Biography
Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D, is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at City University of New York. She is a best-selling author, a feminist leader, a retired psychotherapist and an expert courtroom witness. Dr. Chesler is a co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969), The National Women's Health Network (1975), and The International Committee for the (Original) Women of the Wall (1989). She is a Ginsburg/Ingerman Fellow at The Middle East Forum, and a Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP).
Dr. Chesler was an early 1970s abolitionist theorist and activist: She wrote about and delivered speeches which opposed rape, incest. pornography, sex and reproductive prostitution, and sex trafficking. She organized and/or participated in demonstrations outside the movie Snuff; organized the first-ever Speak Out on mothers losing custody of children; marched outside Dorian’s Red Hand to protest the murder of Jennifer Levin by Robert Chambers after a night of drinking there; organized repeated demonstrations outside the Hackensack, New Jersey courthouse where the Baby M hearings were underway and outside the surrogacy pimp Noel Keane’s NYC clinic; outside the courthouse when Joel Steinberg was sentenced for the murder of Lisa Steinberg; she assembled a team of expert witnesses for the trial of Aileen Carol Wuornos, none of whom were ever called upon.
She is the author of 20 books, including the feminist classic Women and Madness, as well as many other notable books including With Child: A Diary of Motherhood; Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody; Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M; Feminist Foremothers in Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health; Letters to a Young Feminist; Woman's Inhumanity to Woman; and Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site. After publishing The New Anti-Semitism (2003), she published The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle For Women's Freedom (2005) and An American Bride in Kabul (2013), which won a National Jewish Book Award. In 2016, she published Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews 2003-2015, in 2017 she published Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing A Veiled War Against Women. In 2018, she published A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killings, and a Memoir: A Politically Incorrect Feminist, and in 2020, she published Requiem for a Female Serial Killer.
Dr. Chesler has published four studies about honor-based violence, focusing on honor killing, and penned a position paper on why the West should ban the burqa; these studies have all appeared in Middle East Quarterly. Based on her studies, she has submitted affidavits for Muslim and ex-Muslim women who are seeking asylum or citizenship based on their credible belief that their families will honor kill them. She has archived most of her articles at her website: www.phyllis-chesler.com
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Chesler, Phyllis (2021) "Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary by Martin Duberman," Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 7. https://doi.org/10.23860/dignity.2021.06.01.07
Included in
American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, History of Gender Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Nonfiction Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Social History Commons, Women's History Commons, Women's Studies Commons