HiLowBrow wishes Phyllis Chesler a happy birthday

Amazingly, leaves out all her most recent anti-jihadist efforts, concentrating on her groundbreaking Women and Madness (which I read as a teenager — obviously):

Chesler’s sweep reached back to pantheistic myths of abducted daughters and underworlds and forward to the bare cells of the modern American snakepit, where thousands of women had been brutally albeit legally confined, often for nothing other than being lesbian, doubting the maternal mission, or experiencing a hellish menopause.

No one before had so methodically undone the hooks and straps of women’s psychosocial bind, or analyzed the therapeutic orthodoxies by which marriage and motherhood, “the unchosen necessities of the past… were revived as salvation myths for twentieth-century women.”