Elizabeth Abbott2013-06-19T22:48:48-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=elizabeth-abbottCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Elizabeth AbbottGood old fashioned elbow grease.Eternal Happiness In A Wedding Dresstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11797412012-01-09T02:39:45-05:002012-03-09T05:12:01-05:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
These (often frenzied) preparations include a determined search for the right location, the right ambiance, the right rings, the right dress. Often a bride already knows exactly how she wants to look on her wedding day, if only she can find that perfect dress and its accessories.
But almost certainly she will not be expecting that her wedding dress will inspire some of the world's greatest art. Or that her husband will continually re-imagine it as he shares the joy of their marriage in oil paint on canvas.
Yet that is exactly what happened to Russian Bella Rosenfeld-Chagall when, four years after their nuptials on the rainy evening of July 25, 1915, her painter-husband Marc Chagall stunned the art world with his Double Portrait with Wine Glass, a portrait of the couple in wedding garb that, nearly a century later, is considered "the most lyrical representation of connubial bliss ever put to canvas."
How did Bella's wedding dress translate onto her husband's canvases? Double Portrait (1917) makes it long-sleeved and décolleté, worn over purple undergarments that match her fan, while Marc, resplendent in red jacket and green shirt, rides on her shoulders and waves a wine glass.
But in Wedding (1918), Bella's dress is primly high-collared, her veil long and her hand gloved, in keeping with Marc's conventional suit and hat. In a distant tree branch, a fiddler plays, while hovering above and embracing the newlyweds is the red-winged figure of Ida, their little daughter, born in 1916.
What kind of wedding united such a blissfully happy couple? What lessons can we draw from the Chagalls?
The first was the depth, strength and confidence of their love. They first met when Bella was fourteen, Marc twenty-one. It was love at first sight, and it lasted forever.
But beautiful Bella was a mere adolescent, Marc a struggling artist, and they came from vastly different social and economic classes. The six years it took them to overcome these problems only deepened their love and strengthened their commitment to each other.
Marc was the oldest of nine children, whose hardworking father, did "hellish work" as a herring monger while his mother sold groceries from their home. Bella, however, the youngest daughter of a wealthy man who owned three jewellery stores, was well-educated and raised in luxury.
The Rosenfelds' disapproval reinforced Chagall's determination to make a name for himself as an artist, so that he could support a family. Thanks to a Russian patron, Chagall spent several years in art-rich Paris, studying and painting until he accumulated an impressive portfolio.
At the same time he thought "night and day" of Bella and, always faithful to her, refrained from sampling Paris' fleshly delights. Instead, he focused on mastering his art and establishing himself as a painter and selling paintings.
His persistence and Bella's loyalty paid off. In 1915, back home in Vitebsk, the Rosenfelds succumbed to his arguments that he would make Bella a good husband.
But the wedding arrangements suited only the Rosenfelds, who planned and paid for it. Marc arrived very late, and overheard guests gossiping about him - "Who is his father?" one snob wondered aloud - and he mocked how gluttonously they eyed the wedding feast.
The wedding and its accoutrements - including the gown that came to symbolize their marriage - - were unimportant in themselves. What mattered was the romantic love, personal respect, deepest mutual commitment, shared values and unremitting hard work that enabled these extraordinary lovers to unite in an idyllic marriage that endured for twenty-nine years, until Bella's death.
]]>A Pig's Sanctuarytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10211022011-10-24T13:14:13-04:002011-12-24T05:12:01-05:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/Snooters, a farm animal sanctuary in Ontario, Canada, solved the problem by bringing Belle into their home.
It takes only minutes to become accustomed to a pig scampering around the room, which is decorated with pig artwork and statuettes. What about housetraining? "Oh, she goes to the door when nature calls," Susan explains but adds wryly that Belle doesn't squeal to get your attention and if you don't happen to notice her at the door, she'll try to hide her tinkle in the living room rug.
The Morris' first indoor pig was also the first porcine denizen of Snooters: Gracie, a Yorkshire, a common breed in factory farms like the one she was born into. Gracie was born tiny and suffered the usual fate of struggling piglets: rejection by her mother and siblings. When she then gashed her leg, the farm staff did not bother to treat it. Why spend time and money on a worthless piglet when they could just dispatch her by "thumping?"
What, you may wonder, is thumping? Just what it suggests: grabbing the little creature by her back legs and bashing her brains out against the concrete floor, killing her. But before little Gracie could be thumped, a sympathetic worker smuggled her out in her handbag, and the little piglet entered Susan and Brian's life.
When they met Gracie, she was three-weeks-old and ill with a Streptococcus suis infection. The Morrises treated her with high-dose antibiotics, but this kind of strep can cause arthritis, and in Gracie's case it did. Today, at nearly 800 pounds, Gracie is afflicted with a swollen, arthritic front leg. Perhaps that's what also makes her so unpredictable, sometimes affectionate and sweet but sometimes an angry pig who likes nothing better than to chase and bite her human caretakers.
But for the first months of her life, until she weighed in at 250 pounds, Gracie lived inside the house. It wasn't easy. The problem wasn't cleanliness; Gracie was fully housetrained. But she was an obsessive foodie, and if she thought there was food under the sofa, she'd upend it and dump all the contents onto the floor. Susan and Brian took to sneaking snacks and running with them into their bedroom, slamming and locking the door so that Gracie, snorting and pawing and slamming her large body against it, couldn't get in before they finished eating.
But neither "Inner Sanctum" Gracie nor Belle was Snooters' first pig. That was Valentine, the pot-bellied pig "who started it all," Susan says, adding ruefully, "Have I ever evolved! I bought Valentine from a breeder and then learned all about pigs and their background, especially the gruesome factory farms where "thumping" piglets to death is standard procedure." Thanks to Valentine, Susan and Brian became pig-savvy and slowly transformed their charming country retreat into Snooters Pig Sanctuary.
Snooters now has a dozen pigs, nine pot-bellies rescued from humane societies, and three (including Gracie) rescued from factory farms. Shy and sweet Forrest and his more dominant brother Earl are potbellies rescued from a backyard breeder who sold his "wares" to people holding private BBQs. When Susan bought them, the breeder grabbed them by the legs and, as their mother watched silently, carried them upside down to the car, where he threw them into crates. Before Susan drove off with her precious cargo, she approached the sad-faced sow and told her, "They are forever safe."
