60 Facts About Phyllis Chesler

Phyllis Chesler is a renowned second-wave feminist psychologist and the author of 18 books, including the best-sellers Women and Madness, With Child: A Diary of Motherhood, and An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir.

Phyllis Chesler has written several works on subjects such as anti-Semitism, women in Islam, and honor killings.

Phyllis 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.

Phyllis Chesler was the eldest of three children raised in a working-class Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York.

Phyllis Chesler 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.

Phyllis Chesler attended New Utrecht High School, where she was the editor of the yearbook and of the literary magazine.

Phyllis Chesler won a full scholarship to Bard College, where she met Ali, a Westernized Muslim man from Afghanistan, the son of devout Muslim parents.

Phyllis Chesler obtained an annulment from her first husband and married an Israeli-American, whom she later divorced.

Phyllis Chesler describes their relationship, pregnancy, childbirth, and her first year as a mother in With Child: A Diary of Motherhood.

In 1969, Phyllis Chesler cofounded the Association for Women in Psychology.

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

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

Phyllis 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.

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

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

Phyllis Chesler was a leader in the class action lawsuit against CUNY on behalf of women which took 17 years to be resolved.

Phyllis Chesler prepared a statement on the APA's obligations to women and demanded one million dollars in reparation for the damage psychology had perpetrated against allegedly mentally ill and traumatized women.

In 1977, Phyllis Chesler became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.

Phyllis Chesler worked for the United Nations and coordinated an international feminist conference that took place in Oslo, just prior to the 1980 UN conference on women.

In 1986, Phyllis Chesler co-organized a speakout about mothers losing custody of children at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Also in 1986, Phyllis Chesler co-organized a congressional press briefing in Washington, DC, on mothers and child custody.

In 1987, Phyllis Chesler worked with Mary Beth Whitehead's lawyer Harold Cassidy in the landmark Baby M case, in which the New Jersey Supreme Court declared that surrogacy contracts violated New Jersey law.

Chesler organized demonstrations outside the courthouse, wrote articles, created an alliance of diverse groups, and ultimately documented this struggle and the issues raised by a surrogacy contract custody battle in Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M In 1989, Chesler began publishing in On the Issues magazine and functioned as its Editor-at-Large.

Phyllis Chesler did so for fifteen years until the magazine became an online edition.

Phyllis Chesler's stated goal was to educate the jury and the country about the lives of women in prostitution and the dangerous conditions they routinely face.

Phyllis Chesler wrote about the legal and psychiatric issues raised by the case in The New York Times and St John's Law Review and the Criminal Practice Law Report.

Phyllis Chesler created and participated in Jewish feminist life cycle rituals.

In 1988, Phyllis Chesler was among the women who prayed with a Torah for the first time in an all-female, multi-denominational, non-minyan group at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

In 1989, Phyllis Chesler co-founded the International Committee for Women of the Wall to promote the religious rights of Jewish women in Jerusalem; she became one of the name plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state of Israel on this issue.

Phyllis Chesler published her first dvar Torah in 2000.

Phyllis Chesler has written about the participation of African-American women in the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, and was interviewed on camera in a documentary about Viola Liuzzo, a white female civil rights activist who was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members.

In 1981, Phyllis Chesler organized the first-ever panel on racism, anti-Semitism, and feminism for the National Women's Studies Association in Storrs, Connecticut.

In 2013, Phyllis Chesler was appointed a Fellow of the Middle East Forum.

Robert Seidenberg, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at SUNY, wrote that Phyllis Chesler defined manhood "with a brilliance and erudition equal to the task", describing Phyllis Chesler as men's "Tocqueville".

Phyllis Chesler was one of only a small number of second-wave feminists to focus on motherhood.

In With Child: A Diary of Motherhood, Phyllis Chesler explored the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and the first year of "newborn" motherhood in psychological, spiritual, and mythic terms.

Phyllis Chesler wanted to share the history of her generation of feminists with coming generations and to point to work still left undone.

Phyllis Chesler writes poignantly of the way in which her generation was eerily silent about woman-hating among women, including among feminists.

Phyllis Chesler implores readers to adopt a more global perspective on women's rights.

Phyllis Chesler argues that their desire to avoid being labeled "racists" or "Islamophobes" eventually trumped their concern with women's and human rights in the Third World.

Phyllis Chesler was interviewed about the book in the Chicago Tribune.

In 2006, Phyllis Chesler participated at the First Muslim Dissident Conference in St Petersburg, Florida, which she covered for the Times of London.

Phyllis Chesler discusses topics such as prolonged litigation, joint custody, court enabled incest, brainwashing, kidnapping, gay and lesbian custody, fathers' rights groups, and international child custody laws.

The book uses material from diaries, letters, and interviews spanning a fifty-year period to describe this ill-fated relationship and the experiences that Phyllis Chesler believes forged her feminism.

Simultaneously, Phyllis Chesler holds Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism responsible for failing to abolish or to even try to abolish honor killings and femicides.

The "crimes" Phyllis Chesler cites that have resulted in honor killing include wanting to marry the "wrong" man in terms of caste, class, or religious sect, or leaving one's religion.

Phyllis Chesler's memoir is a cautionary tale for today's social activists, who tend to be largely ignorant of the disappeared history of the woman's movement and are thus repeating some of its mistakes.

Phyllis Chesler profiles the way in which Wuornos is a unique serial killer.

On December 14,2005, Phyllis Chesler delivered a presentation before a United States Senate committee entitled, "Gender Apartheid in Iran and the Muslim World".

Phyllis Chesler called for the US government to oppose what she described as "Islamic gender apartheid", and to support the rights of women living in fundamentalist Islamic regimes.

Phyllis Chesler has cited Bat Ye'or's Eurabia thesis as a warning to the West, and has been described as part of the counter-jihad movement.

Phyllis Chesler published four studies about honor killings in the American journal Middle East Quarterly in 2009,2010,2012 and 2015.

Phyllis Chesler identified the first group as consisting of daughters with an average age of seventeen who were killed by their families, and the second group as consisting of women with an average age of thirty-six.

Phyllis Chesler argues that honor killings differ qualitatively from Western domestic femicide.

Phyllis Chesler's position is that perpetrators of domestically violent femicide are regarded as criminals in the west, but that the same stigma does not attach to honor killings in other societies.

In 2010, Phyllis Chesler published an essay in Middle East Quarterly calling for the burqa to be banned in western countries.

Phyllis Chesler argued in defense of this position that despite the Qur'an's command to both men and women to dress "modestly", several Muslim-majority countries have, in the past, banned the full burqa or niqab.

Phyllis Chesler's focus has mainly been on Western countries, but with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, and gender apartheid, and the Islamist persecution of women and infidels, Chesler began to explore similar themes in Muslim-majority countries.

In recent years, Phyllis Chesler has sparked controversy, both for her work on honor-based violence, including honor killing, and for her outspoken criticism of anti-Jewish racism.

The controversy was written about widely on social media, and Dr Phyllis Chesler was almost immediately invited by a group of grassroots activists at University College London to address a conference at that institution in November 2017.