Making Tough Choices

While chatting in IM with a friend last night, she mentioned an elderly relative who'd spend many years trapped in an abusive marriage. It made me think of how few resources women in such situations had many years ago to improve their lives.

My paternal aunt was an exception to that rule, however. She was married at age sixteen during World War II to her childhood sweetheart. The fairytale romance eventually turned into a nightmare, after he began physically abusing her.

By the early fifties, she'd had enough. They had four small children and she knew she didn't want them raised in such an atmosphere. But during that time, most women didn't have much choice. Society believed that people should stay married no matter how bad it was, and to simply adjust to it.

Few mothers with small children worked full time, and those who did, usually didn't make enough to support themselves without the husband's salary. Unless a woman had a sympathetic family who could help, she usually just had to make the best of it and hope for early widowhood.

My aunt was one of the lucky ones. My grandmother had been widowed a few years by then and was willing to move in with my aunt to take over the mother and homemaking duties, while my aunt went to work in a cotton mill to support them all.

It was tough at first, but she pulled it off. Four years after her divorce, she married a man a decade younger than her, who was willing to take on all four kids. They ended up having a son of their own in the early sixties.

But never again did she entrust her livelihood or that of her children to a man, as she continued working until she retired in the mid 90s.

I've never gotten along all that well with her, but I've always respected her for making a courageous and necessary choice in spite of societal disapproval when it mattered most.