Worth reading: Phyllis Chesler's new book, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. This is one brave truthtelling book and it's bound to ruffle more than a few feminist feathers out there--which is a good and necessary thing. Chesler cuts through the claptrap about women's ways of knowing, female community, and sisterhood that comes hand in hand with so much contemporary feminism--especially in the academy--pointing out instead the naked but strenuously denied truth: that women are often just not very nice at all to one another. They gossip and keep score; they personalize and obsess; they are envious, even malicious, and they create cliques; they are emotionally dishonest, incapable of confrontation or admitting anger while at the same time given to nursing grudges and to passive aggressive behavior. Chesler isn't saying women have a lock on nastiness--it goes without saying that men can be pretty crummy to one another, too. But she is saying that women have a special kind of nastiness--a gendered nastiness, if you will--that they reserve specially for one another. Chesler spends a lot of time talking about mother-daughter relationships and backbiting women friends--all pretty standard stuff if you've ever been female or known someone who is. But where the book really shines, where it gets onto truly forbidden territory, is when it deals with woman's inhumanity to woman at work. It's one thing for women to have catfights at home. But it is quite another thing to suggest that women can't leave it at home, or at least take it outside.

Chesler backs away from the frightening implications of such an observation by arguing that a major reason women act this way is that they are taking out the stress of oppression on one another, that the behavioral patterns that characterize woman's inhumanity to woman are the dysfunctional result of centuries of patriarchy. Maybe, maybe not--but I'm wary of arguments that seek to excuse immature behavior and damaging attitudes by claiming they are the side-effects of victimization, especially when that victimization is increasingly an abstraction for women, increasingly a fact of the past rather than a factor in the present. Regardless, explanations are not excuses, and even if Chesler is right about this one, it doesn't change the most damning truth to emerge from her book: that too many professional women (not all, but enough) either cannot or will not behave themselves when their feelings get involved, when they feel threatened, or jealous, or insecure.

Such self-destructively shortsighted behavior on women's part (I call it shortsighted because I believe your average women in possession of her faculties can, all interpellation and hegemonic forces aside, choose how she comports herself) shows itself all too regularly in woman-centered professional environments. Laura Miller has written a hilarious article for Salon.com called "Women's Ways of Bullying" about her experiences working at a feminist co-operative. Miller is especially apt about how feminist theory seems to produce--or at least enable and excuse--inefficient and unprofessional behavior. More notoriously, and more damningly, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge have outlined the structural pathologies currently dominating women's studies departments across the country. Their book, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, proved their point twice over: not only is it well argued, but it inspired a great deal of woman's inhumanity to woman.