How The Women's Movement Disappointed Me

 

(This article originally appeared in Women's e-News in April 2024, but was later removed, further making the point of this piece: even criticism of the women's movement is unacceptable.)

n 1977-79, a newcomer to the USA, I went through a horrific divorce. My then-husband’s assertion in the papers he filed with the court was that I had “joined the liberated women” and therefore was unsuitable to mother our two girls, the youngest of whom was a newborn. He, who traveled internationally two weeks a month—and was rarely home the rest of the time—sought full custody.

I found myself fighting in court the entire range of feminist ideas which I had expressed—and to which my-not-soon-enough-to-be ex brought in a string of witnesses to testify. It included my male therapist because the judge evoked without precedent the patient-therapist confidentiality, decreeing that “the mother’s mental state is in question.” None of the witnesses had found fault in either my mothering or mental stability, only testified that I had said that men had it better in this world; that women were no less smart and capable than men; that women should have equal rights to men under both the law and social norms.

That’s it. A mother who decried to friends and the marriage counselor that women were underappreciated in our society must be unstable. The judge ordered a temporary support of $25 a month at a time when even welfare would have given me $300 for the three of us. He also warned my lawyer that if I took a job, I would not be able to claim to be the main caretakers to these babies. Any mother’s work-for-pay would level the playing field against a mostly absent father.

The father of my babies now had an excellent incentive not to settle. He could never get a better deal in a divorce than paying only $25 a month while he was traipsing the world. He hired a live-in housekeeper, forced me out of the house by violence, and for almost two years rejected a court date for a divorce hearing which he had initiated.  

I did not yet have the lexicon of feminism, but I knew gross injustice and prejudice against me, formerly a career woman and now a full-time mother, studying for my Master’s degree at mostly night classes.

I called a local chapter of National Organization for Women (NOW), only to hear their phone recordings informing callers that they did not get involved in divorce cases. I showed up at anther chapter’s meeting, hoping to be directed to the right resources since divorce touched almost 50% of women—and my case must be of interest to feminists for its outcome would create a precedent in the State of New York. But NOW was engaged in the rights of gay women, a topic then-affecting 10% of women.

I was alone and at a loss where to find a feminist witness who would explain in court how normal were the sentiments I expressed. The influence of my worldview was not yet known since my daughters were still so young. That also meant that if I would give birth in the future to a third female baby, she should be taken away from me.  

It took a barracuda lawyer and some dishonest maneuvering—as well as all of my parents’ savings—to grant me the divorce. The judge, enamored with the new concept of  “joint custody,” imposed on me a partnership with a man who, failing to keep the court-ordered schedule of alternate days for the rest of my children’s growing years, terrified them when he showed up after an absence accompanied by a policeman.

 

Over the decades, as I matured to become an advocate for women’s issues and rights, my sensitivity to the plight of oppressed and disenfranchised women increased. Among the projects I tackled at the 1995 International Women’s Conference in Beijing was helping Egyptian women develop a campaign against the legalization of clitoridectomy. Egypt, the most advanced country in the eyes of other African nations, was setting the tone for the others. The then-Egyptian Minister of Health, a gynecologist, held that the clitoris was a cause of driving teenage girls crazy, especially if they wore synthetic panties. Better nip it before it caused problems for all society.

I sought the support of feminist leaders who peppered the landscape of the conference. None was willing to get involved in “a religious matter.”

That reluctance to speak up against the oppression of women in Muslim societies—and fight for the liberation of women from laws that allowed husbands to beat and kill them, that barred women from schooling and work-for-pay, that stoned disobedient wives without a trial, that prohibited a woman from stepping out of her house unless accompanied by someone with a penis (even if that penis belonged to an eight-year old), became more obvious as world events rolled in, emblazoned with a backward time-travel. The Western feminist movement’s respect of Islam even in its extreme forms has trumped the ways in which that culture was inherently very bad for women’s bodies, mental health, and life.

