Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  Almost overnight, women organized demonstrations, legal actions, bail funds, abortion services, wage strikes, national and international meetings, caucases, magazines, pamphlets, communes, disputes, rock bands, theater groups, women’s studies programs, self-defense programs, all-female dances, and lesbian and women’s centers in every major American city. For those women involved, the women’s movement, to a greater or lesser extent, began to vie with, supplant, or shore up the institutions of marriage, love, and psychotherapy. Up to a point, women’s liberation was more “therapeutic” than either marriage or psychotherapy: it made women happier, angrier, more confident, more adventurous, more moral—and it produced a range of behavioral changes.

  Some women quit their jobs and refused to be involved in alienated and/or oppressive labor, others began job training, college or graduate school, and planned careers seriously, for the first time. It is important to note that only those who could afford to do so—both financially and psychologically—did this. Most women, especially those over thirty with children, cannot just quit their jobs as mothers, housekeepers, factory worker, and secretaries: they can only demand wages, wage increases, and better working conditions.

  Some women started living together; some began living alone for the first time. Some women insisted that their husbands share child care and housework equally; others organized all-female cooperatives for this purpose. Some women had abortions; others refused them, where they might not have done so before. Some women left their husbands; others began to live with a man, feeling somehow at less of a psychological disadvantage than before. Some women refused “alimony”; others insisted on it as back pay and as reparations. Some women withdrew from drugs; others turned to them—out of curiosity and despair. Many women stopped walking down city streets with their eyes averted, stopped not “hearing,” stopped not “responding,” or stopped responding in female ways to male verbal abuse. Some women found that, the stronger they grew and the more they understood, the more they “needed” a man or a monogamous “partner,” either because they felt they could begin to hold their own in such a relationship or because they feared what they knew, and needed the blind comfort of traditional role-playing—just one more time. Their natures and conditioning were too strong and the woman’s movement still too weak to help them grow beyond a certain point.

  Many women started reading political and scientific books as passionately as they read novels: somehow, the glaze of “stupidity” that films over understanding—when understanding understands that, even if it understood, it could never inherit the castle and the kingdom—tentatively began to lift. The common female (and black) attitude of boredom and failure in white male-dominated and sexually integrated classrooms began to shift to curiosity and success. Within a small group, or at a woman’s conference, women stopped giggling, “losing,” and competing with each other for male attention and approval. There were no sexual distractions either: most women weren’t “attracted” to each other. Many women found they could think, found that it gave them pleasure, realized that their thinking ability was needed by others.

  Some women stopped going to beauty parlors, stopped wearing make-up, stopped shopping (or shopping frequently) for “sexy” or “fashionable” clothes. Women began to value their time: they needed fewer adornments to “make up” for being female. As a woman, I do not like puritanism—in thought or dress. However, as a woman, I cannot put my heart into the elite frivolity of expensive or frequently changed costumes—when such costumes are not only not available to all people but, more important, seem to signify a growing passivity and dependence in men as well as women. The fact that American men are being advertised into an involvement with cosmetics and fashions is not as much a sign of sexual equality as it is of capitalist market-seeking and greed. Perhaps the frantic costume changes from one historical period to another signify some collective desire to find the “path not taken.” It is, however, politically naive to think that poverty, racism, sexism or pollution in America will be “solved” if women will only stop conspicuously consuming. The military-industrial and political complex in Washington and Detroit are far more crucial to such solutions than are the clothing, cosmetics, and detergent industries. Further, it is far easier for women who can’t afford to “buy,” to rationalize “not buying” into a form of power. But this is a cultural and moral gesture—not an economic boycott. Fighting for the right to buy, or stealing if employment is denied, are far more commonly pursued paths of action for powerless groups.

  Some women affirmed, discovered, or began to explore their bisexuality or lesbianism. Some women remained celibate for long periods without any noticeable anxiety or suffering. Others felt that it was important to them to have both warmth and sexual intimacy on a frequent basis: either casually or non-casually, with other women, or with men. Some women masturbated to orgasm for the first time, or for the first time without guilt. Some women decided to have a child, or another child; others decided firmly against ever doing so.

  What have contemporary American psychologists and psychiatrists thought and felt about feminism? How have they behaved toward feminism—as an ideology, as a movement, and as something that has been influencing their female patients? Publicly, they have behaved like any other group: they have engaged in nervous laughter, purposeful misunderstanding, hairsplitting, malicious cruelty, misguided sympathy, boredom, hostility, condescension, and commercial and academic capitalism.*

  Some clinicians have been genuinely curious, sympathetic, and supportive. A minority have joined the women’s movement. Several professional journals have devoted “special issues” to women—as a newly discovered but exotic minority-majority group. The Radial Therapist, a collective “underground” journal, has published articles about women and sexism in each of its issues. Groups of women psychologists, therapists, and patients or clients have organized referral lists to feminist therapists. As yet, no one has presented a new theory of human personality based on feminist ideologies—nor has anyone psychoanalyzed feminism.

