The Woe in Woman

By Karlyle Tomms

She eloped across the county line at fourteen, lied about her age, and married a man almost twice her age. He probably would have been arrested in today's world, but in 1923, it was a different world for women and children, at least slightly different.

She came back and told her Pa, “I ran off and got married. What do you think of that?”

He said, “I think you have made your bed, and you are gonna lie in it.”

It was not an easy bed to lie in. No sooner had she moved in with my Grandpa and his family than she was burdened with taking care of the whole lot when they came down with scarlet fever. She says that’s when she learned to cook. Grandpa’s mother despised her. Grandma stole her little boy, the baby of the family who had never moved out, even at the age of 24.

By the time the Great Depression hit, they were trying to raise two children on the scruff of the Ozark Hills with another child on the way. There was barely enough for them to get by, so they went to the bottoms (flat land down around Memphis) to pick cotton. Granny gave birth to all five of her children at home, without a doctor and without the benefit of medication to soothe the pain. Grandpa didn’t realize it, never admitted it, maybe, but she was tougher than he was. Still, he controlled her, and she let him. He demanded so much control over her that the first check she ever signed on their joint checking account was to pay for his funeral.

Throughout their marriage, she did all her chores and half of his. She raised five children and did the laundry, cooking, house cleaning, canning, and gardening. Then she went to the fields with him, hoed and picked cotton, picked corn, mowed and hauled hay, milked the cows, and fed the chickens and pigs, and for this, she didn’t even get a thank you.

When I was five years old, my mother was killed, and they took me in to raise. They never contacted my father, and I didn’t even realize I had a father until a little later in life. The men in my life were my grandpa and my mother’s oldest brother, neither of whom, in my opinion, qualified as real men. My uncle had been the firstborn and only boy in the family, and at 33, when I came into the family, he had never married and had never left home. Granny cared for all three of us and considered it her divinely ordained duty. After all, the Bible says the man is the head of the household. In my opinion, the family took that a bit too far.

I grew up watching my grandma be a slave to my Grandpa and uncle, asking myself, “What’s wrong with this picture?” My uncle was drunk every weekend from Friday through Sunday, with a very rare exception. She paced the floors at night, waiting for him to come home, praying he would be okay because he would go straight to the liquor store on Friday night and start drinking as soon as he walked out. Sometimes he would drive the back roads and drink till after midnight before he came home. Sometimes, he didn’t come home at all. When he did come home, it could be guaranteed that he would drink all night. He would drink till the last drop was gone out of his bottles and start his sobering up sometime Saturday night. On Sunday, he rarely got out of bed. Sometimes he worked, and sometimes he didn’t. When he did work, more of his money went to whiskey than to help with the house or the farm. He never did a chore, except sometimes to help cut wood for the potbellied stove to heat the winter. I can’t remember him going to the barn to milk or the fields to work. He might have helped haul hay a few times, but that was about it.

Grandpa wasn’t much better. He had quit drinking before I came along, but there wasn’t much he contributed. If it hadn’t been for Granny, we would all have been lost. As I got older, I did what I could to help her, but until I matured and realized what was going on in the family, I resented my chores. More than anything, I resented being asked to do chores while my grandpa and uncle rarely left the front of the radio or television. I now realize I was learning the responsibility they never took. By the time I was in college, I had observed enough to realize there was something grossly wrong with my family dynamics. This whole idea that a woman had to serve a man or that she had to submit to him was something I couldn’t wrap my mind around. It was an idea that appeared utterly unfair to me. I could understand that if a man worked outside the home and brought home the only income, it might be fair for a woman to take care of the household and the children, but the opposite is also true. However, that wasn’t the case in my family, and what I grew up with was a magnifying glass on a problem that has gone on in the world for far too long.

When I was in college, I was home for the summer. Grandpa, Grandma, and I had gone to the back of the farm to cut wood for the potbellied stove while my uncle stayed home and did nothing. We would cut wood around the edge of the pastures and leave it to dry before hauling it to the house. That summer, we had finished work for the morning and were headed back to the house for lunch. Grandpa was driving the truck, I was sitting in the middle with my hands braced on the dashboard, and Granny was on the passenger’s side. Grass had grown up around one of the stumps left from the previous year’s cutting, so Grandpa didn’t know it was there until it hit the truck's drive train. The impact threw us forward, but Granny was the only one who was not braced in that old truck with no seat belts. Her head hit the windshield hard enough to crack it and leave a sizeable bump on her head. Grandpa didn’t even ask if she was okay. He merely backed the truck up, drove around the stump, and drove on up the lane to the house.

When we got to the house, I helped Granny out of the truck, into the house, and to her bed in the back bedroom. I then put ice in a damp washcloth for her to hold on the knot in her head. Grandpa sat down in his living room chair while I checked on her and tried to tend to her wound. After a while, he got up, walked to the back bedroom, stuck his head in the door, and said to her, “Ain’t you gonna fix me no dinner!” Dinner was what we called lunch in those days. There was breakfast, dinner, and supper.