What was the feminist movement engaged in during those passing decades? In 1982 we lost the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, never to be ratified nationwide since. Strides were made in removing open workplace discrimination, and shrinking the gap—not eliminating—the women’s work pay when compared with men’s. The portrayal of women in the media has improved greatly, albeit the objectification of their bodies in underground pornography exploded. Interestingly, the formerly reviled semi-clad models of the pinup calendars now took front news as female celebrities strut in insubstantial attires and make their public almost-nudity Politically Correct. Feminists claim that women could wear whatever they wish, even as it entices tweens to emulate provocative getups and moves. The onus is on men to not get sexually aroused.

One issue that I supported wholeheartedly was the freedom of reproductive rights. After the spectacular achievement of Roe vs. Wade, a couple of generations of women enjoyed the freedom to decide if, when, and how often their bodies reproduced. Sadly, attrition in the battle to reverse this right has shut down women’s health clinics by the dozens, until the movement lost the war. Licking its wounds, it may manage to regroup and strategize a comeback. In the meantime, I ache for my granddaughters’ generation.

The awakening of “MeToo” was the slow yawn of an hibernating bear. At Redbook magazine, where I worked in the early 1980s, we did a survey about sexual harassment in partnership with Harvard Business Review and published those findings. The issue went nowhere for a very long while.

Until it did.

Violence against women in all its forms is not OK, our feminist leaders have agreed. They have championed legislation against unwanted touching, verbal comments, locker-room atmosphere—and of course rape, also defined as exertion of perceived hierarchal power, even if no physical force is applied. Prominent men were finally dethroned from their lofty spots in media and corporations. Decades-old sexual exploitations complaints were won both in public opinion and in courtrooms.

The UN, a puppet organization that, on a rotating basis, has given the helms of guarding the rights and safety of women worldwide to countries such as Iran and Somalia, had long declared various “days” in support of women: International Women’s Day (March 8); World Population Day (July 11);  International Equal Pay Day (September 18); International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (November 25).

 

Then October 7 happened.

Hundreds of Israeli women were not “merely” gang-raped, but tortured by sex-crazed Hamas terrorists who broke their limbs, chopped their breasts, and shot nails into their vaginas. Women who survived and were dragged to Gaza, have been imprisoned now for five months, gang-raped and beaten daily, repeatedly, by porno-demented sadists.

The silence of the feminist movement—or whatever can be defined as such in the absence of outstanding focal leaders— about this extreme sexual violence has been deafening. In fact, many female activists have joined the ranks of pro-Hamas demonstrators, of useful idiots calling to “free Palestine” (which means in that vernacular the elimination of Israel and the genocide of its people), of anti-Semitic calls for “a ceasefire”—as if it wasn’t Hamas that had broken every ceasefire, including the one on October 6. As if Hamas couldn’t stop the war on October 8 or any time thereafter by releasing the hostages and surrendering. As if in this war between Israel, a sovereign state, and Hamas, a terrorist group, Israeli women’s tortures and rapes were an acceptable collateral damage.

Or as if it hasn’t even happened. 

UN Women, in the meantime, was silent, as unresponsive as the strewn burned victims of the Hamas massacre to the prodding of Israeli women’s organizations, Jewish organizations, and people of conscience that demanded it to declare its disgust and to condemn both the massacre and the lingering inhuman treatment of Israeli hostages. NOW finally issued a neutral statement against using rape as a tool of war, without condemning—or even specifically mentioning—the brutality of Hamas against Israeli women.

On my radar screen, only one Second-Wave feminists, Phyllis Chesler, Jewish and in her 80s, has been excoriating the remaining feminists of her generation for their failure to condemn the atrocity visited upon Israeli women. Where are the younger feminists?

Last month, on February 12, I lit a yellow candle for the release of the young women hostages. I allowed myself the stabling pain of uttering their names—Agam, Eden, Doron, Shiri, Noa, Karina, Arbel, Liri, Amit, Carmel, Daniella, Naama, Romi—and imagining them being tortured and raped at that very same moment. I was certain that they were unaware that this date was the UN’s International Day for the Prevention of Violent Extremism as and when Conducive to Terrorism.