  Many male psychologists who are verbally “sympathetic” to feminism still call their middle-aged female patients “girls”; still describe them in terms of how “attractive” they are; and, of course, still relate to wives or girl friends in non-reciprocally dependent ways. Many are sympathetic to feminism because they are sexually “attracted” to feminists, whom they see as more “interesting” than their wives.

  Most psychiatrists publicly deny the existence of sex-typed slave labor in state and county hospitals; minimize the effect of medical and psychological “experiments” on their patients; tell “dirty jokes” at their staff meetings; and deride feminist grievances. They are more willing to pity women than to respect them; more comfortable with unhappy women than with angry women.

  Most male and female clinicians are emotionally and financially bound by the romance of the bourgeois family. Few middle-aged clinicians of either sex have any class consciousness. At a recent professional meeting, one female clinician, in a nostalgic description of pre-World War II Vienna, recalled how “really liberated” all the Viennese women were. I asked her whether poor and uneducated women in Vienna were also “liberated.” (I personally would not define Freud’s wealthy Dutiful Daughters as “liberated” but as “privileged.”) She answered that she really hadn’t thought of it “in those terms.” Clinicians seem to dislike and pity the paranoia and anger of feminists: slyly, confidently, they want to know why are they so “nervous” about being found sexually attractive by “poor” Tom, Dick, or Harry? Why are they so angry at verbal abuse in the streets? (The lower classes have always been rowdy, excitingly so, come to think of it—but the police will always be able to handle the poor if they get too out of control.) Don’t these suddenly complaining women “unconsciously” invite harassment or rape, and don’t they “unconsciously” enjoy it? Furthermore, isn’t the point of women’s liberation the liberation of men too, and not, heaven forbid, female power? Isn’t capitalis
m the real enemy and feminism divisive and/or the “pouting” of spoiled white middle-class women? My feelings about this question are: first, that it is usually asked without information, seriousness, or respect; second, that sexism preceded capitalism and colonialism and may indeed have led to it; and, third, that ridicule and misunderstanding are forms of violence that must be avoided as much as possible—especially by our healers and secular priests.

  Most contemporary clinicians are as confused about and hostile to feminism as most people are—and I am talking only about those clinicians who are interested enough to attend panels about female psychology and feminism or to publish on the subject. For years in the early 1970s, most women clinicians delivered impassioned speeches about the necessity and desirability of combining motherhood and professional careers—and they did so even if another topic was specifically being explored. Their male colleagues usually remained safely silent during this genteel Saturday night brawl. The women professionals first insisted they have no political ax to grind—and then quickly offered their political credentials: the existence of their own two or three children. Such offerings would be acceptable to me if we lived in a female-dominated culture, or in a culture that did not, rather dubiously “reward” women for breeding—more than for other activities.

  After defending the motherhood faith, the convention clinicians usually took a breath and launched into a tirade against the “terrible and damaging mothers” their patients have had—those very same “mothers” whom feminists are apparently trying to sneak off the hook of maternal responsibility! They usually concluded their speeches with a description of their male patients in Pieta-like tones—to the approval of their male colleagues, who, in turn, were now not expected to fire them from their jobs or exclude them from their communication networks. No need to: such women are maternal and feminine, and not angry man-haters like “the others.”

  Female clinicians are generally as ambivalent about women as all other women are. The specifically painful price they’ve had to pay for even limited “success” outside the home will not allow them to quickly envision radical definitions of self. One successful woman academic told me, sotto voce, “Phyllis, of course it’s conditioning, but conditioning works—and after such terrible conditioning, most women are in terrible condition. Would you want to work with them? More power to you for trying, but I just can’t.”

  Some clinicians at professional panels have yelled at feminist participants, often rather hysterically and brutally. They have called them everything from neurotic and criminal to selfish. Often, they want the feminists present to talk more about how sexism has hurt men than about how it has hurt women. I asked a black male psychologist at one of these meetings whether he thought a meeting about black power, equality, and self-determination should dwell overlong, and with great clucking sympathy, on how racism has hurt white racists. He laughed.

  What I am saying is that even the most sympathetic male professionals behave like patriarchal men.

  THE INTERVIEWS

  What did it mean to be a Second Wave feminist in America? Why did we seek therapy and why were we psychiatrically hospitalized? What were our lives like before we became feminists or therapy patients, and how have they changed since?

  I spoke to twenty-six feminists, including myself, “officially.” Their ages ranged from seventeen to fifty-eight: sixty-eight percent of the women were between twenty and thirty years old; sixty-one percent were either only or oldest children; ninety percent were white Americans. One woman had some high school experience, seven women had some college experience, twelve women had B. A. degrees, and six women had attended or completed graduate school. Four of the women were unemployed and living on welfare, four of the women were unsalaried students, four of the women were salaried within the woman’s movement at minimum wage levels, two of the women were clerical workers, and twelve of the women were employed in professional capacities, for example, as teachers, journalists, or social workers.

