I actually don't think so, Cathy.
I actually found your words deeply distressing,, Cathy, because they brought up my mother's treatment as a child.
My Mother was undoubtedly an extremely intelligent woman. She got the top grade in the State of Victoria in English in HSC and was thus offered a full scholarship to the University of Melbourne - a scholarship that would pay for her accommodation AND course fees for five years. It would have made her totally independent. It would have nurtured her deep curiosity, the poetry within her being that her children NEVER got to see.
Her father forbad her taking of the scholarship, and crushed her intellectual flowering.
In the same year, she met an Italian man Roberto. She NEVER told me about this relationship, but i found letters between her and Roberto many years ago. There were deep, sincere and tender feelings both ways. Okay, maybe she was young and probably the relationship wouldn't have worked owing to her naïvity, but Roberto wrote to her with respect and grace and love, in a tone that i had NEVER heard or seen my father use. Shockingly, my Mother dated my father on the rebound, and his forename is the anglicized version of Roberto. I think there is tragedy far beyond co-incidence there.
My Mother's father forced her to disown Roberto, physically throwing him out of their home.
Having crushed her intellectual flowering, he crushed her emotional flowering too.
There was nothing much left of my Mum, really, ever again after that. She was cold, and numb, and schizoid ever after.
After suffering this unspeakable pain and betrayal, my Mother had to bear my father's disempowerment. He strove to disempower her in every way. It was totally normal male behavior then, and the world felt like a warzone to me. He constantly threatened to "get a doctor" to my Mum - there was this clear, dark undertone that a "doctor" was of course a sectioning psychiatrist. Like almost everything else my father said, there was a built-in, plausible deniability.
It did my head in as a child - i first recall the threat when i was about six years old, and the disconnect did my head in - the disconnect between the threat in my father's tone and the obvious, surface layer child's interpretation that one calls a doctor when one is worried about some one or cares for them.
AS i grew older, hearing my mother reminded of this threat several times a year, and i gleaned ever more of the foreboding and evil undertones. It is horrifying for a child to witness his mother's treatment in this way.
Moverover, he forbad my Mum to work. Her intellect needed an outlet, so she studied to be a nurse, an option that would pay her to learn. She took higher training courses in coronary care and other specialties.
My father, like most men, forbad her to work. She would occasionally find contracts as i got older, and the violence that that evoked in my father was terrifying.
These traits of men well within living memory were normal and accepted behavior in Australia at least up until about 1985. They are even a trope in Australian Film. "The Dressmaker" depicts them in the Mayor.
It was wonderful when Kate Winslet's character torched her own town.
I don't think we can yet afford to forget that a mere generation ago, disempowerment utterly destroyed every meaningful thread of women's lives.
I see you have tagged this article with "Intimate Partner Violence". Even though you don't explicitly mention violence in the sense that many people would understand, i know from the memories of my Mum, especially, why you did that.
