J. Nelson – Writer

And all the women like her who deferred to their husbands

Maybe you’ve heard about Betty, the 81-year-old Georgia woman who voted for the first time in her life when she cast her ballot last week. Betty had never voted before because her husband wouldn’t let her; her husband died last year.

I had a lot of mixed emotions when I first heard Betty’s story. Most prominent were a mix of pride and rage: Pride in her for getting out to vote despite her obvious physical limitations (video of her showed her walking with a cane and what looks like a leg brace), and rage that her husband had, for decades, impeded her constitutional right to vote.

But close behind were sadness and guilt: Sadness for her loss and guilt for assuming her husband was a terrible person. For all any of us know, he was a wonderful man who loved and cared for her but had some very backwards ideas of what women should and should not do. Or maybe he was a controlling ass and she was glad to be rid of him. We don’t know, so we shouldn’t be so quick to condemn him so completely.

Then I saw a post Buzzfeed had put together of women responding to Betty’s story with things they, their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, or great-grandmothers had forgone because of their husbands.

Some were matters of respect for their partners, like the woman who made herself a strawberry cake after her husband died (he’d been allergic to strawberries) and the woman who’d always wanted a dog and got one after her husband passed away (he’d been allergic to anything with fur).

But many of the stories showcased blatant misogyny and controlling behaviors. Like the husbands who never allowed their wives to wear makeup, especially lipstick, because it would attract the attention of other men, or the one who never let his wife wear pants, or the ones who wouldn’t let their wives earn money (because men were supposed to be the breadwinners) or get tattoos (because tattoos weren’t ladylike). One woman recounted how her grandmother didn’t learn to read or write until her grandfather passed away.

It was sad to read all these stories of women who had lost or suppressed parts of themselves because of their husbands’ demands and expectations. Most of those women belonged to an era when it either wasn’t legal for a woman to divorce her husband or to a time when divorce was considered morally unacceptable.

But it was equally inspiring to read how these women reclaimed their autonomy and identities after their spouses passed away or they got divorced. (And a good reminder of why today’s higher divorce rates isn’t necessarily a bad thing.)

Let’s make it political

Even in the late 20^th and early 21^st century, there were so many things women were told they couldn’t do — not just by husbands and fathers, but by society as a whole. It’s only been in the last 50 years or so that women could have their own bank accounts, take out loans, make big-dollar purchases (like a house or car), access birth control without a husband’s permission, wear clothes other than dresses/skirts and heels to work, be allowed to work in certain fields … The list goes on and on.

And as far as we’ve come, there are still areas where women struggle to gain equal footing: women are still paid less for the same work as men, are less likely to be hired or promoted than men with equal or lesser experience and credentials, and are more likely to be undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for a variety of common illnesses or have their medical concerns dismissed completely. Women still get judged for the clothes and makeup they wear (or don’t) and are frequently defined by their roles in their family’s lives.

And now there’s an entire political movement that is determined to drag women back to the days described by those commenters in the Buzzfeed article: when women were entirely controlled by their husbands, fathers, and brothers; couldn’t work, couldn’t wear certain clothes, couldn’t control their own finances; had little-to-no say in their health care.

It makes me think of the “trad wife” trend: Women who want those 1930s/1950s traditional male/female roles. They want to stay in the home while their husbands work. They want their men to be the main decisionmakers and providers while they (the women) keep the household running and raise the kids.

I have nothing against that. If that’s the lifestyle that a woman and her husband want, then great! What’s important is that it was a mutual decision to structure their marriage and household that way.

What I do have a problem with is people — men and women — who think that just because that’s the lifestyle they prefer, everyone else should live that way, too. Their ideals and choices shouldn’t be forced on anyone else.

No one is trying to tell couples that they can’t have traditional, heteronormative male/female dynamics in their lives and marriages. Some people may try to tell women, especially, that they don’t or shouldn’t have to ascribe to those roles and values — which, if the woman wants to live that way, is no one else’s business — but no one is making it illegal.

The Republican Party, however, is pushing an increasingly extreme and rigid platform to curb women’s autonomy and independence. The party’s leaders — and its deeply religious faction — are trying to take all of us back to the days of those mothers and grandmothers who lived under the thumbs of their husbands and fathers.

Let’s make it personal

The more I thought about Betty’s story, and the stories of some of the women described in the Buzzfeed article, I wondered why these women didn’t just do the thing anyway.

Why didn’t Betty go out on Election Day and vote anyway, then tell her husband she was running errands? Why didn’t the women whose husbands wouldn’t let them wear makeup apply it surreptitiously in the car when they went out and clean it off before they got home? Why not get the tattoos or the ear piercings or learn to read and write and tell their husbands to shove off?

And when I stopped looking at it from an outsider’s perspective and started imagining myself in those shoes, I realized just how difficult it would be to do the thing.

To have to keep secrets. To try to hide. To sneak around behind a loved one’s back.

To be afraid not of anger or retribution, but of disappointing someone we care about.

So even for the women in those stories who had otherwise loving and compassionate husbands, I can see how it would be difficult to go against their husbands’ wishes. How hard it would be to bear the weight of secrets and lies. How it was easier to let go of the things they wanted in order to keep the peace.

How many of us have the kind of courage it would take to do the thing? To do it anyway, confidently own our choices, and face the censure?

After I thought about it that way, I had a lot more empathy for Betty and the women in those stories. I had a lot more respect for the way they never fully gave up on their dreams and goals, quietly holding onto their secret desires for years and years and years.

To finally do the thing — after decades of waiting, of suppressing — takes its own kind of courage.

Betty and those other women — the ones who got the tattoos and wore the pants and finally cast their ballot — don’t need our pity, but they certainly deserve our admiration.