As was, so it seemed, the rest of the world.

 

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Talia Carner is a novelist whose heart-wrenching suspense and historical fiction expose society’s ills speak for those without voice. www.TaliaCarner.com

 

How Beijing 1995 threw me off orbit--into another....

 The voices could not be silenced.

I traveled to Beijing as a business woman with an education in economics, who believed that economic freedom was the first of all freedoms. In New York, I had been a volunteer for the Small Business Administration’s women entrepreneurial programs and watched as, in the USA, financial independence gave a woman the courage to leave an abusive marriage and, through Credit Union that lent micro loans, I learned that in an African village, a woman could realize her vision of educating her daughters while her sons grew up no longer view a woman’s role as subservient to a man.

               In Beijing, I led entrepreneurial workshops and participated in economic panels. On my second day, though, I was shocked to my core by accounts of clitoridectomy of tens of millions of Muslim and African women, and Indian “burning of the brides” over family dowry disputes. In the coming days I learned of Chinese gendercide—singling out baby girls for death—and about the way our US justice system betrayed molested children by giving custody to their molesters. I learned of mass rape as a tool of war to break a nation’s spirit, and of how the Japanese Imperial Army captured thousands of girls during WWII as “comfort” sex slaves to its soldiers, yet steadfastly refused to acknowledge this war crime.

               My world was shaken of its illusion that financial independence was the first independence, because I had taken for granted the real first freedom—the freedom from violence against women.

               Back home in New York, I closed my five-city marketing firm, canceled the multi-phone lines, and donated my business suits to charity. In the new silence I let the voices of courageous girls and women fill my head, channel into the tips of my fingers, and come out in the form of novels as I set out on the lonely and treacherous journey alongside one protagonist at a time. The stories were all around me. I now knew that skeletons were hiding in all corners of our society—all over the globe—often in plain sight. In the years it took me to write each novel, I heard the voices of the women in Beijing. Each time I finished a novel, the next one presented itself, taking hold of my head and heart, and compelling me to tell the truth about women’s lives.  

               Each of my five novels to date has a social issue behind it, each has launched my activism in that area, and four out of these five novels has had its seeds planted in Beijing in 1995.

               The voices of Beijing can no longer silence—nor should they.

Talia Carner

New York, July 2020

Published by HarperCollins, Talia Carner is the New York-based award-winning author of five novels and numerous articles and essays. Her historical and psychological suspense novels bring to the forefront indignities and atrocities long ignored. She was the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine and a lecturer at international women’s economic forums. A committed supporter of global human rights, she has keynoted or co-paneled over 350 civic, educational and cultural events, educating her audiences about the social issues behind her books.  www.TaliaCarner.com    

A Politically Incorrect Feminist

 A review of Phyllis Chesler's new book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist

No political/social movement can be launched nor hurled forward by the faint-of-hearts. The second wave feminism required no less gumption and fierceness than the first wave. The first-wave feminism—that of the suffragists who won for women the rights to vote and own property—surged with the second wave, which started in the 1960’s and gained momentum in the 1970’s. It sought to broaden women’s rights to equality in family, sexuality and employment and sounded the battle cry for fights in areas unique to women such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, marital rape, paid maternity leave, sexual harassment, affordable child care, and changes in divorce and custody laws.

Paradoxically, civil rights, students’ rights and labor unions often failed to include women within their leadership ranks, nor did they give credence to women’s issues in either their ideologies or policies until feminists fought them internally to be heard and included.