Poppy and Flossy are Yorkshires from factory farms, Flossy saved from slaughter only because of her unusual looks: large flat ears, and one brown and one blue eye. From the piggly perspective, Flossy was low on the pecking order, ate only leftover food and was, in Susan's words, "one very sad little girl" until a sympathetic worker saved her. Flossy was an injured piglet who, like Gracie, was rescued just before she was to be thumped. She is now healed and healthy, a "close talker" and just a tad pushy.
These fortunate pigs share their rural haven with other animals: two horses, Harley and Dolly, rescued from slaughterhouses, two Jersey bull cows rescued from a dairy farm and doomed by their gender to be bobby calves slaughtered days after birth or raised as veal calves, arguably a worse fate. One of them, Ashli Taylor, arrived with his umbilical cord still intact.
There are also two sheep, Timmy and Tommy, and ten battery hens known as "The Girls." During a recent visit, one of The Girls watched a visitor sweeping the henhouse stairs then waddled over and brushed away the remaining bits of hay, finishing the job.
For its animal residents, Snooters is a sanctuary. For visitors, Snooters is a living reminder of what an animal's life can be, how enterprising and energetic a battery hen can be, how clever and fun-loving a pig, how jolly and playful a horse or a sheep. Inside Snooters, the horror of factory farms and slaughter recedes; it provides respite and serenity to the animal rescuers but also hope and relief to those who despair about humanity's treatment of its fellow animals. As a Snooters' plaque proclaims, "Wonderful Things Happen Here." ]]>Why Wives Can't Have Misterstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10023972011-10-19T03:30:47-04:002011-12-18T05:12:01-05:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/ infidelity is a constant theme in the history of marriage, and has never been restricted to husbands. Wives, too, have always strayed outside the marital bed; some even transformed that marital bed into the setting for extramarital trysts. But even infidelity was riddled with gender discrepancies.
In the past, though a husband might have a mistress, an adulterous wife's lover could not be the male equivalent -- a mister. The reason? In an unequal society, a woman's relationship with her lover would necessarily reflect her inferior status just as her husband's reflected his superior one. She could not, therefore, replicate with her lover the non-sexual elements of a man's relationship with his mistress.
Let's look at how this was translated into acknowledged infidelities of past eras. An earlier post described two accepted 18th century versions of infidelity among patrician wives: in England, where extramarital sex but not pregnancy was tolerated, and in Italy, where the inventive institution of cavalier servente encouraged emotional intimacy but outlawed sex. In neither country could the philandering wife enjoy the balance of power and legal and social protections that a man could with a mistress. In England, the cheating wife became her lover's mistress. In Italy, the (theoretically) faithful wife's devoted companion was known as her amicus or friend. Even in these relatively relaxed arrangements, there was no room for lovers, much less Misters.
Why was this so? Why was the goose denied something that was so good for the gander? The culprit is the double standard that reflected society's perception of men and women and, on that basis, granted men many rights and privileges inaccessible to women. Until recently, the double standard was at the basis of most of our laws. In other words, the double standard that inspired and facilitated Mistressdom is an impenetrable block to a parallel institution of Misterdom.
This is by no means a bad thing. The double standard, now largely uprooted by egalitarianism, was pernicious. By ensuring that a mistress had no claim on her lover's estate and by bastardizing children born out of wedlock, the double standard pitted woman against woman and ensured that husbands could cheat with very few consequences.
Nor was the double standard restricted to sex. It extended from politics and law to society and culture. As democracy developed, the double standard engendered laws that deprived women of votes by decreeing that that they had no legal existence outside their husband's or their father's. The double standard colored "science," which taught that women's intellects are different and inferior. It dictated educational norms, and directed women away from the "difficult" and "manly" studies of mathematics and medicine.
The logic of the double standard also made it necessary to characterize and legally define women as inferior and sexually cold as a means of forcing them to remain in even intolerable marriages. Because of this, even a woman trapped in an arranged marriage with an ailing, absent, aged or alcohol-dazed husband could not find comfort in a mister; her partner in an extramarital affair would be a lover or, if she rewarded him with gifts, scorned as a gigolo, a male who prostituted himself to women.
Yet women risked often drastic consequences in search of the emotional and/or sexual satisfaction that marriage was not intended to supply them. And when they were caught being unfaithful, the double standard was applied in harsh judgement against them.
This, then, is why wives cannot have Misters; the internal logic of the double standard that designed Mistressdom is rooted in the ideal of empowering men by disempowering women, making it impossible to create Misterdom as a parallel.
Furthermore, today's egalitarian attitudes and laws have so fundamentally altered the nature of Mistressdom that it no longer resembles its historical model. The Mistress and any children she may bear her lover are no longer excluded as legitimate claimants against his property and his earnings. At the same time his wife may cite his relationship with his mistress as grounds for divorce. The title is the same, but the power structure that once anchored it has been fundamentally altered, leaving Mistressdom a sorry anachronistic misnomer in an egalitarian world.
And so in liberating women from the double standard and uprooting the institutions it fostered and nourished, egalitarianism has struck down the possibility of developing an ungendered new version of Mistressdom, even one designed for women and called Misterdom. That could happen only if women were to forsake equality and subjugate men, and that would be as grave a travesty as their own subjugation once was.]]>The Skin Will Make You Jump Out of Yours!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9678542011-09-19T19:13:28-04:002011-11-19T05:12:01-05:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/The Skin, a full-length feature film screened at Toronto's CaribbeanTales Film Festival as part of its North American/European-wide tour. The fourth film by husband-and-wife team Howard and Mitzi Allen, The Skin is a supernatural thriller steeped in Caribbean folkloric mysticism made doubly eerie by its seemingly normal setting in a fine villa in modern Antigua.
Plot-wise, paying that villa's mortgage is young couple Lisa and Michael Fenton's driving concern as the bank moves to foreclose on them. But despite Lisa's determined efforts to raise money, even a yard sale of all their household belongings added to photographer Michael's assignments, they always fall short.
