By Phyllis Chesler
This is an excerpt from my nineteenth book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist (2018). It is long out of print and yet, as I sit here editing Volume One of my diaries (1960 – 1970), I think it’s time to resurrect some of this material for those who have never read it and who now have no access to it–except via an audiobook read by me.
The book was sabotaged in so many ways–some more humorous, some more
terrifying than others. But this is one of the chapters about which so many feminists thanked me for having put it all into psychological perspective–all our trashing, slanders, personal and political betrayals, thefts, revising of our history, erasing so many women out of that history by other feminists.
And today is a day that Heaven has left me off the hook. And this is a year in which, more and more, I’ve given up jumping on breaking news, hunting for clickbait based on increasingly violent and outraged rhetoric, and on reading explosive exposes day after day. I can no longer easily bear material so quickly here and just as quickly gone–nothing that is meant to last for all time.
I should get this book back into print as well as another book of mine, long out of print but still perilously up to date: The Death of Feminism (2025).
Do let me know what you think about this material.
Our Sorely Afflicted Feminist Geniuses
From the time I was twenty-seven years old, in 1967, I shared my ideas mainly with women, rarely with men. This was a complete turnaround, since for most of my life I had primarily read works by men, studied with male professors, worked for men, and fallen in love only with men.
Not talking to men was a profound loss, but few men were interested in feminism—and I was consumed by it.
Turning to women to discuss my most important ideas was psychologically and intellectually revolutionary. It was also paradise. For many of us rebellious and ambitious daughters, the wounds of maternal disapproval were temporarily healed.
However, Paradise inevitably is always followed by the Fall.
Only now, looking back, do I remember how much of the early years of second-wave feminism was painful.
Individual petty jealousies and leaderless group bullying were frightening and ugly. “Mean girls” envied and destroyed excellence and talent; in short, they ate their most gifted leaders.
Feminists who had left the Left brought with them its tactics of intimidation and interrogation.
Many radical lesbians were lesbian supremacists who demanded primacy in terms of victimhood. Some also outed other women in cruel and public ways.
Thus, right at the beginning of paradise, trouble rumbled both overhead and beneath our feet. Trouble drove many a good feminist far, far away, but many of us who could still taste paradise on our tongues remained for the duration.
The whole chapter is here
First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter
