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This is an excerpt from my nineteenth book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist (2018). It is long out of print and yet, as I sit here editing Volume One of my diaries (1960 – 1970), I think it’s time to resurrect some of this material for those who have never read it and who now have no access to it--except via an audiobook read by me.

The book was sabotaged in so many ways--some more humorous, some more terrifying than others. But this is one of the chapters about which so many feminists thanked me for having put it all into psychological perspective--all our trashing, slanders, personal and political betrayals, thefts, revising of our history, erasing so many women out of that history by other feminists.

And today is a day that Heaven has left me off the hook. And this is a year in which, more and more, I’ve given up jumping on breaking news, hunting for clickbait based on increasingly violent and outraged rhetoric, and on reading explosive exposes day after day. I can no longer easily bear material so quickly here and just as quickly gone--nothing that is meant to last for all time.

I should get this book back into print as well as another book of mine, long out of print but still perilously up to date: The Death of Feminism (2025).

Do let me know what you think about this material.

Our Sorely Afflicted Feminist Geniuses

From the time I was twenty-seven years old, in 1967, I shared my ideas mainly with women, rarely with men. This was a complete turnaround, since for most of my life I had primarily read works by men, studied with male professors, worked for men, and fallen in love only with men.

Not talking to men was a profound loss, but few men were interested in feminism—and I was consumed by it.

Turning to women to discuss my most important ideas was psychologically and intellectually revolutionary. It was also paradise. For many of us rebellious and ambitious daughters, the wounds of maternal disapproval were temporarily healed.

However, Paradise inevitably is always followed by the Fall.

Only now, looking back, do I remember how much of the early years of second-wave feminism was painful.

Individual petty jealousies and leaderless group bullying were frightening and ugly. “Mean girls” envied and destroyed excellence and talent; in short, they ate their most gifted leaders.

Feminists who had left the Left brought with them its tactics of intimidation and interrogation.

Many radical lesbians were lesbian supremacists who demanded primacy in terms of victimhood. Some also outed other women in cruel and public ways.

Thus, right at the beginning of paradise, trouble rumbled both overhead and beneath our feet. Trouble drove many a good feminist far, far away, but many of us who could still taste paradise on our tongues remained for the duration.

The psychologist Naomi Weisstein told me that within three years of its formation, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band turned on her in pretty much all the familiar feminist ways. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which she had helped found in 1969, had already trashed her as a “star” and demanded that she surrender her speaking engagements to less eloquent speakers. Band members followed suit, and, fraught with envy and untold hidden agendas, the band disbanded in 1973.

Here’s what they were thinking: if all women were supposed to be equal, then no woman should be more appreciated or better known than any other.

Although unacknowledged, the trashing of the late 1960s and 1970s was ultimately the psychological reason our mass radical movement ground to a halt. The ideological disputes played out in breathlessly vicious ways. But it didn’t stop me. Luckily, I was blessed with the ability to remain connected to women on both sides of many of our major wars.

Some feminists did sound the alarm about trashing. In 1970, the journalist Anselma Dell’Olio addressed this in an unpublished and incandescent manuscript that was later known as her “swan-song to the women’s movement.” Jo Freeman discussed it in two important articles, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” which appeared in Ms. in 1976 and provoked more reader response than any previously published article. In 1972, I discussed it in Women and Madness. Our words didn’t lead to a feminist reevaluation of sisterhood. Few feminists wanted to look at how they treated other women. And fewer still wanted to consider

the possibility that the movement was not both “breast and womb.”

I once convened a panel at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association at Spelman College. The panel’s title was “Horizontal Hostility among Women: Race, Class and Gender Issues,” and it nearly tore the roof off the place. Because my invitee and copanelist bell hooks and I publicly agreed on so incendiary a subject, some audience members—many of whom were African American—accused the much-younger hooks of being my “mammy.” But mainly the audience wanted to tell their own stories of woman-on-woman betrayal and heartbreak. When we were finally forced to leave the auditorium, I sat outside on the lawn for a long time listening to them speak.

