The demand drew attention, both positive and negative. She and her colleagues then attended the American Psychology Association's (APA) annual meeting in 1970 and she made a controversial demand at the Town Hall meeting: they asked for one million dollars in reparations for the damage psychology had perpetrated on women. Some time in 1969, before or after completing her PhD, Chesler was among the founding members of the Association for Women in Psychology. In fact, much of what Chesler has learned may be traced to the power of collective actions and "what collective consciousness raising accomplish for the soul, for the mind."
She described them as providing "the relief, the blinding, sweet relief of confirmation that one's self is not crazy, or ugly, or wrong, or irrational or overreacting." Discovering the political and structural origins and the commonality of problems women experienced proved to be immensely therapeutic. Chesler commented on one aspect of this growing feminist incursion - consciousness-raising groups. As she describes it, her dissertation was on "observational learning in mother cats and their kittens." Yet feminist activism was slowly beginning to seep into the patriarchal discipline of Psychology. While heavily involved in the women's movement, Chesler was working towards completing her PhD in psychology with an internship at both a hospital and a psychoanalytic institute. It was soon thereafter that she made a speech about feminist revolution and became a card-carrying feminist. She recalls that these groups did not quite "get it yet about women." Towards the end of 1966, she was working in a brain research lab and left the lab "possessed" and "driven" in her white lab coat in search of a meeting of the National Organization of Women. Returning from Afghanistan, Chesler became immersed in civil rights organizations and tried to discuss her experiences abroad. It was not until years later that as a young woman she learned the importance of feminism when she "left Western civilization and married a man from Afghanistan." She noted that what she "thought was going to be a great adventure.turned out to be captivity." Phyllis Chesler remarks that she was "certainly always a rebel." Indeed, raised in an Orthodox Jewish family she "rebelled by becoming a member of Hashomer Ha'tzair, which was viewed as a communist, Godless, Zionist organization from hell." While she notes that she was devastated when she was not bat mitzvah'd, at that time she was not able to understand this incident through a feminist lens. Reflecting on her relationship to feminism, Dr.
0 kommentar(er)