Their luck changes (for the scarier!) when Michael happens upon a centuries-old vase buried deep in the ruins of Betty's Hope, a former sugar estate. (Spoiler alert: he notices it while peeing in the woods after a photo shoot there.) Lisa scrubs the filthy vase clean, rinses out its disgusting and unidentifiable contents, and Michael sells it to Felix, an expatriate antique dealer, for enough money to acquit their mortgage and indulge in a clothes-shopping spree.
And that's when the normalcy of the everyday world spins into the mystery of the demonic past, and the thoroughly modern Fentons make the terrifying acquaintance of a soucouyant, an evil spirit disguised by day as a gruesome crone who strips off her skin at night and assumes the form of a fireball to penetrate random victims' homes in search of blood or a baby she can sacrifice.
Lisa remains sceptical about things supernatural. But when the mystic Vision arrives from Jamaica to work counter-magic, her unbelief is a sharp counterpoint to the escalating nightly terror wrought by the enraged soucayant in an increasingly frenzied search for her skin.
The Skin's special effects are as sophisticated and otherworldly as the dialogue is simple and matter-of-fact. This is a triumph (among many) in a film produced for the stupendously low dollar figure of US $100,000. It is also a tribute to Mitzi Allen's producer's genius, who ensured that every dollar earned by product placement, from rolls of Cottonelle in the bathroom to a whirlwind shopping spree and fashion show in Antiguan clothing shops, was stretched to gossamer thinness.
The characters were ably acted by emerging Antiguan actors (Aisha Ralph as Lisa, Brent Simon as Michael) and renowned Jamaican actors Carl Bradshaw (Vision) and Peter Williams (Detective Morgan) and Scottish actor Jeff Stewart (Felix). Antiguan dancer and choreographer Veron Stoute Humphreys, who made a sensational acting debut as the soucayant, deserves special mention. All played to the gently sardonic humour - a brief closeup of the supercilious, womanizing detective as he gazed at Lisa's shapely ass, the big For Sale sign at film's end - that provoked rollicking belly-laughs from the delighted audience. It served as well to heighten the contrast between the tranquillity of today's Antigua and the roiling, danger-filled Antigua of yesteryear, when the slavery and brutality of the sugar world ruled the land.
"I wanted," director Howard Allen explained, "to tell the story of Caribbean folklore and history as simply as possible, without recrimination and retribution." The post-screening outpouring of applause and congratulations from audience members, men and women who jumped up and declared their pride in his achievements, were proof of his success. By juxtaposing a narrative that was a combination of thriller and supernatural drama, Allen has developed a confident, laconic cinematic style that speaks volumes to his passion and commitment.]]>If He Has a Mistress, Why Can't She Have... A Mister?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9663322011-09-19T12:15:59-04:002011-11-19T05:12:01-05:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
This is by no means a new notion. In 1778, Lady Julia Stanley -- the protagonist of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire's novel "The Sylph" -- muses that her husband has had a mistress since their wedding day and asks plaintively, "What law excludes a woman from doing the same?"
The simple answer was the law of the double standard that tolerated adultery in husbands but condemned it in wives -- the law of England, indeed, the law of most lands. In an era of marriages contracted as either commercial or family alliances, when (in Lady Julia's words) "the heart [was] not consulted," this law was particularly onerous.
Georgiana played by these rules. Whenever she seemed likely to stray, her controlling mother reined her in. It didn't matter that her husband's new mistress, Bess Foster, was her closest friend. Only after Georgiana had produced an heir could she decently look outside her marriage for the personal fulfillment so egregiously lacking inside it.
That happy day came when Georgiana delivered William Hartington "Hart" Spencer, her third child and first son, the longed-for heir who (she rejoiced) freed her from marital bondage. She began a passionate love affair with the much younger politician, Charles Grey. But Grey was not her mister. Rather, she had become his mistress.
Then Georgiana broke a cardinal rule -- she became pregnant by Grey -- and her furious husband forced her to choose. If she did not break off with Grey, she would never again see her children. Georgiana's capitulation was immediate. Terrified and contrite, she renounced mistressdom and resumed her life as an unloved, cuckolded wife.
In Italy, the talented and beautiful Teresa Guiccioli, teenage wife of the very wealthy sixty-year-old Count Alessandro Guiccioli, had a similarly difficult marriage. But before she provided the Count with an heir, Teresa fell profoundly in love with the charismatic and equally smitten expatriate English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron.
They had sex almost immediately. Teresa's maid helped cover their tracks. A priest acted as their go-between. Their affair invoked the unreality of Italian opera -- assignations in gliding gondolas and charming, out-of-the-way villas, and long, long hours in bed. Soon, Byron proposed that they run away together.
Teresa was shocked. Did Byron not know that in Italy, a wife could have both a husband and a cavalier servente, an eternally faithful, devoted (though chaste) lover? Teresa could have Byron and Guiccioli together -- as long as they pretended that she and Byron were not sexual partners.
The institution of cavalier servente did not challenge the husband's dominance in marriage. As in England, a wife was supposed to produce her husband's heir. Afterward, she was free to cavort with an amico -- a "friend" or soulmate who would accompany her to plays, churches and elsewhere. But unlike his English counterpart, the amico was forbidden to have sex with her.
The supposedly sex-starved amico also had to swear eternal fidelity to his mistress and promise never to marry or to leave Italy. (Priests were a favorite choice, for their vows of celibacy precluded marriage with anyone.) This arrangement also protected the husband; should he die, his merry widow could never marry her amico. Murder, or suspicious accidents aka "Divorce, Italian Style" could not change the amico's status. A husband's demise was no reason -- or excuse -- for his wife's platonic relationship to become a sexual one.
The wife's conduct was carefully regulated. She could see her amico in her home but not in his. She could invite him to theatrical productions in her family's box but not join him in his. She was bound forever to her husband, and she and her amico had to display admiration and affection for him, and never shame or dishonor him or his family's name or, for that matter, her father's.
So how did cavalier servente work for Teresa? First, Guiccioli "borrowed" a large sum of money from Byron, then invited him to move into their palace where eighteen servants spied on the lovers and made sexual trysts nearly impossible. Guiccioli also noisily exercised his husbandly right to sex with Teresa, making Byron intensely jealous.
