We visit a lot of historical sites, it’s our thing to be curious about why things have turned out as they are, and history provides a great perspective in understanding ideology and structure. I’ve said in previous posts that I think belief underpins ideology, but what of the situations that these ideologies create that affect real people in different times?
A lot of history is unkind to women, I, like my partner Em, am a feminist according to the description in the dictionary – a person who believes that men and women have the same rights and should be treated equally. That does not mean we believe in skewed advantages being created to make that which is naturally unequal, look in fact equal. Inequality, the non financial type, is just a fact of life because people are different, and to intervene is to create artificial prejudices that then are a form of inequality that are not natural or justifiable. Em is my intellectual equal, she is often my emotional superior, but I am physically stronger and more able than she is and there is nothing either of us can do to change that. By many measures Em is a superior person to me, but it depends on the criteria. What is important is not what is measured, but the right to be considered equally valuable to each other and society as a whole.
Recently we were reading an information board at a historical location, all about a woman who was punished for killing her spouse by poisoning after decades of physical and mental abuse, and she was hanged for it. We found ourselves both being on the side of the woman and thinking that what she had done should not even have been considered a crime because what else could she have done under the circumstances? She couldn’t leave because she had nowhere to go and no income, she could not appeal to authority because she was in this part of history a possession of her husband and it was not a crime for her to abuse his possessions. She could not appeal to the church as they would have blamed her for her husband’s behaviour (before you argue that point, go get a bible and read it). This woman had to chose between two options, kill him to end the abuse, or put up with it, there was nothing else. Now if you beat your dog every day of it’s life, and then one day it bites you out of anger, are you at fault. or is it?
Another woman, same place, different time, is in abject poverty following the death of her child’s father, but she is still a young attractive woman. A gentleman wishes to marry her and offers to lift her out of her circumstances if she will do away with the child he is not willing to raise. This woman is starving, and so is her child, so she does the unthinkable. She is caught committing this act, and even though her actions are a result of the man who made her make a choice she could not be thought to be in sane mind to do, it was her that hanged, and he went unpunished. What else was she to do, what choice did she have, who engineered this situation to be this way? If he had not insisted then her choice would not have been forced, something else would have had to be done instead, maybe not this outcome.
We move on to another historic site, this one is from a more recent era, but it still gets us thinking again about the sometimes impossible choices that women have had to make to survive. When the Nazis invaded countries in Europe and took them over they had to subordinate the people of those countries, and the people of those countries, particularly the men, were expected to continue to resist the occupation. Now this is fine from a historical perspective because men are deemed to be useful in tasks that will continue to need to be done in the occupied land. The Nazis were not about to move their own workforce to the occupied area to farm and produce, so they let the men continue to do so under supervision. The women were not so valued, so their task was to please the occupying army. It is not a pleasant thought to entertain in the mind the sexual needs of a large military force away from home and missing wives and girlfriends, but it is a necessary one to think about when understanding what women had to endure, and likely have had to endure in every conflict in history to some extent. Men tend not to be the object of desire for these occupying forces.
My question is this…. what would you do to survive? Maybe knowing that conflict will end, but having no idea who will win in the end (and remember the Nazis were only narrowly beaten, maybe because they made a mistake in trying to invade Russia, for a long time it looked like they could win), yet you have to do something? What would you look like to the side that won if you had made survival based decisions, a collaborator, a victim, an opportunist? We often celebrate those that have perished and look unfavourably at those that survived by capitulation, but what good is that celebration to those dead people when their lives were not lived?
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