11. Two to Tango?: The Burden of Shame, Blame, and Guilt
The Burden of Shame, Blame, and Guilt
Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require “educational practices and socializing agents” even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people’s behavior from their earliest childhood.
GERMAINE GREER
I wonder if she was contentious.” That was the comment a colleague posed after David Duyst was charged with killing his wife, Sandy. Several of us were sitting around a table in the faculty room eating our lunch. “Contentious?” I looked at him in disbelief. “Well,” he responded, “you have to wonder what she might have done. It takes two to tango, you know.” Others (all male) then jumped into the discussion.
Having already finished my lunch, I went on my way. I was upset, and I didn’t want to deal with the matter in front of all my colleagues. Never mind that David, as was proved at the trial, was having an affair and had just taken out a large life insurance policy on Sandy. It takes two to tango. Never mind that she had been shot twice in the back of the head, and he insisted it was suicide. (Maybe once, not twice, is the most a person is able to pull that trigger.)
It takes two to tango. Not always. No wife is perfect. Far from it. I certainly wasn’t during those nineteen years of marriage. But I pleaded with my husband to go to marriage counseling. He refused. Our problems, he insisted, were all my fault anyway. Besides, marriage counseling, he claimed, by its very nature usurped his headship. A woman certainly is capable of being contentious, indeed, to the point that she’s impossible to live with. If Sandy had been such a woman and counseling offered no relief, David had the option of separation or divorce.
It takes two to tango. Bruce Ware, a professor of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has asserted that a wife who refuses to submit to her husband is at least in part to blame for the abuse. In many instances, a woman blames herself, convinced that it truly does take two to tango. That was true with Meredith Vieira, a correspondent for NBC News and a television talk show host. Her story is told best in her own words:
I was in an abusive relationship many, many years ago as a young woman . . . It started out, I loved this guy. It started out, we’d have a fight and he’d just sort of grab my arm. I didn’t think a lot about it, and then it turned into pushing me into a wall and then it went beyond that, to [his] actually taking his hand and grabbing my face and saying, “I could ruin your career if I wanted to and no one would watch you.”1
We understand why an evangelical preacher’s wife might stay in an abusive relationship, or why a mother of young children who needs a husband’s financial support might stay. But why would someone like a successful, single, young news reporter stay in such a relationship? And what does this phenomenon have to do with blame and guilt?
I’m a smart woman . . . [and heard] a lot of people say, “Well, who would stay in that situation?” Somebody who doesn’t have the wherewithal to get out, the means to get out. [But] I had that. I had a job at the time, and I kept in this relationship. I’ve done a lot of thinking about why, and I think part of it was fear. I was scared of him. I was scared if I tried to leave something worse could happen to me. Part of it was guilt, because every time we would have a fight he would then start crying and say, “I promise I won’t do it again,” and I would feel like maybe I contributed somehow to this—and they are saying this about Ray Rice’s wife, that it takes two to tango.2
Then there was a horrific episode. She had endured abuse from the man she loved, but now she was certain he had gone way over the line.
There was the night, we shared an apartment, and he threw me into a shower, naked with scalding water, and then he threw me outside into the hallway . . . We lived in an apartment building, and I hid in the stairwell for two hours until he came again, crying, “I promise I won’t do this again.”3
So, the next day when he was out of the apartment, she packed her bags and left for good. True or false? False. How could she not leave? She didn’t have a half dozen kids. She was a young single woman on the make. Unbelievably, she stayed.
I continued to stay in that relationship until I was offered a job in another state and that’s where I felt I had the ability to get away . . . It’s not so easy to just get away. You think it would be, but it’s not . . . That’s just my experience with it, and I know it’s rampant in this country, and we all have to accept the fact that it’s not just an issue with the NFL—it’s an issue with all of our lives, and until we take it seriously, more and more women are going to get abused.4
Since 1986, Meredith Vieira has been married to Richard Cohen, and they have three children. Her story is one of those told in Elsa Walsh’s Divided Lives: Public and Private Struggles of Three American Women.5 She has been able to move on and navigate the difficulties of life, minus domestic violence.
What is most telling about Vieira’s story are her words: “Part of it was guilt, because every time we would have a fight he would then start crying . . . I would feel like maybe I contributed somehow to this—and they are saying this about Ray Rice’s wife, that it takes two to tango.”
The assumption that it takes two to tango is part of our DNA. From ancient legends to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, we are entertained by women like Katharina, that incorrigible, callous shrew. Even before this time, medieval street dramas featured Noah, who had to beat his disobedient wife to get her away from her gossips and into the ark. But perhaps Charles Dickens did as much as any writer to portray the shrewish wife. He was the most popular British writer of the nineteenth century, and his women are all too often portrayed as evil, as he regarded his own wife. Dickens loved teenage girls, and he had a longtime extramarital relationship with a young woman.