  Twenty-one of the women considered themselves feminists of about two years’ duration. Five women had a more recent commitment. Three women were heterosexually married, six women were divorced, thirteen women were legally single and living alone, three women were living in a woman’s collective, and one woman was living with a man. Seven of the women were lesbians.

  Twenty-five of the women had been (or still were) involved in private therapy, for a total group average of forty-one months (see Table 3). Feminists remained in treatment with male therapists for about thirty-one months and with female therapists for about nineteen months. Seven of the feminists, five of whom were also lesbians, had been psychiatrically incarcerated. Their average length of hospital stay was 158 days.

  With few exceptions, all the feminists grew up in families where sex roles, however they were defined, were rigidly defined; in families where most mothers stayed at home for child care and domestic purposes—at least during their daughter’s first five years of life; in families where menstruation was somehow shameful and virginity was not; in families where, no matter what else was allowed or encouraged, love, marriage, and motherhood were touted as the most important goals of female life. Most of the women had “troubled” relationships with their mothers, and of course, with developing traits such as confidence, a sense of self, tenaciousness, initiative, sexuality, a wide range of interests, a deep and preferred enjoyment of other women and “younger” men, and an ability to say no to what they didn’t initiate or choose. Most of the women had “trouble” with work—with the getting and keeping of “jobs.” Such “trouble” often increased after they became feminists—whether their jobs were as housewives and mothers, students, feminists, or bourgeois professionals. Awareness doesn’t lead to instant or easy happiness. It may lead to the ability to make choices, which is one aspect of wisdom.

  ALICE: You won’t believe this, well, maybe you will—but when I went to my first department meeting, I was the only woman there. And the men assumed, they just assumed, that I’d take the “minutes.” I walked out—and told them I wouldn’t be bringing back any coffee for them either. After that, I developed a reputation for being “difficult” and “paranoid.” The secretaries, of course, preferred working for men. They were resigned to it, used to it—they might get flirted with or married. They didn’t like working for a woman—and if my male colleagues saw me dictating a letter they’d say, “Oh ho! Caught you in the act, oppressing a sister, are you now?” But they didn’t stop dictating letters, and I was responsible for as much on the job as they were—and of course, I was getting paid less money and couldn’t really “fraternize” to make up for it. I could have had an affair with one man—and would have been somewhat protected by him—as his property. I could have flirted more to find out things, or acted as if it didn’t matter in order to find out things; I could have played the usual game of token woman who doesn’t like other women. I did none of these things—and everything was an uphill fight, just everything. And I had no wife to go home to at night to comfort me. I only had a boy friend, who really needed and thought he needed comforting—and didn’t know how to comfort in return without feeling “castrated” and my first CR group thought I was too successful and therefore a “male-identified” woman and wouldn’t comfort or support me either. You get real cooled out if you’re an “achievement”-oriented woman. No matter how high a price you pay, you’re alone when you get anywhere—in a way that no man ever has to be.

  DEIRDRE: I had a really good woman analyst. I thought I had become stronger and more sure of myself. I felt I didn’t have to play any games with men—and I didn’t believe I was picking the sadists any more. So, I got pregnant—a woman’s thing to do—no? And my boy friend began having temper-tantrums, affairs, and withdrawing from me. Now we had talked it all out before—about our having a child—and here he was behaving just like a trapped animal. And I had too much of a sense of self to do the usual crap—cry, beg, promise, lie. So I left him. I was very bitter. I felt
that no matter how hard women and men tried to have a relationship, no matter how unique and exceptional they were, at some crucial pressure point, societal training of dominance-submission will rise to the surface. And men will be absolutely unyielding unless the woman plays her submissive role. I became so frightened of what would happen to me—a bitter woman alone, totally responsible for a baby, so frightened when I realized how universal this situation is for women—whether men are legally or economically there or not—that I frightened the child to death—I miscarried. I think it was then that I became a feminist.

  Most of the feminists described certain middle-class and existential problems that neither individual therapists nor isolated consciousness-raising groups had any control over—in terms of causing or “curing.” The groups, however, were generally more aware that the problems were real, external, and could not be solved by the individual woman alone.

  MARILYN: In a lot of ways, he [my therapist] has reassured me about getting pleasure from sex just for the sake of it. He felt outraged on my behalf when I was with a guy who wouldn’t sleep with me because he thought I treated him like a sex object. In a sense, he was right, I didn’t love him or want to marry him, but I did want to sleep with him…. When he turned me down I had this incredible experience of wow, what’s happening! I felt guilty about treating him like an object, and I was hurt too. But dig it: this guy stopped in the middle of making love. He didn’t let me get away with anything.