The Femine Mistake

Deja Pseu at Dilettante's Progress: More Big Fat Invalidation discusses Leslie Bennetts's The Feminine Mistake and the tendency of some reviewers to dismiss her thesis on the basis that Bennetts is fat. Now, I have an issue with people's work being dismissed because of how they look, no matter how that is. If someone were to invalidate the work of a blond or someone who is beautiful or a man with long hair or whatever, I would recognize that the critic is shallow. The same with the reasons someone might dismiss my work -- that I'm fat, female, old, and a secular humanist. And yet, what I want to say to you has much less to do with how disgusted I am that a woman's work is dismissed because of her weight, than with the work itself.

When my father died, my mother was 25 and utterly untrained to work, since this happened in 1948. She struggled and struggled and could only get her children back together and under her roof by marrying a man who would support us. Then, she was afraid to stand up to him, knowing that if he were to divorce her she would be back where she had been before, but with one more child to support. I am certain that, if she had not been so terrified of the possible (but, knowing Daddy, improbable) consequences of speaking up when she didn't like his harshness and sarcasm with her children, life would have been much more pleasant in that house. The fact is that Daddy worshiped her. How she didn't know it amazes me, but when I once told her that she was the love of his life, she was astonished.

Anyway, I vowed that I would never let myself get in the position of helplessness, and I never did; if you don't learn from other people's pain, you may have to suffer yourself. It was enough that my mother suffered not being able to take care of her children and that we suffered being separated from her and her fear of it happening again. My children and I never went through that.

Women who are not able to support themselves and their children often say that they can trust their husbands, they know they are married to honorable men. Some of them are wrong, and find themselves sinking into poverty when their husbands turn out not to be so honorable. And even when they are right, no one is so honorable that he can not die while you still need him. To me, it just makes no sense to allow that kind of vulnerability to threaten your children and yourself.