Domestic Discontents: Feminist Reevaluations of Psychiatry, Women, and the Family

Abstract

In 1972, Phyllis Chester framed an indictment of American psychiatrists: "They are more willing to pity women than to respect them; more comfort- able with unhappy women than with angry women" (246). She offered this judgment in her book Women and Madness (1972), an angry and path- breaking reassessment of women's relation to the psychological "helping professions." Chesler invoked the fates of women, some famous (Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath), some not so famous (Elizabeth Packard, Ellen West), who had sought or been forced to seek psychological assessment and treatment, and who, in the course of "treatment," had been physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abused within interlocking "mental health" systems powered by male-determined constructions of female roles and capacities. When women came up against psychiatry, Chesler asserted, women lost.