Something rather different happened when I presented my views on psychological matricide and sororicide at a national conference of feminist therapists. Therapists had difficulty acknowledging that women can also be sexists. One African American therapist insisted

that this is a “white girl’s problem”; one lesbian therapist insisted that this is a “straight girl’s problem”; one heterosexual therapist said that she hadn’t known that “women even had a mother

goddess or that we had killed her.” She urgently wanted to know the goddess’s name.

Perhaps we were tame compared with our suffragist foremothers. According to Kathy Barry in her riveting work Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist, conservative suffragists demanded that Anthony disinvite the famed Ernestine Rose as a speaker “because

Of her avowed atheism.” They also rejected Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States and passed a resolution that clarified that, unlike Woodhull, they didn’t

believe in free love. Unbelievably, they also voted to disassociate the National Woman’s Party from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s critique of religion in The Woman’s Bible. Barry writes:

Susan B. Anthony, in the chair as president of the association,

was astounded and for a moment struck dumb. It was one thing

to disagree with Mrs. Stanton over priorities but never would

she consider that either Stanton or her critique of religion would

be censored. . . . Never had their movement censored thought.

Now these young women who were “unborn when Mrs. Stanton

called the first Woman’s Rights Convention” proposed to censure

her. Anthony was eloquent in her anger: “When our platform

becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I

myself shall not stand upon it.”

Anthony was heartbroken and considered resigning the presidency of her own association. She told her protégées, “I see nothing but the beginning of a petty espionage, a revival of the Spanish Inquisition,” and that she was “sick at heart” because of their violation of the right to exercise one’s judgment and for wronging Stanton personally.

By the mid-1970s, Betty Friedan, who claimed to have lost control of both NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus, concluded that NOW was suffering from a “power struggle so acute and so vicious that, finally, only those who can devote twenty-four hours a day to the movement can play—women who have made the women’s movement their sole profession, their career,

their sole road to glory, even their personal life.”

Many NOW members had married NOW psychologically; they had turned it into a total institution, the equivalent of a family or a religious order. When they lost, they lost everything for all time. This

was not a game. It was all they had, everything that mattered, and they had no rules of engagement or disengagement.

Sonia Johnson, a former Mormon who was excommunicated for her support of the Equal Rights Amendment and the author of From Housewife to Heretic, told me that seventeen NOW women who didn’t want her to run for the NOW presidency had ganged up on her in her hotel

room. Sonia withdrew her candidacy.

Ellen Hawkes, in her book Feminism on Trial, quotes the lawyer

and former president of NOW Karen DeCrow:

Until you’ve seen a contested NOW election, you haven’t seen

anything. I had a bodyguard with me when I ran for reelection at

the 1975 Philadelphia conference, and I thought, my God, am I

going to need armed guards to be head of the sisters! When I left

in ’77 I felt I would have no trouble being a litigator because I’d

been through the NOW wars. I’m frequently in a legal situation

where someone will say, “How can you stay so cool?” I smile

sweetly and think back on NOW. If you can live through NOW,

you can battle both the Fortune 500 and the worst sex

discrimination cases.

According to Hawkes, Shelly Mandell, a California NOW member, was competing with another California NOW member, Ginny Foat, for the presidency of a NOW chapter, and got rid of her rival by reporting Foat to the police on a suspected murder charge. Ginny had been battered by her husband and was accused of killing him. She was eventually acquitted at trial.

According to my dear friend Arlene Raven, Chrysalis magazine folded in 1980 because

Women

gave each other too much grief as we all worked for no money.

Everyone, including the leading feminist lights of the day, felt

entitled to criticize and insult us. Editors who doted on a

particular writer’s work were devastated when that writer

turned out to be nasty, cruel, petty, insane. Women only

complained, few thanked us for being there. Once you stick your

neck out, women think it’s okay to take pot-shots at you. And the

editors wanted approval from the very women who were

criticizing them.

Once, a fight in a California gay bar about control of a woman’s

studies program and a feminist bookstore spilled outside, and in the

altercation that followed a woman died of a heart attack.

I’ve been told that some feminists had a fistfight about pornography and prostitution on the street outside Columbia University.