While in this excellent book Phyllis Chesler claims to not have written the history of second wave feminism, she nevertheless does so through her own eyes and personal experiences that were deeply intertwined with the fabric of the movement. She recounts her involvement with almost every aspect of this gut-wrenching years-long struggle, and most importantly, offers an intimate introduction of the many players—their strengths and weaknesses, idiosyncrasies and yes, madness. The battles that raged on the road to women’s liberation were not only against the male hierarchy and dominance of political and social views that held women as childish, given to hormonal fluctuations, and incapable of thinking straight, but also internally. The fire in the belly that fueled feminists’ fervor and made them effective in ultimately achieving many of the movement’s goals burned also in the intensity of their diverse worldviews that often targeted other women. Backstabbing, public shaming, envy and demands for conformity crippled many talented women leaders. Many fell by the wayside, slunk away to lick the wounds inflicted not by their powerful male opponents and their centuries-old beliefs, but rather by their colleagues and fellow Amazonians—often close friends—right inside the movement and in the many organizations that sprouted within it.

Luckily, Phyllis Chesler is one who remained standing through it all, albeit not unscathed. Her personal achievements as a psychologist who confronted the entire industry and forced it to change its perceptions and treatment of women patients is documented not only in this book, but in the astounding success of her ground-breaking book, Women and Madness (a book that was followed by over a dozen other best-sellers, each stepping into arenas no one had ever dared enter before.) Time and again, Chesler paid a personal price when she became the target of envy by those who did not wish to see stars rising within the feminist movement, by those who held the paradoxical idea that for true equality women should not publish over their own bylines (an unimagined demand to be made from male writers,) or by early Lesbians who discredited heterosexual women who chose to marry and become mothers as Chesler did. The reasons for rancor could be many—or any—as Chesler analyzed in her book Women’s Inhumanity to Women, and as I experienced years later in a mini version when I traveled for three weeks with a group of fifty women to the 1995 International Women’s Conference in Beijing: Environmentalists against those who brought plastic forks; blue-collar working women against executives; Lesbians against heterosexuals; non-Jews against Jews; women of color against Caucasians; West Coast women against “Yankees”; health-conscious against coffee-drinkers….

Yes, reading the book reveals that indeed, the movement was created by “bitches, lunatics, prodigies and warriors,” as the subtitle describes. Yet, overall, they were Wonder Women, because they lurched our society forward into the changes of the late 20^th century and early 21^st century—and to what we are now experiencing as the “third-wave feminism.”

I was younger, yet growing up across the ocean I was unaware of any of these developments when I cultivated my own brand of feminist ideas—and was labeled by some friends “a castrating female.” Later, in New York, when I was drawn into a vicious custody battle, the judge listened to the argument that I should not be allowed to raise my two baby daughters because I had attended a conscious-raising seminar, and as my former marriage counselor—a renowned psychologist—testified against me because I was “a feminist.” At the same time, the judge refused to put into evidence my lawyer’s presentation of the father’s passport proving that he traveled two to three weeks each month. Reading Phyllis Chesler’s book I recalled how, a new immigrant to the USA, I had sought out someone who could explain this. I checked with the local university, where I was studying for my masters’ degree, but in those days of pre- “Women Studies,” which Professor Chesler helped introduce, I couldn’t even articulate what kind of an expert I was looking for. Phyllis Chesler, a psychotherapist and a warrior, and the author of Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody, would have been perfect.

The reluctance of women to acknowledge greatness and give credit to feminists who have paved the way for us continues. Several years ago I proposed to the Women National Book Association to honor Phyllis Chesler, a prolific author of eighteen books that changed the landscape of our society and helped shape for the better the lives of millions of women, to receive the Association’s yearly award. Her candidacy was rejected because she was “too controversial.” Controversial because, as she describes in A Politically Incorrect Feminist she demands that American feminists take a stand against the subjugation and brutality that is the lot of hundreds of million women in Muslim countries. Controversial because her unique research of “honor killing” in Western countries of daughters of Muslim families that shame their families by assimilating into Western culture or dare refuse arranged marriages is perceived as politically incorrect against Islam.

Yes, “the personal is political,” and this book that charts the bravery and valor of so many amazing women has inspired me anew to fight for women’s rights and dignity both at home and abroad.

