Phyllis Chesler

I am a second wave feminist who was politically active at the same time that Dr.Phyllis Chesler writes about. I have met her cast of characters at different political meetings and conferences and oh what a time it was. Dr Chesler writes about these times with wit, pain, honesty with a sharp eye for the contradictions, the drama, the turbulence and plain meanness and sweetness of it all. Like all social movements there are cliques, backstabbing, genuine animosity between members and among show more different factions of the movement. Yet, my overall feeling of the time was how exhilarating it was like to be in a movement that was making real change for women. I found myself chuckling that Dr Chesler focused on the gossip, the backstabbing and infighting of the time and in her book, was doing the same. A great read, an incisive look at a social justice movement with all of its warts, failures and beauty.

Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to review this book for an honest opinion.
Karen show less

I found this book fascinating and frustrating. As a young bride in 1961, Chesler thought she was going to visit her new Afghan husband's family in Kabul. Instead she found herself essentially under house arrest, in purdah. She was stripped of her passport (and American citizenship) and sent to live with the women of her new extended family. Unable to speak Dari, to leave the house, or tolerate the food, she found no sympathy with her husband who had seemed so Westernized in the US. She was show more repeatedly told "you are an Afghan wife now" and expected to convert to Islam and be obedient to her husband's family.

After 10 weeks, near death from hepatitis (her mother-in-law had told the servants to stop boiling her water), her father-in-law allowed her to go home to her parents on an Afghan tourist visa. But not before her husband began beating and raping her to try to keep her in Afghanistan. She arrived in Kabul naive, but left a feminist.

The second part of the book reflects on Afghan culture and the norms that subjugate women. show less

Chesler reaches back to pantheistic myths of abducted daughters and forward to the modern American snake pit, where thousands of women had been brutally albeit legally confined, often for nothing other than being lesbian, doubting the maternal mission, or experiencing a hellish menopause. No one before had so methodically undone the hooks and straps of women’s psychosocial bind, or analyzed the therapeutic orthodoxies by which marriage and motherhood “were revived as salvation myths for show more twentieth-century women.” Docked a star and a half for a conception of male homosexuality just as backward and destructive as Freud’s (worse in a way, since Chesler lacked the Victorian age as an excuse). show less

As an eighteen-year-old undergraduate, Jewish-American Phyllis Chesler met fellow student Abdul-Kareem, a handsome and charismatic man from Afghanistan. Their relationship very quickly blossomed as they spent hours together, falling passionately in love whilst sharing their love of literature, music, foreign films and immersing themselves in American culture ... although one thing they didn’t discuss was religion! They married when Phyllis was twenty and she was looking forward to sharing show more an exciting and exotic lifestyle with him when, following a brief visit to Europe, they moved to Kabul in 1961 to live with her husband’s extended family. However, once there, he is barely recognisable as the Westernised man she married because he quickly slipped back into his misogynistic culture, a world in which women have absolutely no rights, no opportunities for independence, and must obey their husband at all times. Little wonder that modern, independent-minded Phyllis very quickly became deeply unhappy and was desperate to escape. However, as her American passport had been confiscated as soon as she landed in the country, and the American Embassy officials refused to help when she eventually turned to them for help, this was something which proved very hard for her to achieve and only became possible following a serious illness which left her close to death. With the surprising aid of her father-in-law, she was finally granted a six-month visa to return to America to recuperate … she never went back.
Although there were times when I felt the balance of this book was rather skewed, I found it a fascinating and thought-provoking account of the author’s experiences – a combination of memoir and a detailed exploration of the complex history and the numerous religious, political and social influences which have shaped Afghanistan over the centuries. Whilst some of her own experiences were truly horrific and brutal, it became clear that her passionate feminism, and especially her decades-long determination to give silenced Muslim women a voice, were all forged from those experiences, as too was her need to gain insight into what had motivated her to take such risks. Not only is her writing rather surprisingly full of compassion for her ex-husband and his family (she retains contact with them) but it is also scholarly in its examination of the influences which have led to escalating Islamism and the acts of terrorism which are directed not only at the West, but also at more moderate Muslims.
Now that I’ve finished the book I feel I have gained a far greater insight into the reality of the lives of women living in such oppressive circumstances, as well as the fears and physical danger they face on a daily basis. However, I’m left wondering just what can be done to make life better for all of them, not just the relatively few who manage to escape and who are helped to find their own voices. Phyllis Chesler’s voice is strong on their behalf, but a seismic shift in attitude is needed before such oppressed women can be in a position to experience the true freedom of self-determination. However, when any criticism of another country’s cultural mores is all too often deemed racist, people in the West are increasingly reluctant to voice these concerns and to demand change ... but we all need to ask ourselves why where women are born should determine what freedoms they should be entitled to? show less