Feminism as a philosophy or as a political movement cannot guarantee ethical behavior, nor can it save individual feminists from being undervalued, kicked to the curb, or impoverished. Feminism is a vision in whose service we enlisted. It couldn’t give us most of what we

wanted: victory in our lifetime, a lifelong loving community.

On the contrary, for most of us our lives became harder, not easier,

Because we were feminists. No one gave us the equivalent of boots

and guns; most of us were rarely embraced as heroes. More likely, we

were hazed—and the war was never over.

Most feminists were also women. As such, we carried extra baggage.

When a human being has been diminished by heartless prejudice daily and victimized by sexual, physical, economic, and legal violence, she can become disabled, just as veterans of combat and torture victims can. Some such people are able to carry on valorously, but even so, being wounded may lead to fits of weeping, bursts of bad temper, paranoid accusations, and disappearances without notice.

Add to this mix runaway egotism, the ideological demand for uniformity, envy of those perceived as more talented, and women’s unacknowledged sexism and inhumanity toward other women, and you can begin to understand what we were all up against.

I’ve never before written what I’m about to write here. I didn’t even dare think it. But a recent conversation in 2016 opened this tightly shut door.

I was reminiscing with my friend Bob Brannon, a cofounder of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism and longtime feminist leader.

“Do you know X?” he asked.

“Of course I do. And how! She was totally nuts.”

“Tell me about it,” Bob groaned. “She once visited and went through my things, stole stuff, lied about it, and then she turned on me, accused me of being a sexist pig.”

As we spoke, I realized that just as I was once afraid to admit—even to myself—that mental illness plagued my high-functioning mother and members of her family, so too have I denied the extent to which so many of the most charismatic and original of feminist thinkers were mentally ill.

I don’t mean neurotic, difficult, anxious, or eccentric. I mean clinically schizophrenic or manic depressive, suicidal, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or afflicted with a personality disorder.

Thus, quite apart from ideological differences, some of our most beloved geniuses were unstable and wildly needy. No more so than people in general—including socialites, artists, or members of other social justice movements—but no less so either.

Feminism isn’t crazy, and feminist ideas aren’t crazy, but some of the feminists I’ve known and loved have suffered from mental illness.

I’m reluctantly willing to admit that mental illness may have been one of the many problems that dogged our movement.

However, I’m also writing about historical figures who must be judged for what they accomplished. That’s why I’m writing about them; it’s why they matter. At the time, however, even I refused to think of feminists (or of women) as mentally ill. That phrase had been used against women so unjustly that I simply did not want to repeat this calumny. Those among us who were not clinically or theoretically educated about mental illness, as well as those who were mentally ill, did not recognize or consider that certain behaviors (nonstop talking, yelling, paranoid accusations, drinking, stealing, pathological lying) might be evidence of mental illness. We all preferred to consider dysfunctional behaviors as ideological opposition.

Many great male artists have also been mentally ill. Baudelaire, Blake, Coleridge, Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Eugene O’Neill, Pound, Shelley, and Dylan Thomas all immediately come to mind. They attempted or committed suicide; drank to excess; were deeply, darkly depressed; spent time in lunatic asylums. Of the feminists, first came Shulie Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Oh, was that a breathtakingly brilliant book. For a long time our movement was haunted by her absence. But she was very much alive. She was either holed up in her apartment in the East Village or in a psychiatric facility.

I remember reading The Dialectic of Sex when it first came out in 1970. I was writing Women and Madness and her book electrified me. Her work is fierce, as sharp as a diamond—logically precise, somewhat frightening, offensively utopian, but extremely liberating.

Years later, Shulie called and asked me to visit her at home in my capacity as a psychotherapist. She said, “You’re the only one I can trust.” I immediately agreed to do so. Then she added: “But you’ll need to come to the fifth floor by climbing up the fire escape. I’ll talk to you through the window.”

I told her I couldn’t do that, that I might fall to earth and shatter, but I couldn’t persuade her to open her door.

Her book Airless Spaces is a small and tender gem. Humbly, carefully, she writes about her schizophrenia and her time in various hospitals. When it was published in 1998, she asked a small group of us, including me, to read aloud from it at her book launch. I remember Shulie’s standing off a bit to the side, watching, listening, but silent, at a remove, always removed.

