Mean like me: a feminist author discovers that women aren't always nice. Betsy Hart says this isn't news to anyone who survived seventh grade. - Woman's Inhumanity to Woman - book review

Women's Quarterly, Summer, 2002 by Betsy Hart

MY MOTHER had a wonderful way of summing up small truths with bang-on accuracy. It was she, the mother of three boys and two girls, who noted simply that "boys are boys, and girls are manipulators."

That girls and women can be petty, mean, backstabbing, vindictive, and jealous is not news to any female who has survived the seventh grade. But it seems to be big news in the popular culture (really, don't baby boomers discover everything?) where the subject of "Mean Girls" has recently been the focus of lengthy articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the stuff of tabloid talk shows.

Into this climate enters Woman's Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chesler, author of the best-selling Women and Madness, along with Letters to a Young Feminist, and a leader of the so-called "second wave" of feminism.

It comes down to this, a disillusioned Chesler seems to lament: In spire of all the wonderful, generous goodness which "should" inherently be found in the Sisterhood--as opposed to the brutish "brotherhood of man"--the fact is women can be real bitches.

Chesler worked on the book for decades. It shows. The too-long tome is full of angst-ridden anecdotes, stories, and all kinds of case histories of the little-defined group that Chesler interviewed for the book, women generally bemoaning how other women have betrayed them.

Chesler herself says she's been the victim of such treachery many times. She describes students who have been ungrateful, feminist compatriots who've stolen her ideas, and most of all her mother. Talk about too much information. Ouch. (Chesler's view seems to be that all mother/daughter and biological sister relationships are doomed from the start.) One can't help feeling that the book may have been written to settle more than a few old scores.

Chesler looks at everything from ancient mythology to today's middle school, from the animal kingdom to the modern workplace, and finds that women tend to resemble Cinderella's stepsisters a lot mote than they do Cinderella.

One woman named Elsa recounts, "My best friend was a divorced woman who could nor have children. I refused to discriminate against her because she was a divorced woman. In retrospect, I should have shunned her the way the other married women did. My friend not only made off with my husband. What was worse was her systematic campaign to become my son's mother."

Another woman has a similar tale. "I became friendly with a woman in our new neighborhood.... I confided in her and considered her a best friend. Guess what? About a year into our friendship she had begun having an affair with my husband."

FORTUNATELY FOR us, women's betrayal isn't always so complete. Still, Chesler writes that even young girls "learn that a safe way to attack someone else is behind her back, so that she will not know who is responsible. This tracks girls and women into lives of chronic gossip and rumor mongering.... Girls may use social manipulation to dominate or express anger because they have learned to do this from their female role models: adult women.

And watch out for those adult women. If they aren't stealing husbands, they're stealing the top spots in the business world. Unless there is a lot of room for women in key positions, says Chesler, the knives will be out.

(For Chesler, the biggest outrage seems to be women who don't believe another woman's story of sexual harassment or discrimination on the job, though it should hardly be a news flash that such accusations shouldn't be believed unless and until they are proven.)

Throughout the book, Chesler maintains an air of sad incredulity that women can be, in their own duplicitous, manipulative way, really nasty--just like men. Remember Lord of the Flies?

Sigh. Weren't we supposed to be so much better than "them"?

But of course we aren't "better. Women are different from men, and different from each other. We're also fully human, which makes us just as capable of sin in all its amazing manifestations as our brutish brothers.

Chesler appears conflicted about this truth, to which she grudgingly pays lip service, while looking for other "reasons" for women's inhumanity to women. Maybe it's that we live under an oppressive male culture, so we've learned to oppress others. Maybe it's that there are only a few "top" spots for women, whether in the workplace or in a culture that values youth and beauty too much, so we're always looking to knock off or knock down the competition. But maybe it really is just that women are real people after all.

Where Chesler's work proves valuable is that first, this is a well-known feminist pointing out the very inconvenient truth that the Sisterhood can be pretty bloody. Further, interspersed between the scenes of tortured betrayal and anecdotes that seemed mined from group therapy sessions centered around singing, sharing, and emotionalism, Chesler includes some really interesting data about how women typically relate to each other.

And a lot of it isn't pretty. For instance, "According to University of California anthropologist Victoria Burbank," writes Chesler, "women mainly target other women for aggression. They did so in 91 percent of the 137 societies Burbank surveyed...." In other words, the message to husband-stealers is this: It's generally the other woman, not the husband, who will bear the brunt of the scorned wife's wrath.