I just finished a long post to my niece. We've been emailing and writing back and forth sporadically for a few years now. She's 28 years old, my brother's oldest child. She is like me in many ways, one of them being that she's brighter than her parents. In fact, she's been in gifted school programs for most of her educational life. However, my brother and his wife being who they are (people without educations and with blue-collar jobs), she did not get the emotional sustenance and guidance she needed growing up. They didn't know how to help her go to college (the financial aid forms were too complicated), so she wound up taking a class here, a class there, then dropping out and working at the furniture factory where her father worked. There she met and married a man who is her father's age. And now she has two little girls.
Her communications to me have implied that marriage to this man is hardly heavenly. He is abusive and psychologically controlling. Now her younger sister (age 15 or 16) has married her teenage boyfriend and is being abused by him. My niece seems resigned to the fact that she and her sister seem doomed to be married to abusers. Of course I could hardly let that idea stand without challenge.
She's trying to raise her girls and attend college full-time. The bottom dropped out of the furniture industry, so she's had minimum-wage jobs here and there. My impression is that her spouse doesn't work, or if he does, it's at a lousy job. He seems to be suffering from deep depression and often threatens to kill himself, but it seems as if it's his way of trying to control her. She's trying to get this college degree, and he's doing all he can to prevent it.
I just wrote this long email to her explaining that she does not have to stay in this relationship. She has been deeply religious (though I think she's evolving out of that mentality), so maybe my advice will fall on fertile ground and not deaf ears. (Sorry for abusing that metaphor!) Maybe I'm just overly sensitive about this abuse thing, given the trial my husband was just part of, and noting that our local newspapers are chock-full of members of the men-who-murdered-their-wives club. (And to be fair, one instance of an ex-wife who murdered her ex-husband over custody of the children, and another of a woman who tried to hire a contract killer to kill her married lover's wife.)
It really burns my biscuits for people to assume that a man somehow automatically has a right to physically or emotionally abuse his wife. (And no, I don't agree with the reverse, either, but for all the talk about nagging and shrewish women, the number of women who murder their husbands is really low compared to men who murder their wives.) One of the reasons that I don't care for organized religion is that too many people use it as justification for keeping women in second-class status. Every time I pick up our local newspaper and read some article where local women are finally getting a tiny role in running their churches, I get angry all over again. The local dominant faith is really oppressive and simply won't have women in any role except subservient. (They are really much more oppressive than the Southern Baptist churches of my youth. At least women can pastor churches in some branches of the Baptist faith.) I won't mention the name of the religion here, but if you know anything whatsoever about Western Michigan, it won't take you long to figure it out. That church also has strong ties to a huge door-to-door selling operation that has been accused of pyramid schemes.
A hunk of meat hanging between a man's legs is not a mark of God's blessing. If there is a god, I have no doubt that she's a woman. And if there are heaven and hell, then hell is full of self-righteous bastards who slap women around and try to make them feel ugly, stupid, and worthless. In my humble opinion, of course. Dr. S.
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