Then came Kate Millett, another brilliant intellectual, whose productivity was miraculous given her crippling mental illness. Kate’s first book, Sexual Politics, came out the same year as Shulie’s, 1970. It too lit up the night sky.

I once offered to try and share my tenured professorship with her. Ha! But when I shared a lecture podium with Kate for the first time, all hell broke loose. She made no sense. She ranted and railed, talked about the Irish “troubles,” and wouldn’t stop rambling. Ultimately, to everyone’s horror, she had to be physically removed from the stage.

Kate had a shitload of charm and, in the beginning, a commanding presence, but she also had periods in which she didn’t sleep, raged at others, attempted suicide, and exploited her groupies—all the while feeling victimized by them (which she was). She couldn’t be counted on to remain lucid at a press conference. She also fell in love, and tried to have her way, quite aggressively, with woman after woman (including me).

Once, I saw how frightened Gloria Steinem became when Kate freaked out at a press conference. French feminists had organized something at the United Nations on behalf of the imprisoned Madame Mao in China. Our girl Kate began talking about the Irish Troubles and simply wouldn’t stop. She was off message and out of her mind. Gloria turned pale—her defense against chaos is to keep herself under tight control, never an emotional hair out of place, so to speak. She mumbled to me, “You’ll take care of this,” and rushed away.

I did take care of it. I didn’t desert Kate; I gallantly accompanied her home. However, this did not amount to therapy. It was merely an act of kindness.

Unlike Shulie, Kate hotly denied being mentally ill. She denied that mental illness existed. And even if it did, she insisted that she didn’t suffer from it.

The point is that Kate wrote despite her mental illness; she kept going, she never stopped working, not even when other illnesses laid her low. It was also almost impossible to work with her or to have a stable or genuinely reciprocal relationship with her.

Andrea Dworkin—oh dear God, what can I say about Andrea? I valued both her work and our friendship. I was so protective of her because she seemed so fragile. But eventually, ultimately, I was forced to see that, although Andrea was a complex and strategic thinker, she was also a fanatic, a terribly wounded one, who felt that she was always the victim, even when she was on the attack, like picketing a bookstore reading when Rebecca Chalker and Carol Downer published A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486 in 1992. In the book the authors had written: “Only in desperate situations—such as women may find themselves in the future if states ban abortion except for certain reasons such as rape—should women even consider resorting to faking rape,” and then went on to warn about the potential this had for “undermining the gains of the movement against violence against women.” Nevertheless, Andrea was enraged because she believed that this advice would weaken all rape allegations. She called a number of feminists to try to convince them to join her on the picket line outside a Brooklyn bookstore where Rebecca was doing a reading. Barbara Seaman, Rebecca’s supporter, received a series of threatening phone calls in which a female voice said: “You’re dead meat.” This sounded very Andrea-like, and Barbara was convinced that Andrea was the caller.

Writers. Great writers. Revolutionary thinkers like Andrea and Kate are often shy and awkward in intimate gatherings, comfortable only on history’s large stage.

My pal Jill Johnston, who inspired so many lesbian activists, described her nervous breakdowns as “stepping out” of her mind. She never hid this, nor was she ashamed of it. She was half British, and they’re known for tolerating extreme eccentricity.

In 2005, at a memorial service for the lesbian feminist writer Bertha Harris, who apparently drank herself to death, I sat with Jill. She kept writing and wouldn’t look up. I said, “Jill, this is our beloved community, our friends.” She admonished me: “No, Phyllis. These are my competitors. All the lesbian writers here are my competitors, not my friends.”

The authors Elizabeth “Betty” Fisher (Women’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society) and Ellen Frankfort (Vaginal Politics) both killed themselves. I know that Ellen felt that our movement had failed her and also naively believed that she could forge a lifelong career as a writer-activist. Could this have had anything to do with her suicide? She had also been the one who found Betty Fisher’s body. Or were the causes of these women’s suicides simply genetic or neurochemical in nature?