As the affair deteriorated, Byron complained that a man should not be hobbled to a woman, and that his "existence [as a cavalier servente] is to be condemned." Weary of the conflict and rancor, and no longer "furiously in love," Byron left Italy -- and Teresa -- forever. Teresa grieved. In breaking the rules that forbid a cavalier servente from abandoning his mistress, Byron had broken her heart and humiliated her. Soon after, her unhappy marriage failed.
Georgiana and Teresa were exceptional women in unexceptional marriages, and their experiences were typical of those of legions of dissatisfied and unhappy wives who struggled for a modicum of relief from the constraints of their arranged marriages. The English assumed sex would occur but penalized its consequences; the Italians permitted socializing and companionship couched in terms of medieval courtly love, but forbid sex. Both imposed strict standards of decorum that upheld husbandly authority. Both systems were, in other words, based on hypocritical premises and for most women, could only work when practiced in the breach.
Our egalitarian society has yet to improve on these 18th century pioneering models by devising a way to respond to today's realities. More than two centuries later the challenge still resonates: If a husband can have a mistress, why can't his wife have a mister? ]]>Why Mistresses Have Everything to do with Marriagetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9457332011-09-02T02:04:07-04:002011-11-01T05:12:01-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
For every diamond Stephen bought his latest mistress, he had to buy one for her. So his love nest hatched a glittering nest egg of rings, earrings, brooches and uncut gems, which Minnie bequeathed to her female descendants.
My great-grandfather walked a well-trodden path, and that's why I wrote Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman as the central book in my historical relationship trilogy that includes A History of Celibacy and A History of Marriage. Mistressdom, in fact, has everything to do with marriage. It's an institution parallel and complementary to marriage, and it evolved to accommodate the sexual double standard that tolerates adultery in husbands but condemns it in wives. Like celibacy, mistressdom offers a fascinating perspective into how women relate to men other than in marriage.
Mistresses, it seems, are everywhere. One U.K. reviewer was startled to find the painful story of the end of her own first marriage on page four of my book. Bel Mooney's husband, British radio present Jonathan Dimbleby, suddenly plunged into a dramatic and obsessive affair with the magnificent soprano, Susan Chilcott, who was terminally ill with cancer. Against her anguished pleas that her very new lover consider his own well-being and not ruin his life for her, Dimbleby vowed to care for her until she died, and moved in with her and her little son. "I still do not adequately understand the intensity of passion and pity that animated my decision," he said later. "It felt like an unstoppable force." Yet he also "felt absolutely torn" about being away from Bel and their decades-long, happy marriage.
Less than three months after her last public performance, playing Desdemona and singing sorrowfully, her voice rising to a crescendo, "Ch'io viva ancor, ch'io viva ancor!" (Let me live longer, let me live longer!) Susan died. But a grieving Jonathan did not return to Bel and their tattered marriage unravelled into divorce.
My retelling of their story, Bel wrote, "was a reminder that there are no easy generalisations about this subject." But she did offer this perspective: "I admit to a suspicion that most men are susceptible to temptation. Show me a loyal husband and I'll show you one who's never had a real opportunity to stray."
Well, not all loyal husbands lack opportunity, but as Bel Mooney's personal experience suggests, opportunity is all too often irresistible. Remember when President Clinton was under attack for his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky? We discovered later that as Reverend Jesse Jackson piously counseled and prayed for Clinton, he was also cheating on his wife with a mistress who was carrying his child. And Clinton's self-righteous prosecutor, Newt Gingrich, was secretly pursuing a passionate relationship with Callista Bisek, whom he married after divorcing his wife, Marianne.
Both Jackson and Gingrich mistook the waning years of the 20th century for an earlier era, when mistressdom was the familiar handmaiden of marriage. That was clear when Jackson's mistress, lawyer Karin Stanford, successfully sued him for child support. After millennia of protecting marriage by bastardizing the offspring of mistresses, indeed even making it difficult for men to recognize and provide for their "outside" children, our new laws essentially "outlaw" the concept of illegitimacy; they also demand parental accountability. Gingrich made another kind of mistake: he gambled on keeping his affair a secret but six years into it, he got caught. The values of the media world were also changing, and the man who had been angling to run for president on a platform of "family values" had to settle for divorcing his wife so he could marry his mistress.
The values of the media world were also changing, and the man who had been angling to run for president on a platform of "family values" had to settle instead for divorcing his wife so he could become his mistress's new husband.
Mistresses are not always ruinous to their lovers' marriages. Some people believe that love affairs enrich and enliven marriage. Frenchmen, for example, can justify the cinq à sept, the after-office-hours rendezvous a man enjoys with his mistress, by quoting French writer Alexandre Dumas's pithy observation: "The chains of marriage are so heavy that it often takes two people to carry them, and sometimes three."
The British multibillionaire Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, who died surrounded by his wife, ex-wives and mistresses, had another take on marriage and mistressdom: "When a man marries his mistress," Goldsmith opined, "he creates an automatic job vacancy."
In today's North America, when most marriages are rooted in mutual love and compatibility, mistresses pose a different and often greater threat to marriages. This was not always so. In the days of arranged marriages, when parents selected their children's spouses for economic reasons or to cement family, business or political alliances, romantic love was considered an irrelevant, self-indulgent and even treacherous foundation for marriage. Husbands and wives were expected to cohabit and operate as an economic unit, and to produce and raise children. They were not expected to adore one another or to fulfill each other's emotional needs. Though some spouses developed romantic feelings for each other, usually respect and camaraderie were as much as anyone could hope for, and many marriages were desperately unhappy. This was the context that prompted all but the most puritanical societies to tolerate the tradition of mistresses who enabled men to satisfy their romantic and lustful urges.
The times they are a'changing, and so is the nature of marriage and therefore of mistressdom. Laws and institutions are more egalitarian. Birth control is effective and accessible. Modern mistresses are less likely to depend financially on their lovers. Much more often they fall in love, usually with married men unwilling to divorce and regularize the relationship. The alternative to breaking up is the insecurity of the status quo. Many mistresses accept it but hope that somehow, someday, their liaison will be legitimized through marriage. Today as in the past, the two institutions are inextricably linked.