No "Spring" for Saudi Women

This article appeared in the August 2011 of Digital Journal. Today, as Saudi women are claiming the roads in a pre-organized protest, here are my somber thoughts:

By Talia Carner

            Earlier this year, the world watched with bated breath as Egyptian women took to the streets alongside men to protest Mubarak’s rule and demand democracy. Cynically, men encouraged women’s participation—only to betray them once Mubarak was removed. Merely a few months later, Egypt—formerly the more modern among Muslim nations—has regressed into gender apartheid the like of which the country has not been seen in decades, and “modesty squads” roam neighborhoods in search of errant women whose appearance or behavior defy the Extreme Islam’s dictates. 
            Does anyone believe that Saudi women will fare better in their quest for the right to drive? In 2010, the Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 129th out of 134 countries for gender parity (down from spot #114 in 2006.) Islamic patriarchal system has kept Saudi women not just from driving, but from traveling, working and even signing medical forms without the permission of a male guardian—any male relative, even their own minor child.
            Gender apartheid is the basis for the entire Muslim social structure. The Arabic word “fitna” means both civil disorder and beautiful woman. In his 2004 article, “Female Desire and Islamic Trauma,” Islam scholar Daniel Pipes explains: 
            “The entire Muslim social structure… goes to great lengths to separate the sexes and reduce contact between them. This explains such customs as the covering of women's faces and the separation of women's residential quarters, or the harem. Many other institutions serve to reduce female power over men, such as her need for a male's permission to travel, work, marry, or divorce. Revealingly, a traditional Muslim wedding took place between two men – the groom and the bride's guardian.” The reason, Dr. Pipes explains, is rooted by the view that a woman’s sexual desire is so great, that believers are obsessed with the dangers posed by her presence. “So strong are her [sexual] needs …she represents the forces of unreason and disorder. …She must be contained, for her unbridled sexuality poses a direct danger to the social order.” 
            For that reason, in 2002, in Saudi Arabia, religious policemen prevented fourteen-year-old schoolgirls from leaving a burning school building because they were not wearing their headscarves and abayahs. Fifteen girls died. 
            The Quran was written long before automobiles were invented. Therefore, it did not specifically prohibit women from driving. It did not even forbid women from riding horses or camels.  And in a society obsessed with the modesty of women’s dress, cars actually hide women better than any other methods of transportation. Saudi Arabia’s leaders’ explanation that women driving is unsafe and leads to sexual impropriety is entirely false, as women are routinely pinched and groped through the chadors when walking in the streets, and are often sexually harassed by taxi drivers—or even raped by their own chauffeurs.
            On the other hand, driving women around has created a source of income for many Saudi men: there are hundreds of thousands of chauffeurs in Saudi Arabia. Removing the religious fatwa against women driving would deeply affect an entire profession.
            Phyllis Chesler has written extensively that subjugating women is behind the brutal misogynistic Islamic practices such as female genital mutilation, stoning and immolation of women, beatings, forced marriages, child marriages and polygamy.  Now that Muslim feminists are taking to the streets in protest for the right to drive, they are beaten by mobs, yet have no legal protection even in cases of barbaric assault or rape. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, commented at FoxNews.com  "… [Saudi] women's rights activists have very little [legal] protection for their physical well-being …This is the problem in a corrupt society…. Republics of fear oppress and repress their citizens by allowing criminals to do the dirty work of the government. It allows the government to keep [its] hands free."
            Saudi Arabia is the only country that prohibits women from driving. But viewing the protesting women in context of the men’s dread of female power to cause civil disorder, it is clear that breaking any taboo carries the unthinkable threat of women seeking rights for representation in government, in marriage and divorce, or in property ownership.
            In the midst of the Arab awakening, women fighting oppression—in Saudi or any other Muslim nation—is doomed to fade away into a dark night, because the power to relinquish control lies in the hands of their oppressors: men, government, and Islamic religious leadership.           

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            Author Talia Carner’s novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, June 2011) deals with a woman’s struggle for individuality against her society’s strict religious dictates. www.TaliaCarner.com