[Adrianna took exception to my comments about the black and white women who murdered their abusive husbands. Her comments are posted below.

It appears to me, the general consensus these days is that men are bad. Jan]

Dear Jan
I have read with considerable dismay your negative comments towards a beaten, traumatised, abused woman who ‘was applauded in the court room for killing her husband’.

While I would never condone any violence including murder of course, I feel that your viewpoint is shaped very much by the fact that you are indeed a male.

Have you ever tried to place yourself in the position of a woman, Jan? Any woman?

Any woman will tell you that, for instance, we are usually paid half or even less the wages men routinely get, only because we are female. Even the best-educated women suffer from this ongoing problem.

There is a very strong reason for this which often makes it always impossible to improve matters for women: most (male-dominated) authorities worldwide often still view women mainly as child-carers who should remain at home to care for the children – and who thus should be actively discouraged from pursuing any careers outside the home.

This fact has a devastating effect on any woman, as this places her in a permanent financial subservient position to her male partner – always.

Women thus don’t own much in this world except their first names:
even women’s surnames are either inherited from their fathers or their husbands – so none of the world’s females except in just a few Scandinavian countries, ever know who their ‘foremothers’ were.
It’s still the land of our ‘forefathers’ but never of our ‘foremothers.”
And if an abusive male partner in this society chooses to use his spouse as a permanent punching bag, as so many men seem to want to do on a very frequent basis, the vast majority of abused women – even the best-educated ones — find themselves faced with the fact that they cannot even basically support themselves and their children without the income of the abusing partner. So they endure and suffer.

Our financial inequality makes it very difficult for most abused women (and girls, as often the girl children also become abused by their abusive fathers) to simply walk away from any such abusive relationship.
Often, women endure the pain and suffering and broken bones and bruised bodies all ‘for the sake of the children.’

Many women also commit suicide rather than leave their abusive husbands so that at least their children are still provided for… others sink into deep permanent depressions which are referred to by the world’s male psychiatrists as “female hysteria”.

Many millions of women and girls are being subjected to this terrifying, fear-filled kind of daily life — but never walk away from it, even though they know they would save their lives if they did, because many also eventually die at the hands of abusive partners.

It’s actually very surprising to me that not more abusive male partners get killed by their female victims when they finally do break down mentally.

Of course women also beat up on their husbands and this is an underreported problem because of male pride but does occur.
Still, the record shows that many more women are being beaten up by abusive male partners than the other way around, probably because males are physically larger and stronger. Indeed if all women started defending themselves against this abuse more aggressively, there would be many millions of husbands killed all over the world.

So why isn’t this actually happening?

I believe that women, from early childhood, already learn to have a nearly infinite ability for taking this kind of daily punishment – and that it has been embedded in our psyche that out children’s future is more important than our own wellbeing.

If women could become financially independent — i.e. if they routinely become just as well-paid as are males in our society — there would be a new balance struck inside Western marriages too; partners could then afford to simply walk away from abusive relationships without any long-term financial harm to the children.

One can see this actually happening in some more equal societies such as Great Britain and the United States, where women and men are increasingly paid identical wages for identical work and -educational levels under the law.

The only reason the vast majority of women remain trapped in abusive relationships, is because of this vast financial inequality which still exists in most of the world’s societies.

And men should not hardshly judge any women who kill their abusive spouses — unless these men also are willing to actually address the underlying problems faced by all women and girls in our society.

Meanwhile, I myself will continue to view all “abusive-spouse murderers’ (males and females) in a much more sympathetic light than you are doing, Jan, even though I will never condone murder.

I myself walked away from an abusive relationship as a young wife — and had to fight for the right to keep my children due to my poor financial situation, which indeed was so dire that their much better-paid father used this fact as an argument in court to ‘prove that I was incapable of caring” for my own children. And I know many women who have gone through the same heartbreak if they chose to walk away from their abusers. It’s a bitter price to have to pay!

Women will always get punished just for being women, and there are very few abusive males who seem to want to understand what harm they are doing to their entire families with their grotesquely immature behaviour.

All my best
Adriana Stuijt