]]>Haiti's Young Men on Motorbikestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9263252011-08-15T15:12:19-04:002011-10-15T05:12:02-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/tremblement, the earthquake that killed countless people and devastated so much of the country. The destruction was immediately evident. On both sides of the airport road, settlements of uniform grey tents were pitched close. In the crammed capital of Port-au-Prince that was once my home, I saw the rubble and ruins, and more appalling encampments of tattered tents. Amputees, most victims of the earthquake, hobbled by on crutches or sticks. Streetside vendors crouched beside their wares outside storefronts that ran the gamut from wretchedly battered to freshly painted. Pedestrians hurried through the streets, a melange of humanity: half-naked men straining and sweating under too-heavy loads, smartly-dressed women in high heels, Madame Sarahs balancing massive baskets on their heads, schoolchildren in neat uniforms. There were also idle loungers, groups of young men gabbing, gesticulating, swigging bottled drinks, sharing Comme Il Faut cigarettes.
Haiti has an extraordinarily high percentage of youth in the population, 35.9 per cent under fourteen (it's 16.8% in Canada) , with a median age of 21.1 for males, 21.6 for females (38.6 and 40.4 in Canada). The contingent that really caught my eye was the army of young males on motorbikes, riding with the cockiness of immaturity exacerbated by the frustration of travel on Haiti's miserable roads.
Many of them operate as unofficial taxis, transporting customers one by one. In a country near infrastructural collapse, they are an important part of the private sector -- and only -- transportation system. As part of their scramble to pay for and fuel their bikes, they offer an affordable service that on mountainous Haiti's twisting, gutted roads, is often the only alternative to drudging on foot or mounting the rubbed-raw back of a thirsty, overburdened mule or pony.
First, some context: motorbikes proliferate throughout the developing world. Price-wise, they clobber all competition from bigger vehicles. They consume much less fuel and are easier to maintain and repair. They can navigate roads impassible in other vehicles and if they encounter unbreachable obstacles, it's fairly easy to pick them up and haul them to the nearest drivable spot. The earthquake prompted a rush on motorcycle sales and rentals as foreign aid workers thronged Haiti's roadways. The U.S. Haiti Motorcycle Project was devoted to facilitating aid delivery.
But in Haiti as elsewhere, this reliance on motorbikes exacts a terrible toll in the high incidence of traffic accidents. Statistics are unavailable, but anecdotal evidence of carnage is ubiquitous. On a single day, an accident involving two motorcycles occurred before my eyes. Minutes later, a third one crashed into a ditch feet away. On another occasion, an emergency department physician at the Hôpital Saint-Michel, the southeastern city of Jacmel's sole hospital, confirmed the frequency and severity of these accidents. I was there, as it happened, assisting and translating for my travelling companion, a Canadian doctor summoned by the frantic relative of a young man lying speechless and unmoving hours after a horrific motorbike accident.
Motorized two-wheelers are inherently riskier to drive than larger vehicles, and their young male drivers are disproportionately injured. But in Haiti other factors contribute and they speak to Haiti's weak government and near-absent infrastructure.
First, the condition of the nation's roads is abysmal and not just because of the earthquake. They are seldom maintained and many lack their asphalt covering. Side streets and rural roads are often beaten earth. Drainage is inadequate and heavy rains transform roads into slippery and muddy tracks. Even main thoroughfares lack lighting. Potholes and fallen trees or rocks obstruct roads for days or longer, forcing traffic to swerve around them. Guard rails, road signs, lane lines and traffic lights are rare. Other hazards are the sheer mass of people who, for want to sidewalks, throng the roads and often dart across them. Goats, dogs and pigs meander up and down. In the countryside, so do cows and donkeys.
Drivers (including motorbikers) do not make things easier. They are lax about observing rules of the road, including speed limits, keeping to the right lane, passing and right of way, which are seldom if ever enforced. Vehicles, many groaning under overload, are not properly maintained and corrupt inspectors issue safety certificates in return for bribes that cost less than repairs. On treacherous mountain roads, brakes fail and vehicles slide backwards, slamming into others or over cliffs unprotected by guard rails. Broken lights and malfunctioning horns are common so that in night-time, which falls early in Haiti, vehicles may be invisible to each other until just before they collide. In hours-long traffic jams, oil leaks and gas runs out, stalling vehicles. Some drivers forestall gas shortages by carrying containers of sloshing gasoline in their trunks. The appalling roads puncture tires, creating a huge commerce of tire-repairers set up everywhere at roadside stalls.
As if this were not enough, the young drivers have no qualms driving without a license. They seldom wear helmets, those expensive and aesthetically uncool barriers to bashed-in skulls. They speed, listen to loud music through earplugs that mask traffic noises, fail to signal what they intend to do, refuse to cede to other drivers. The first accident I witnessed was caused by a pair of motorbikes slamming into a truck from a side road; the young drivers had not bothered to slow down before racing onto the main road.
Motorbikers constitute a minority (albeit a substantial one) of their demographic, and in many ways resemble their counterparts all over the world and participate in delivering the essential service of transportation. But thanks to Haiti's minimal official oversight or enforcement of what laws and rules of the road do exist, they live on the edge and continually put their own and their passengers' lives at risk. In a nation whose young people are its greatest resource, surely such potential should not be so recklessly squandered.]]>Gay Marriage, Gay Parents: What About the Children?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8964382011-07-14T10:30:46-04:002011-09-13T05:12:02-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
Other, more child-centered questions include: Is it better to have two parents rather than one, even if both are fathers or mothers? Are gay parents likelier than heterosexuals to abuse their children? Will their children suffer more bullying or ostracism? What happens in case of divorce -- which mother or father gets custody, and under what sort of arrangement? Because the nature of gay marriage means that only one -- and often neither -- spouse is the child's biological parent, custody disputes are inherently more challenging.
More complicating still can be impregnation by sperm donors whose role the law, if not all the individuals involved, may interpret as fatherhood. The children may handily navigate their relationships, but defining them within the context of social and legal norms, and without apparent precedent, is not easy.