One of the books John read to me recently was Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Nelly was an eighteen-year-old actress, he a larger-than-life, forty-five-year-old entertainer and bestselling writer. In order to justify that affair and others, he denigrated his wife. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “Catherine is as near being a donkey as one of her sex can be.”6
Exactly what he meant by calling her a donkey is difficult to say. Accusing her of stupidity would simply not square with who she was—attractive and intelligent, an author in her own right. After bearing ten of his children, however, she no doubt had lost some of her looks and liveliness. He blamed her. He blamed her, not only for being an unfit mother, but also for her frequent pregnancies and the birth of their ten children, as though he was an innocent bystander. He forced her out of their marital home when she was in her early forties, naming her younger, prettier sister as mistress of the house. Although he claimed this was an amicable separation, the media rumor mill poured out condemnation. In response, he sent a statement of self-defense to various publications, concluding with these lines:
I most solemnly declare, then—and this I do both in my own name and in my wife’s name—that all the lately whispered rumors touching the trouble, at which I have glanced, are abominably false. And whosoever repeats one of them, after this denial, will lie as willfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie, before heaven and earth.7
Defending himself publicly was surely not all he did to protect his name. “When Dickens spurned his wife,” writes Essie Fox, he treated her viciously, “causing Catherine the cruellest of humiliations by publishing public letters in which he claimed her to be demented, preventing her from seeing her children and even denying her the chance to attend one daughter’s wedding day.”8
This apparent hatred was evident in his relationships with other women as well. In one instance, when he had a strong disagreement with the popular writer Elizabeth Gaskell, he wrote, “If I were Mr. Gaskell O Heaven how I would beat her.”9 One wonders how much he might have beaten his wife, Catherine. Such misogyny can be seen in his writing as well. In Oliver Twist, Nancy is brutally murdered by Bill Sikes. When Dickens himself performed the part of Bill in a staged version, he acted “out of violence . . . with bloodthirsty relish.”10
In Great Expectations, Pip discovers his sister, Mrs. Joe, “lying without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head . . . destined never to be on the Rampage again.”11 Judith Johnston, in an article titled “Women and Violence in Dickens’ Great Expectations,” writes that Mrs. Joe is now portrayed as a much better woman: “Violence has rendered her a passive human being, and although her mind and hearing are irretrievably impaired, her temper is greatly improved . . . The harridan and termagant has been effectively silenced.”12
Mrs. Joe was a harridan and a termagant, two of many words used to silence and blame women. Catherine Dickens was also regarded as the termagant, the shrew, who was responsible for the marriage breakdown.
How many words are there that refer to a belligerent—or sex-crazed—man? What about a woman? Termagant, harridan, shrew, scold, hag, battle-ax, crone, nag, hussy, bitch, slut (and dozens more, were I to scan rap lyrics). The woman is accused of henpecking and nagging her husband and getting into a catfight when she argues with another woman. Where are the comparable terms for men? The man is strong and confident and forceful, the head of the home. Female blame as much as female guilt is so much a part of our culture and worldview that we aren’t even aware of it.
This is not to say that women never behave badly. They surely do. We see it in the Bible, too, in the three celebrated wives of the patriarchs—Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel. All three of them are manipulative and treat others very poorly. But there are no scriptural terms that set them apart as “bitches” in comparison to their badly misbehaving husbands and sons.
It is true that women are often treated badly in the Bible. The “texts of terror” prove it. But so are men. How often are they slaughtered in battle or executed on the spot or swallowed up in the quicksand of a giant sinkhole? We can weep over the “texts of terror,” but when we have dried our eyes, let us weep over the countless men whose suffering was no less. The Bible is a violent book, and no one is spared. Let us be grateful that the ill-behaved women don’t have descriptive slurs attached to their names.
Here the issue is the nonbiblical words and actions that are regularly employed to demean women—often in the name of God or of male headship. And here the issue is domestic violence. There is no excuse ever for domestic violence, no matter how badly the abused one is behaving. David Duyst should have ended the marriage through a valid court procedure. Now he is spending (hopefully) the rest of his life in prison, having been forced to go through the court system himself. So it was also for Clarence Ratliff. If either one of these men believed their wives were bitches, they had many other options that did not involve murder. So it is for all of those men who beat their wives.
