A Politically Incorrect Feminist by Phyllis Chesler: A Review

A Politically Incorrect Feminist — Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women

by Phyllis Chesler.

St Martin’s Press, 28th August 2018

‘It’s impossible to convey how excited I was — how excited we all were. While at work at the Brain Research Labs, I somehow heard about a women’s meeting. I rushed out, still wearing my white lab coat. I was on the streets searching for “the women”, as if a group of aliens had suddenly landed on Earth.’

This was in America in the late 1960s. Phyllis Chesler describes the origins of her intense involvement with the second wave feminist movement, work which ‘would come to occupy the rest of our lives’. She continues, ‘all we would be able to claim was the struggle, not the victory’. The book’s title hints much about that sparkling, strenuous, and sometimes sorrowful struggle and the ‘few, we happy few, we band of [sisters]’. Chesler was ‘politically incorrect’ in the eyes of some other feminists, but it’s this political incorrectness that has kept her true to the cause of a feminism based on universal values.

This book is not only of historical and biographical interest; it has significance wider than its direct subject. It’s a jewellery box of things to ponder as…