There's one thing it's difficult to dispute: the children of gay parents are not victims. Almost all studies, even those whose authors do not couch their premises in gay-friendly terms, conclude that gay parenting is pretty well comparable to its heterosexual equivalent. A quartet of Brigham Young University scholars, for example, conclude that "adolescents raised by gay and lesbian parents typically behave more like youth in two parent biological families, providing little support for gendered-deficit theories." Charlotte Patterson's comprehensive 2005 study for the American Psychological Association interpreted three decades of research comparing lesbian and gay parents to heterosexual parents and concluded:
The results ... are quite clear ... Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents. ... Lesbian mothers' and gay fathers' parenting skills may be superior to those of matched heterosexual couples ... This was attributed to greater parenting awareness among lesbian nonbiological mothers than among heterosexual fathers. ... In contrast to ... the majority of American parents, very few lesbian and gay parents reported any use of physical punishment (such as spanking) as a disciplinary technique.
Good, stable lesbian mothers provide good, stable parenting, and lesbians are happier raising children than gay men or straight couples. Their children seem to establish closer relationships with their non-biological or second mother than stepchildren do with stepmothers in straight marriages. Few are deeply wounded if other children query them about their sexual orientation or tease them for having gay parents. A ten-year study concluded that they ranked "significantly higher in school, social/academic, and social competence... than their age-matched counterparts...." And very few are molested.
Molestation is a recurrent theme in critiques of gay parenting, and it does happen. But the research shows that most pedophiles -- adults who sexually abuse children -- are male, and that such behaviour in women is extremely rare. Furthermore, girls are overwhelmingly the victims of male sexual abuse, and gay men are no more likely than heterosexual men to commit it. (There is no association between homosexuality and pedophilia.) One study concluded that "a child's risk of being molested by his or her relative's heterosexual partner is over 100 times greater than by someone who might be identifiable as being homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual."
As the new culture of gay parenting proliferates, so do physical and online resource centres: a few are Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, Family Equality Council and Gay Dads. Magazines such as Gay Parent and online support communities such as the LGBTQ Parenting Connection continue to mushroom. The focus on gay parenting, rooted in a growing interest in and commitment to children's welfare and rights, is also an acknowledgment of gay marriage and an attempt to cast it in ways acceptable to North America's evolving society.]]>Gay Marriage Act's Impact on Heterosexual Marriagetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8915682011-07-07T18:50:27-04:002011-09-06T05:12:01-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
In the past, many gay people did not identify with or even fully understand what homosexuality was, or their relationship to it. In earlier centuries, for example, intense and sustained same-sex relationships were considered unremarkable. And because notions of privacy were still practised largely in the breach, it was customary for friends -- even strangers -- to save money or make do with limited space by sharing beds and many did so.
At the same time, homosexuals "caught" being homosexual were treated as criminals. In 1953, for example, President Dwight Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450 required all civil and military federal employees guilty of "sexual perversion" to be fired, and thousands were. As late as 1965, Canada imprisoned a gay mechanic as a "dangerous sexual offender" after he admitted to having consensual sex with other men. He was released only in 1971, when the tide began to change.
The consequence, of course, was that most lesbians and gay men married opposite-gender spouses and tried as best they could to fit into the heterosexual mould their society expected, not infrequently indulging in clandestine gay liaisons.
These are the marriages that the Gay Marriage Act will mostly end. And some of its most fervent supporters have been the heterosexual spouses of closeted homosexuals. These gay husbands and their wives and ex-wives, and lesbian wives and their husbands and ex-husbands number in the millions, and number in the millions -- between 1.7 and 3.4 million -- and are increasingly speaking out about how their experience has affected them personally. The Straight Spouse Network, for instance, use a virtual community "for all the millions of us who find that we are married or in a long term relationship with someone who we find out is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or just not sure about that." Television's Fran Drescher's show Happily Divorced is inspired by her real-life experience as a straight woman whose husband reveals, post-divorce, that he is gay.
But the right to gay marriage will reduce but not eliminate these marriages; only eradicating homophobia will do that. There remains a chasm between official policy and the realities of personal and social life: parental rejection, social ostracism or mockery, and physical danger that includes being bashed as a "fag." Coming out can still be perilous, and many young gays prefer the safety of being closeted. The complexities of gayness are heightened as expatriate gays who once lived clandestinely in their homelands seek to make sense of North American inclusiveness.
For the first time in history, young people are growing up in the presence of legally sanctioned gay marriage (and divorce), an experience that will influence how they shape their lives in a world that is marching away from homophobia and allowing gays and lesbians to unite in marriage, to raise their children, and to expect to receive the same rights and to be subject to the same obligations as heterosexual spouses. As more gay men and women decide to marry, they will shore up the very institution whose decline the wider society mourns.
]]>Is New York's Gay Marriage Truly Historic?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8860692011-06-28T14:15:31-04:002011-08-28T05:12:01-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
Historic? Very much so, but not in the way that Clinton means. Gay people have always been around, and in eras when homoeroticism was viewed more matter-of-factly, as in ancient Egypt, various Greek city states, and the Roman Empire, there is evidence of same-sex unions, and perhaps marriage. What else to make of the Sifra, a third-century commentary on Leviticus often cited by the Talmud, forbidding the Israelites from copying what they believed to be Egyptian practices:
And what would they do?
A man would marry a man and a woman would marry a woman; a man would marry a woman and her daughter; a woman would be married to two men.
That is why it is said, "nor shall you follow their laws."
In ancient Greece, some fathers consented to quasi-marital unions between their sons and men who desired them. Similarly, in China's Fujian province in the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), women ceremoniously bound themselves into intimate unions with girls, and men did the same with boys. These relationships ended years later, and the adult spouses then helped their young partners find and marry opposite-sex spouses.
By the time of the early Roman Empire, there were some references to same-sex marriages. The Roman historian and biographer Suetonius reported that the emperor Nero attempted to transform the youthful Sporus into a woman by castrating him. Then he married the maimed boy in traditional rites, and afterward treated him as his wife. (Nero had previously assumed the role of bride and took his wine steward, the freedman Pythagoras, as his husband.)
The satiric -- and probably bisexual -- poet and social commentator Martial described how "Bearded Callistratus married the rugged Afer in the usual form in which a virgin marries a husband. The torches shone in front, the wedding veil covered his face... Even the dowry was declared. Are you still not satisfied, Rome? Are you waiting for him to give birth?"
