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Women and Madness QUOTES

Women and Madness QUOTES

1 " Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

2 " For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

3 " Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

4 " Mary, mother of Jesus, pays for her maternity by giving up her body, almost entirely: she foregoes both (hetero) sexual pleasure (Christ's birth is a virgin and "spiritual" birth) and physical prowess. She has no direct worldly power but, like her crucified son, is easily identified with by many people, especially women, as a powerless figure. Mary symbolizes power achieved through receptivity, compassion, and a uterus. (There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a consciously willed "receptivity" to the universe; on the contrary, it is highly desirable, and should certainly include "receptivity" to many things other than holy sperm and suffering.) "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

5 " Once Lola Pierotti earned $24,000 a year and worked long hours as an administrative assistant on Capitol Hill. Now she works longer hours and has even more responsibility- but no pay. What happened? Was she demoted? No, she just married the boss. Her bridegroom, of four years this month, was the senior Republican Senator from Vermont- George D. Aiken. "All he expects of me is that I drive his car, cook his meals, do his laundry and run his office," she enumerated, with a grin. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

6 " sister-victims of the patriarchy. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

7 " subjection of the wife to the husband’s will.” Her “therapy” consisted of imprisonment and domestic servitude "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

8 " Battering, drunken husbands had their wives psychiatrically imprisoned as a way of continuing to batter them; husbands also had their wives imprisoned in order to live or marry with other women. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

9 " When fathers contested custody, even of infants, “good enough” mothers would consistently lose children due to (false) allegations of mental illness or sexual promiscuity. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

10 " Most women are trained to put their own needs second, the needs of any man—including a violent man—first. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

11 " are psychopaths. They form cults around themselves, isolate cult members from their friends and family, teach that “sexual encounters” with the leader are both an honor and an occasion for spiritual enlightenment. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

12 " Even if a psychoanalytic understanding of one’s life is potentially liberating—and I think it may be—psychoanalytic therapy, by itself, cannot overcome trauma, or human nature. Nor can psychological healing take place in isolation. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

13 " most girls and boys continue to experience childhood in father-dominated, father-absent, and/or mother-blaming families. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

14 " cumulative effect of being forced to lead circumscribed lives is toxic. The psychic toll is measured in anxiety, depression, phobias, suicide attempts, eating disorders, and such stress-related illnesses as addictions, alcoholism, high blood pressure, and heart disease "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

15 " still behave as if they’ve been “colonized. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

16 " Colonization” exists when the colonized has valuable natural resources that are used to enrich the colonizer, but not the colonized: when the colonized does the colonizer’s work, but earns little of the colonizer’s money; when the colonized try to imitate or please the colonizer, and truly believe that the colonizer is, by nature, superior/inferior, and that the colonized cannot exist without her colonizer. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

17 " Women who have been repeatedly raped in childhood—often by authority figures in their own families—are traumatized human beings; as such, they are often diagnosed as borderline personalities. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

18 " rarely treated as the torture victims they really are. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

19 " given how insurance and drug companies, managed care and government spending cuts have made quality psychotherapy totally out of reach for most people. This means that just when we know what to do for the victims of trauma, there are very few teaching hospitals and clinics that treat poor women in feminist ways. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness

20 " Medication by itself is never enough. Women who are clinically depressed or anxious also need access to feminist information and support. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Women and Madness