That was true when I was beaten on the last Mother’s Day before our separation. We had argued in the afternoon about paying our church pledge. He was in control of our finances and refused to write a check for the pledge. Finally he ended the argument by telling me to “go wash the dishes” and behave like a submissive wife.
That order may have seemed like an ordinary slur, except for one important detail. He had previously forbidden me to wash dishes. He claimed I wasted too much water. He would let them pile up in the sink and would then use his own waterless method. I smoldered under the restriction, hating the messy, smelly sink, but he was the “head of the home from the kitchen to the bedroom.” Now he, without even realizing what he was saying, was ordering me to “go do the dishes.” I pivoted and marched straight to the kitchen, defiantly saying, “I will.” I proceeded to run water, vowing to get the job done. He followed me, ordering me to stop. I fired back, “You told me to wash dishes, and I will.” I refused to stop washing despite his demand. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, the wind having been knocked out of me by a violent blow to my back.
Carlton was screaming. That’s all I knew. When Carlton began pulling me across the floor and helping me crawl upstairs to the bedroom, he was still crying out, repeatedly asking if I was okay. I didn’t know. At the moment, my legs were like rubber; I couldn’t even walk. Carlton got me in bed and barred the door. He later went downstairs. I never did learn what happened between him and his father. But he later came back and was relieved to learn that I had been able to get out of bed and make it to the bathroom on my own. He said how terribly sorry he was. But then he added a statement that I’ll never forget as long as I live: “Mom, it was your fault. You should have stopped doing dishes the second he said so.” Here was my beloved son blaming me for having gotten beat up.
Carlton was right. The most painful part of his childhood was seeing his mother beat up, and I had done something I absolutely should not have done. I will never know why I kept washing those dishes for even five seconds after my violent ex-husband told me to stop. I had walked away so many times before or had gone into a fetal position when he knocked me to the floor. Why? Why not this time? If I hadn’t cared about my own physical (and emotional) well-being, I surely should have cared for Carlton’s. He was right. That he blamed me was the only way he could save himself. Blaming his father and risking a violent encounter himself would have done no good. He knew I would accept the blame. I did. Never again did I defy his father.
I carry guilt for that experience and others as well, including my indecisiveness about getting Carlton out of that house of horrors. If we had escaped earlier, would things have worked out better? Or might a judge have said Carlton was too young to testify and simply acceded to his father’s demand for joint custody? I’ll never know if I made the right decision in this case and in many other instances. Like many mothers, guilt is simply part of my genetic code.
But there was a period of decision making in our marriage for which I bear far greater guilt—a guilt so great it will always haunt me. (For any readers tempted to contact me with Bible verses or online therapy, please leave me alone.)
I’d like to be able to say my husband alone will have to answer one day for the terrible wrongs, but I was complicit—the queen of cover-up until the very last months of our marriage. Midway through our marriage, after he had been arrested and dismissed as minister in Woodstock, we moved to Crown Point, Indiana. Here he was able to get another small church and enroll at a seminary, which kept him away from home three days a week.
During this time, we arranged to have thirteen-year-old Deana live with us as a foster daughter. I had read books and articles on foster care and believed this was a good time in my life to help a child while she was in transition. Deana had come to our home with a few clothes in a plastic bag. When she left on June 24, 1977, more than a year later, she had stylish outfits, a bicycle, a sewing machine, a set of luggage, and several hundred dollars in a bank account. The caseworker had raved about what a great foster family we were.
She left with a lot of stuff—and also with a big secret.
A week earlier, when my ex-husband had been away at seminary for three days, I looked out the kitchen window one afternoon and noticed our older neighbor, who often paid Deana for odd jobs, patting her on the behind and behaving in an inappropriate way. I called her in, saying I had something for her to do. Actually, I was headed to the food mart a couple of blocks away across the highway, and I wanted her to stay close by, since Carlton was napping. But my main point was to tell her to never let a man treat her the way our neighbor just had.
She retorted that every man is that way. “He’s no different from anyone else.” I was indignant. “How can you say that? Can you even imagine Dad doing that?” There was a pause. No answer. And then she burst into tears, telling me how he had come into her room at night—more than once—and sexually abused her. Deana had lied about things before, but this was no lie. My brain shut down. I was in shock. I don’t even know if I responded to her. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had my money, and I headed out to purchase milk. The next thing I knew was the sound of brakes and blasting of a semitruck horn. I was crossing the highway on the way to the store.
Poor Deana! I wasn’t there for her. When my ex-husband returned home, I confronted him with my knowledge of what had happened, and he finally admitted it. My rage that had been building knew no bounds. There was no physical violence, but never before or after had I felt or unleashed such virulent and deep primal wrath. Otherwise, that period in my life is little more than an awful, blurry stain of filth and regret.
