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).

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 1969, Chesler cofounded the Association for Women in Psychology.

Chesler taught one of the first Women's Studies classes in the U.S. at Richmond College (which later merged with Staten Island Community College to form the College of Staten Island) in New York City during the 1969–1970 school year.

She turned the Women's Studies course into a minor and then a major at the university.

She is a renowned second-wave feminist psychologist and the author of 18 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 was 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 Hebrew, 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 Ein 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.

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".

Chesler has been consulted by lawyers, psychologists and psychiatrists on diverse subjects including sex between patient and therapist, rape, incest, domestic violence, custody, honor killings, and the mistreatment of women in jails and in psychiatric institutions.

For many years she maintained a small psychotherapy practice and in 1997 taught a course in Forensic Psychology at John Jay College.

In 1997, she was the sole expert witness in a class action lawsuit in Nebraska on behalf of female psychiatric patients who had been sexually, physically, medically, and psychologically abused.

In the 1998 edition, her son wrote the preface to the book.

In 1998, she taught a course in Advanced Psychology and Women's Studies at Brandeis University.

From 2008 to 2012, Chesler submitted courtroom affidavits in cases where girls and women have fled being honor killed and applied for asylum in America.

Chesler is considered a radical feminist and a second wave feminist leader.

Chesler believes that men can and should be feminists, and she wrote in her book Letters to a Young Feminist that she envisions her heirs as both women and men.

Chesler has studied male psychology and published a book on the subject (About Men) which discussed the father-son, mother-son, and brother-brother relationships; the book also tried to understand male conformity, how and why men obeyed the orders of male tyrants, and what kind of men resisted doing so.