anything more than first but necessary steps in the right direction.) But I think that it was this “talking about orgasms,” together with the expression of anger in an atmosphere of female approval, that led to whatever changes occurred in women.

  And the changes occurred quickly, in an exhilarating and suspiciously instant, prefabricated way. For a while, it seemed as if some apocalypse was about to happen, as if all wrongs would be righted, and the gates of paradise forced open by reason and sorority. It took awhile before American women were directly introduced, politically, to the twentieth century; awhile before we realized the extent to which publicity, like all advertising, is a substitute for change, a compromise offering, instead of something of value; awhile before we understood how truly divided we were, how deep our female conditioning was, and how difficult it would be to change it. Until then—the events were dizzying, contradictory, and absolutely uncorrupted.