Last weekend my husband and I attended the 10th Anniversary Convention of VOTF in Boston. At breakfast on Saturday, we talked with a couple
from Massachusetts and a woman from Virginia, all in their late seventies or early eighties. They told these two stories from fifty years ago.
A woman with five sons
inquired of the priest about birth control.
“Are you an animal?” the priest responded.
A woman with six children told her priest she wanted to use
birth control. “You’ll go to hell,” he
warned her.
“But I can’t go to hell,” she responded. I have to be here, to look after my family.” This woman was a nurse, a well-organized and
loving mother, but she felt, the storyteller said, that she’d had enough.
Women of all religions, and poor women for the most part, were treated with disdain by religious leaders, doctors, etc....
ReplyDeleteMy mother, Jewish, was allowed to be in labor for days...when my father was asked: Who do you want us to save--the baby or your wife? My sister, Penelope, choked by the umbilical cord, was born dead. My mother survived to have 3 children. My father who asked in response to the doctors' question: Can't you save both? was forever mistrusted by my mother's sister as a result.
My mother was in the same generation of women who wrote about their experiences above. Similar attitudes towards women condemning them to a less than heavenly life here on earth.