At that point, I turned on him. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I told him, “Get your ass back in there and leave her alone! If you are too damn lazy to fix your own dinner, I will fix it for you later, but you leave her alone.”

He quietly turned, returned to the living room, and sat down. I have wondered what might have happened if I had not been there, but at that point in my life, I had had enough of watching him treat her like a piece of property instead of a wife and mother of his children, instead of a human being deserving respect, honor, and dignity.

Although my family may have been an extreme example, women rarely get the respect they deserve, and they are considered second-class citizens more often than not. Research shows that women, even today, typically have about 40% less leisure time than men. The glass ceiling still exists, and research also shows the continued discrepancy in pay for women when they have equal qualifications to men. I had a man from Zimbabwe tell me in 1979, “There will be a black man elected president of the United States before there will be a white woman.” I didn’t believe him at the time, but now I realize that what he was saying was a prophecy based on keen observation of how women in America are treated. What I have never been able to understand is why women are so disrespected. The prejudice toward women is very subtle, unlike the usually overt prejudice of racism. I have literally heard some men comment, “At least they don’t have to wear a burka and walk five paces behind their husband.” This is supposed to somehow excuse the fact that one of the wealthiest and what should be one of the most progressive countries in the world still lacks valid equal rights for women.

What is essential to understand here is that in every group that is subject to prejudice, there are those within the group who buy into the stereotype and buy into the expectation of their role as prescribed by outside society. Despite some of the most disrespectful behavior I have ever seen toward women, Donald Trump would not have been elected president had it not been for women voters. Many women themselves accept disrespect and double standards passively. This is the result of internalized misogyny resulting from the childhood indoctrination of both men and women. My grandmother accepted her role. She lived it and did not attempt to rebel. To her, it was a woman’s place. She lived what she had been taught her entire life and didn’t question it. I once asked her why she had never considered divorcing my grandfather when he was such a tyrant, and she said, “Because I made a commitment, for better or for worse.” I responded, “And all you got was worse.” However, truthfully, the chances of being able to leave him and live on her own were slim in those days. I had graduated from high school and started college before women could even open an account in their own name without a man co-signing. Women could still be discriminated against in renting properties, and let's never forget that, even today, regardless of what the law may say, the practice of discrimination can be quietly practiced under the table.

The problem with women is that too many of them passively accept their “role” and do not put forth the challenge necessary to make legitimate changes in American society. There are certain situations in which women have very little choice. A woman in a relationship with an abuser may be very limited by the fear that he will kill her if she tries to break free. However, it is important, even then, for women to understand that they often have other choices. They may need help to get out of an abusive relationship safely, but in most cities, even small towns, help is available. However, many abused women are too terrified to seek it.

As long as women buy into and perpetuate the myth that men are somehow better than they are, the mistreatment and lack of respect for women will continue. Many women treat their sons like princes to be worshiped rather than teaching them that they are equals to the opposite sex. Neither mothers nor fathers hold their sons accountable in too many cases. The hero worship of men, in which they get a free pass for sports and macho behavior, has to stop in order for women to find a place in society in which they can genuinely be considered equals. Both men and women have to stop worshiping masculinity in order for “rape culture” and misogyny to be eliminated.

Because the prejudice is more insidious and subtle, it will take more than the symbolic gesture of Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus for these changes to occur. It cannot happen without women themselves taking a good, hard look at their own internal belief systems. It will take challenging their own beliefs and then challenging those beliefs in others when they are subtly displayed. For years, gay people put up with the ridiculous question, “When did you know you were gay?” They began to ask, “When did you know you were straight?” People asking the question didn’t have a clue they were doing something offensive. They thought they accepted gay people, but, in truth, held the underlying belief that someone makes the choice one day. It will take something similar to that for women. Women and men who understand and affirm their equality will have to start questioning and challenging the double standards. This is about more than calling a woman a bitch if she is assertive or calling her a slut if she behaves as sexually open as a man does. This is about refusing to passively accept behavior in men that is degrading, disrespectful, or demeaning to women, no matter how subtle it may be. This is about challenging things that both men and women say, challenging the idea that it is okay to grab or touch anyone without at least their implied permission. It is about challenging the idea that women are less capable or as hard-working. It is about challenging rather than passively accepting, period!

My grandmother was smarter than my grandfather. She worked twice as hard and kept up with him every step of the way. She was a successful mother and housekeeper, a successful farmer and gardener. She had more potential in her little finger than he had in his whole body. Sometimes, I wonder what might have happened if she had grown up in a world where women were respected and given full equal rights and permissions to pursue whatever they wanted, including being a housewife or a sex symbol, if that were their passion, instead of being assigned to a man. Perhaps I wouldn’t be here to write this right now, but perhaps her life could have been far better than it was.