In 117 AD, the satiric poet Juvenal castigated the aristocrat Gracchus for -- well, read on, and see how very "historic" gay marriage, and the response to it, really is:
Gracchus gave a dowry of 400,000 sesterces to a cornet player -- or perhaps he'd performed on a straight horn. Marriage documents were signed, felicitations offered, they sat down to a great banquet, and the new bride lay in her husband's lap... This very man who now dons flounces and a dress and a bridal veil, he bore the sacred implements swaying on their mystic thong, and he sweated beneath the shields of Mars.
Father of Rome, how came such sacrilege to your Latian shepherds? How is it, Mars, that such an itch possessed your descendants? Just look at it: a man of high birth and estate is given in marriage to a man, yet you do not shake your helmet, nor strike the earth with your spear, nor complain to your father...
If we live long enough, [homosexual marriage] will happen, and happen openly; they will even want it reported in the city gazette.
Now let's look closer to home, where early European visitors were astonished (and repelled) by North American native versions of same-sex unions. The Crow people, for example, recognized a third gender, or berdache, understood by natives as "two spirit" people possessed of both maleness and femaleness and, in many tribes, permitted to marry partners of the same sex.
The polygamous Aleut and Cheyenne permitted male berdaches to be co-wives of a man alongside single-spirit women. Whether they married monogamously or polygamously, berdaches had to observe traditional kinship rules for marriage. "Strange country this," observed fur trader Edwin T. Denig in 1833, "where males assume the dress and perform the duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex!"
Centuries later, New York has joined the growing number of jurisdictions including
Canada, where a 2005 federal law legalized same-sex marriage country-wide. New York's brand-new law, too, is only historic in that it grants to all interested citizens the right to same-sex marriage once only available in some Native tribes, and in antiquity, to powerful males.
]]>Was J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello Inspired by Canada's Elizabeth Abbott?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8761222011-06-13T15:40:02-04:002011-08-13T05:12:01-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/ Methodist Hatchet, Babstock concludes that Nobel Literature Prize winner J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello is modeled on... Elizabeth Abbott.
That's right, on me!
I'm not inventing this. Here, as proof, is the selection Babstock starred as he presented me with an autographed copy of Methodist Hatchet the day before he flew to Berlin for a year's stint as a visiting scholar. "Thank you for lending your identity," he'd scrawled.
Actually, I can thank the age-old literary device that, in this case, transformed Abbott into Costello. But judge for yourself.
The worst of the glare slid behind the sales lot tinsel
and she wasn't a stranger at all. No
stranger; my neighbour, Liz. Elizabeth Abbott.
You may know her work: Celibacy
Mistresses, something on Haiti, and recently, Sugar.
Her home a hospice for dying dachshunds
way station for incoming rescues from Serbia (we nearly
took in Dunja last month.) So, animal
rights activist, retired academic, vegan, but here's where
the Danish gets sticky. Just last week it dawned
on me, in a dinghy adrift on Georgian Bay, while rethinking
the preponderance of pumpkins in The Life
and Times of Michael K, while the sun crested the horizon
over Huron and settled like a South African
in Brisbane, before I'd had either coffee or chance to tally
the consequences, it came to me, Coetzee - J.M. - him -
had modeled Elizabeth Costello on this Elizabeth Abbott.
I know what you're thinking, but stop. I looked
them up. A conference, Belgrade, '91, they shared
keynote address three ways with Martha Nussbaum
and must have had, at the very least, lunch, if not more.
I know what you're thinking. He'd submitted
a paper but was, shocker, turned down: "Paranoia: Can We
Live Among the Animals?" - R. Karadzic.
I've read and reread this at least a baker's dozen of times, with emotions ranging from shock and consternation to resentment and guilt. And comprehension! So that's why Babstock told poet Karen Solie, interviewing him about Methodist Hatchet, that "Yeah, I'm sure it'll annoy some people, there's not much I can do about it. There wasn't any other way for me to inhabit the world, the poems, this time around.... I think humans, others, even named others, appear at the level of the symbolic in the book and at the level of actuality in the domestic and in love, right up to puppetry. I didn't know they were going to flood in, I guess, but they have, what am I going to do about it? J. M. Coetzee's gonna sue me." [laughter] "Why is J. M. Coetzee in my book?" [laughs]
I fished Elizabeth Costello from my bookshelf where it had been wedged next to its slim matrix, The Lives of Animals. Both volumes were gifts from friends who just knew, they told me, that I was Coetzee's ideal reader. (The Slow Man, Elizabeth Costello's latest literary foray, is another story.) But -- I saw -- I had been critical, and had pocked Elizabeth with citrine Post-Its marking my dismay. How I had wanted Costello and the animals she championed to emerge victorious in her mission to win over her audiences with rigorous logic and learning!
"I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats," she said in her (too) measured way. I was tense then, and tense again in rereading, because she anticipates the defeat ("the concession of the entire battle") I felt crushing us both, and the animals with us.
And yet it's all there, every truth, every righteous notion, every goodness, the heart "the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another." And in that moment at least, Elizabeth Abbott was indistinguishable from Elizabeth Costello. ]]>Arnold Schwarzenegger's Traditional Affairtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8652972011-05-24T13:26:08-04:002011-07-24T05:12:01-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
Looking close to home for sexual adventure, Clinton with a White House intern and Schwarzenegger with his family's housekeeper, is the stuff of tradition. Male employers throughout history have regarded their staff as sexually available, and Patty Baena was no exception. The details of their relationship -- Who pursued whom? What possessed them to have unprotected sex? What was their game plan with regards to Maria and the Schwarzenegger children? Did Rogelio de.Jesus Baena know or guess whose child Patty was carrying? -- may be fascinating fodder for speculation, but they do not change the power dynamics of their employer-employee relationship. The fact that they conceived a child was a complicating but not unusual factor.
Schwarzenegger's tenacity in concealing paternity of his love child was also traditional. Though he supported his son financially, he hid his identity and relied on the discretion of trusted friends and employees to maintain the fiction that his only children were Maria's.
Until very recently, the children of mistresses were bastardized and pregnancy was a dreaded occupational hazard. The maid cast out into the world after being impregnated by her employer was a literary theme and in literature as in life, she was blamed, scorned and despised, and her child suffered with her. In the last decade laws have struck down the concept of bastardization, and in the eyes of the law, a child is a child whether born within or out of wedlock. Schwarzenegger respected that enough to ensure that his son with Patty, born mere days after Christopher, his son with Maria, lived in comfort if not the luxury he provided for his legitimate children.