Ellen and I became close friends. In the mid-1980s, she had found me a house near her in the Hamptons. That was where she told me how disappointed she was in Flo Kennedy for continuing to support black nationalism and the Left and how hurt she was by Flo’s condemnation of Ellen’s 1984 book, Kathy Boudin and the Dance of Death, which denounced the American Left. She said: “Phyllis, our movement has lost all dignity. Movement women are all bullshit artists.”

A few years later, Ellen threatened to kill herself. I visited her immediately and tried to persuade her to get off all her prescription meds. She had seen so many different psychiatrists who had prescribed so many different medications. Red pills, blue pills, yellow pills, pink pills all tumbled out of her handbag. I told her, “These pills have messed with your mind.”

“Phyllis, the book you’re working on right now should be my book. I write about working-class women and the ways in which they’re screwed.”

“Ellen, get yourself together and perhaps we can coauthor this book.”

I didn’t really mean this—the deadline for Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M was bearing down on me—but I said it because it meant so much to her.

As close as we became, I still didn’t know that Ellen had a twin sister who had committed suicide. And perhaps I hadn’t understood how deeply she may have been traumatized by having found Betty Fisher’s body.

Although Ellen lived with a wealthy man, she still hoped to be able to support herself as a feminist writer within the context of a dignified feminist movement. I understood that Ellen was bereft, both of such income and of movement.

I could not save her. No one could.

I was the emcee for Ellen’s memorial service, held in the courtyard of Westbeth, an artists’ housing complex in the West Village. There was a gospel choir—she had left a suicide note and it was her choice; its members were her friends. I saw many pale, shocked feminist faces among those gathered in her honor. I can easily name twenty more feminist pioneers who were dear to me and produced extraordinary work but were disadvantaged, wounded by depression or other psychiatric afflictions. Were they depressed by how often they were on the losing end of ideological battles, by the everyday sexism that sapped their vital juices, by having to fight so hard to obtain so little because they were women? Were they at a perpetual disadvantage due to incest, rape, economic insecurity, overwork, or homophobia?

I know one brilliant feminist author who became so increasingly anxious that she was finally truly unemployable. She lost her home, her money, and even more of her mind. Today she’s still brilliant, but she lives below the poverty line and spends her time writing long letters to newspapers that are rarely published.

I know several feminists with bipolar disorder or severe depression who are also gifted and accomplished but hard to be around. One of them used to turn up at my door weeping inconsolably and threatening suicide.

One of our early lesbian rights activists, Sidney Abbott (Sappho Was a Right-On Woman), was always disconnected and inappropriate but cheerfully, harmlessly, so. Luckily she found a psychiatrically challenged feminist billionaire who gave her a home, food, horses, dogs, and a caretaker, and that’s how things stood until she eventually refused to ever get out of her armchair. There she sat, for nearly two years, until she accidentally burned herself to death.

I was there when yet another feminist completely freaked out under the pressure of success. She was on her way home from a television program when she tried to punch the TV show’s driver, rushed into her apartment past a group of journalists and feminist friends awaiting her, slammed her bedroom door shut, and simply refused to come out. Maybe it was just as well. She was raving, crying, and had taken off all her clothes. It was a while before I could talk her down—and she was usually the sweetest soul.

African American feminists had problems of their own. I served as a therapist and confidante to a number of extremely accomplished African American feminists whose self-esteem was paper thin and who viewed themselves as ugly and perhaps unlovable. They were subject to periods of depression and self-imposed isolation. Many of them scapegoated white women for the considerable crimes of the African American men these women loved but who had betrayed them—perhaps slavery’s long legacy.

Activists and artists are an at-risk population. Feminists are human beings. Some are normally competitive; some are bullies; some hide their viciousness by operating only in mobs; and a few are sociopaths, such as women who want to be able to brag to others about their own (unearned) importance. One feminist used to sneak up behind a feminist celebrity while the celebrity was speaking and had a friend quickly snap a photo of the two of them. This woman has a rather disassociated affect as she follows the camera. After watching her performance over many decades, I concluded that it was beyond merely eccentric, perhaps even beyond diagnosis.

The “celebrity selfie” taker merely appears to be in the center of things. Worse are the identity thieves, who take credit for work they’ve never done. This puzzled and disheartened me the most.