She did not report him, nor did I. I was the adult; she was the kid. My reasons were not to protect my husband. My feelings of anger against him were unbounded. I did not report him because I knew he would be arrested, lose his job—our only income—and probably be imprisoned up to fifteen years. How would I manage with a two-year-old son? But mainly I didn’t report him because I wanted to shield myself from the humiliation of facing family, neighbors, church members. I didn’t report him for selfish reasons. I was protecting myself, and no one else.
The Bible church minister who imagined himself to be a “marriage counselor” told me I had done right in this situation—that my submission to my husband was submission to God and that I should feel no guilt. He lied to me. What I did was terribly wrong. I was complicit in this crime. I never saw Deana again.
It was Friday, June 17, 1994. I had been in Chicago for professional meetings but had left early to accomplish a mission I had been contemplating for more than a year. Carlton had by then graduated from high school, and I was beginning to get on my feet financially. I was out to fulfill a fantasy. I was going to track down Deana. Her extended family was from northern Indiana, and I had a bucket of quarters, enough to make dozens of calls from a pay phone.
I had turned on the radio to catch up on the news as I drove south on I-94, and quickly realized that the only news was the minute-by-minute account of O. J. Simpson on his mission to evade police. A Los Angeles Times writer summed up the story succinctly: “The O. J. Simpson ‘white Bronco’ chase was one of the most surreal moments in the history of Los Angeles criminal justice.”13 It truly was surreal. Here I am driving on a freeway, and the news is essentially no news because nothing is happening (apart from the gruesome fact that Simpson’s wife, Nicole, had been viciously murdered) except that Simpson is in a white Bronco, which is being pursued by police officers.
Reaching northern Indiana on my way back to Grand Rapids, I exited the highway and turned off the radio. I stopped at a gas station and pulled up to a nearby phone booth with a chained northern Indiana phone book. Soon I was calling every person in the book with the last name of Judge. No luck, until finally a woman gave me a number for an individual who might know a relative who may be able to help track down this young woman.
An elderly man answered. I asked about Deana. He said he knew her and that she lived not so far away but he couldn’t remember where. My heart was pounding. Is she married? Does she have a family? Is there anyone I could call who could give me more information? “Let me ask my wife.” I heard what sounded like a woman’s voice in the background. He kept asking, “Are you sure that was Deana?” Then I heard him say, “Yeah, you’re right. It was Deana. Her sister never went to the university in Bloomington; she’s the one who got married.” He turned back to me and recounted the story.
Deana was a university student returning to see her sister in northern Indiana over Christmas break. Her car had slipped off a bridge in an ice storm, and the vehicle was not found until spring, at which time her body was identified.
When I hung up the phone, I was weeping so hard I could not drive. I sat in the car for more than an hour, trying to control my heaving so I could get back on the road again.
My dream had been to get Deana’s phone number, call ahead, and ask her if I could stop by and see her. I knew she would say yes. She would now have been in her late twenties. Maybe she would have young children; perhaps she was a single mother. In my fantasy, I would notice that she had bags of clothes ready to be taken to the laundromat. I would go with her and the kids and renew our acquaintance. Then I would take them out to eat before heading over to Sears, where I would buy her a new washer and dryer. I would tell her how sorry I was. I would plead for her forgiveness. And I would hope to become a surrogate grandmother to her little ones.
That dream was dashed . . .
Two chapters ago, I was stomping my foot and telling my story with boldness. When my husband asked if it was hard for me to recount my story of marital rape, I quoted Lucrece: “Go get me hither paper, ink, and pen.” Today, after John returned from visiting his ninety-nine-year-old mother and ninety-seven-year-old second mother-in-law, he asked how things were going. I tried to tell him what I was working on but got choked up. He said, “Oh, you’re writing about Deana?” I nodded.
It’s the hardest writing I have done in this book, and getting me hither my Apple notebook is not what is lacking. It’s rather the emotional wherewithal to get the words on the screen.
I will have the opportunity to tell the rest of my story in the next chapter—among other things, my discovery of how absolutely wonderful marriage can be when there is no fear and no violence, no guilt and no blame. My marriage to John, of course, is far more than simply one without any abuse. And it has a happily ever after ending.
Deana’s voice is silent. What if I had made a very critically different choice? What if we had gone to court together? What if I had stood by her and kept in contact with her as best I could, knowing I could not prevent social services from finding her a better home? What if . . . ? What if I had remained her advocate, never abandoning her? Is it possible she’d be alive today to tell her story with a happily ever after ending?
The questions haunt me.