In the era before today's more egalitarian laws, some North American men provided for their illegitimate children but if they attempted to name them as legal beneficiaries, relatives almost always contested their wills. Segregationist politician Strom Thurmond was one such clandestine father. His daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, was born to his mother's African-American domestic, sixteen-year old Carrie Butler, when he was twenty-two year-old. Thurmond died in public office at the age of one hundred, still notorious for his relentless advocacy of racial segregation. (He sounded "like the ghost of Adolph Hitler," Essie Mae recalled.)
But in private, Thurmond offered financial support and was keenly interested in his biracial daughter. Only after his 2003 death did Essie Mae disclose the truth of her parentage. The Thurmond family, graciously and unusually, confirmed her paternity and spoke of her right to know her heritage. (It helped that she had no interest in suing for a share of her father's estate -- her moral and legal right.) Her half-brother, Strom Thurmond Jr., added that he was eager to get to know her.
Though Schwarzenegger lived in kinder times than Thurmond, his situation was messier because unlike Thurmond, unmarried at the time of his relationship with Essie Mae's mother, Schwarzenegger was a married father with no interest in divorcing his prominent and beautiful wife. There is much speculation about why he waited for thirteen years to 'fess up to Maria and attempt to make peace with their children. Several possible reasons suggest themselves: a) Someone was going to blow the whistle on him and he pre-empted them by telling Maria himself. He could not have supported the child without leaving a paper trail, so he and Patty were not the only ones in on the secret. b) His governorship was over and he could finally breathe more freely, and had an impulse to get it off his chest though until then he had categorically and publicly denied all accusations of marital infidelity. c) He either miscalculated how terribly revelations would devastate Maria, or else he decided to put all his cards on the table and see what happened.
And what about Patty? She may also have believed she had urgent reasons to keep the affair quiet. She had a generous salary as the Schwarzenegger's housekeeper, she got support payments for her son and she knew Schwarzenegger wasn't going to leave Maria for her. The Schwarzenegger-Baena saga is ongoing. So far, however, it has not strayed far from the traditional story of powerful men, risk takers by vocation, defying the social morality that would condemn them for betraying their marriage vows, in Schwartzenegger's case, spectacularly so.
]]>Lest We Forget, Marriage Is Often a Forgotten Casualty of Wartag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7822792010-11-11T13:38:45-05:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Elizabeth Abbotthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-abbott/
No matter how just the cause, war is a hell that takes a heavy toll on veterans' marriages. This is especially true of combat soldiers, whose first marriages are much likelier to end in separation or divorce than non-combatants. It is also true of officers, and of women, now 11 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
What's wrong? Are broken marriages an inherent risk of military service? The sad answer is yes. By delving into military history, we can document the profound impact of war on historical marriages. After the Civil War, and despite intense anti-divorce sentiment, the divorce rate skyrocketed. In the newly-united nation, officials ordered studies to determine why the Republic was emulating ancient Rome and other decadent societies.
The answers lay closer to home, and resonate to this day. As men enlisted and left wives and families at home, their relationships changed. And in the thick of the horrors, banalities, and brief joys -- camaraderie and life-saving bonds -- of war, so did their values. Meanwhile their waiting wives shouldered new "manly" burdens, and grew more confident and assertive.
At war's end, reunited couples took stock of each other. Many husbands were severely injured or disabled. Combat soldiers fighting on the ground were often wounded in the buttocks, pelvis or genitals and the National Archives Pension files are filled with records "of impotence and depression related to loss of sexual function" that darkened many veterans' marriages.
Rampant alcoholism and drug addiction, the "soldier's disease," wrecked havoc on marriages. So did venereal disease, contracted from prostitutes known as "horizontal refreshments." Symptoms included incontinence and impotence, and "No one knows how many Union and Confederate wives and widows went to their graves, rotted and ravaged by the pox that their men brought home," writes Civil War medical historian Thomas Lowry.1
Some demobilized husbands had grown closer to their wives through letters describing their experiences, including their fears, hopes, and emotional responses. Others, alienated by years of separation and hardship, had difficulty reconnecting with spouses. ("While you all was Haveing Such good times... on the 4th. we was Shooting Rebels," one young soldier observed.2) Some women had had extramarital sex. Others, expecting their husbands to die in combat, entered new relationships. Some sold themselves to survive. When many veterans and their waiting wives reunited, they made each other miserable until they finally sought relief in separation or divorce.
The rising divorce rates associated with World Wars I and II had similar causes: draft notices that pushed (often very young) people to marry on the spur of the romantic, patriotic moment; enforced separation; wartime adulteries; and the severe psychiatric conditions diagnosed in more than half a million soldiers. As they had in the Civil War, many veterans and their spouses reunited at war's end and then divorced.
Like veterans of previous wars, those on active combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan are much likelier than non-combatants to divorce. In life and death situations, the connections they form with each other may interfere or compete with their conjugal bonds. Increased deployment rates add greatly to the strain. Back home, veterans are subject to the vicissitudes of today's economy. They have difficulty finding and holding jobs. As many as one in four is homeless.
Officers, lonelier and weighed down by additional responsibilities, divorce at far higher rates than enlisted men. So do women, at nearly three times the rate of their male counterparts. New mothers are further stressed by being required back at work just four months after giving birth. "If the Army wanted you to have a family they would have issued you one," they joke.
PTSD, once dismissed as cowardice, hysteria or shell shock, afflicts millions. One of these "walking wounded" is retired Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded a United Nations mission in 1994's blood-torn Rwanda. Dallaire has attempted suicide, is depressive and insomniac, and is tormented by flashbacks. In the tortured minds of PTSD sufferers, the terrible past still exists and they incorporate it into their lives as a reality only they can see.
Stricken veterans account for one fifth of the US's suicides. Many commit violent crimes and abuse substances. They struggle with interpersonal relationships and with integrating back into their families. No wonder their divorce rate is so high, and so worrisome to their compatriots and to Department of Defense officials, who are coming to understand that among the most serious casualties of war are their soldiers' right to emotional stability and social reintegration.
'Lest we forget....
1 Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell, p. 108. 2 Newton Scott to Hannah Cone, July 23, 1863, www.civilwarletters.com.]]>