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). She is known as a feminist psychologist, and is the author of 14 books, including the best-seller Women and Madness (1972), About Men (1978), With Child: A Diary of Motherhood (1979), Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody (1986), Sacred Bond: the Legacy of Baby M (1988), and the recent publications Woman's Inhumanity to Woman (2002), Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site (2002), The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (2003), The Death of Feminism (2005), and a 25th Anniversary Edition of Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody (2011) with eight new chapters and a new introduction. Her work has been translated into many European languages, as well as into Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
For more than 40 years, Chesler has written on topics such as gender and mental illness, gender bias among mental health professionals, male psychology, the nature of motherhood, divorce and child custody, surrogacy, the legacy of second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, incest, and violence against women.
In the last decade, she has written about academic freedom, free speech, hate speech, new forms of censorship, women's rights, including religious rights, human and civil rights, woman's internalized sexism and consequent inhumanity to woman, jihad, and the dangers of terrorism. 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 antisemitism, and to the abandonment of Muslim women, Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists and human rights activists, as well as religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries.
Read more about Phyllis Chesler: Personal Life, Studies, Activism, and Writings On Islam, List of Books By Phyllis Chesler
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“Goddesses never die. They slip in and out of the world’s cities, in and out of our dreams, century after century, answering to different names, dressed differently, perhaps even disguised, perhaps idle and unemployed, their official altars abandoned, their temples feared or simply forgotten.”
—Phyllis Chesler (b. 1941)