Lost My Funding-Help Keep Independent Voice Alive

Who am I?

I’ve been fighting for women’s rights, human rights, and for Western universalist values for more than 50 years.

A retired Emerita Professor of Psychology, I’ve published twenty pioneering books including Women and Madness (1972), Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2002), The New Antisemitism (2003), and A Politically Incorrect Feminist (2018). (Alas, authors make very little money…) I research and publish about 60 articles every year, all of which are available for free at my website, phyllis-chesler.com. People tell me that my work has changed their lives.

In 2021, I worked almost non-stop with a team engaged in evacuating endangered, educated Afghan women. That work continues still. I’ve also continued to write about censorship, cancel culture, and about what happens when you run afoul of the politically correct Thought Police on issues about Islam, Israel, honor killing, gender identity, and violence against women.

What happened?

I just unexpectedly lost 40% of my funding and may have to close up shop. When my funder did not send her annual check. I wrote—and I wrote again. Finally, she texted that she’d decided that my work to help save Afghan women was no longer one of her priorities. She did not want “more of them here.”

A heartless and misguided point of view. These are educated, feminist women who are most likely to assimilate in the West.

But that’s not the only reason my funder decided not to send her precious check my way. Her last minute decision came only days after I‘d published a pro-abortion piece, which was read at a 2022 demonstration outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Why do I think that my abortion piece was a turning point? Once, on a visit to my home, this funder quietly left a book behind. The book was a rather extreme anti-abortion work. Carefully, kindly, we never discussed it. But I knew that she regularly attended conferences at which anti-abortion speakers were featured and I silently blessed her for her principled feminist stand and for her tolerance for another viewpoint.

If my texting her has persuaded her into rethinking her decision, I fear that she’ll make a far more modest grant and then be done with me. Our very long-term partnership will be over.

How can you help?

People think that writers and thinkers simply live on air and in romantic garrets, that what we do cannot or should not cost real money. That is not true. Even without taking a salary, I pay for a webmaster, a website, a research assistant, an IT team, hardware and software, office expenses, subscriptions to newspapers and magazines—even rent—and this all costs more than a proverbial pretty penny.

No funding=being silenced. It’s another form of censorship.

Any donation, no matter how small, will be of vital importance to keeping my work in print, my voice out there. All funds raised will go directly to office-related expenses. Thank you for your generosity.