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Breaking up is hard to do

Hi everyone! Greetings from one of your guest bloggers. I’m really excited to be contributing at Feministe, although I do wish it was under slightly more cheerful circumstances. The short synopsis view of me: my background is primarily in bioethics (my name can be found on the President’s Council on Bioethics’s website if you look hard enough), and I’m currently a third year law student, which might help explain why my first guest post here is about divorce.

I’ve been following two very different stories in the news about marital discord: country singer Sara Evans’s recently filed divorce* and the race for Congress in the 10th district in Pennsylvania, where incumbent Don Sherwood (R-PA) has been dealing with the fallout from news of an affair with a twenty-nine-year-old staffer and the allegations that he choked her. Sherwood’s opponent has been harping on the affair in debates and campaign ads. Normally, celebrity divorces and allegations of sexual misconduct by politicians are not exactly news. But I’m writing about these two instances because there’s something kind of strange about each. First is Evans’s husband’s allegations that the singer’s “interest in her “marital roles and responsibilities” declined and she “neglected” their three children after she began appearing on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.”” Second is the letter Sherwood’s wife sent out to Republican voters talking about the affair.

I’m not exactly sure what Craig Schelske (Evans’s husband) and his attorneys have in mind when they say her “interest in marital roles and responsibilities declined”, but I suspect we’re now well into the realm of “she’s not conforming to the gender roles I had in mind, and I’m not getting laid.” I don’t say this to be flip (admittedly, I don’t know the particulars of how Schelske and Evans have arranged their marriage), but much of the language in divorces is about one (or both) party’s failure to conform to normative roles about what a good spouse or parent is. Good mothers don’t ignore their children (although husbands who don’t spend much time with their kids are just good providers). Good wives don’t go off and have affairs with men many years their junior (although husbands who do are just behaving as men are wont to do.)

Even though these expectations have changed a lot in recent memory, archetypes about “good” wives/mothers and husbands/fathers still remain:

“[A] substantial body of legal research…has uncovered evidence of systematic and pervasive gender bias in all aspects of the current judicial system. More than twenty-five state task forces, commissioned and staffed by members of the states’ own judiciaries, have uncovered a pattern of sex discrimination in state courts. The final report of the New York state task force reported: [G]ender bias against women … is a pervasive problem with grave consequences. Cultural stereotypes of women’s role in marriage and in society daily distort courts’ application of substantive law. Women uniquely, disproportionately and with unacceptable frequency must endure a climate of condescension, indifference and hostility. At the federal level, only the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has completed a study of gender bias within the federal judicial system. Its Gender Bias Task Force found widespread evidence of gender bias against women in all aspects of the federal judiciary. In Ellison v. Brady, it stated that unconscious gender bias in society is so pervasive that a gender neutral perspective is virtually impossible. “A sex-blind reasonable person standard tends to be male-biased and tends to systematically ignore the experiences of women.” — Jean Reith Schroedel, Pamela Fiber, and Bruce D. Snyder, 7 Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 89 (2000)

[There’s also a mention in the CNN article about an incident where Evans and Schelske were watching a porn flick together in bed (after their kids were asleep) when their seven-year-old daughter unexpectedly walked in. Now, in the context of a normal marriage that would be grounds for “Crap! Remote, remote, remote!”, not an argument about why someone’s being a bad person, but there you have it. And I think we can safely assume that watching porn looks much worse for Evans than it does for Schelske.]

Of course, there are plenty of situations in which someone is acting the bad person, which brings me to Sherwood. At this point, it’s undisputed that Sherwood’s affair did occur, and he’s run campaign ads apologizing for this fact. The weirdest part is now the letter Carol Sherwood sent out to voters. She writes that she is not condoning Don’s mistake, but she isn’t dwelling on it either; Don was once a hero to their daughters and will be again, etc. I don’t know if Carol Sherwood contemplated leaving her husband, but her letter plays directly into this notion of “good wives”. Her anger isn’t directed at her husband (who’s still a good person as we are reminded in the closing paragraph), but at his opponent and the campaign ads mentioning the affair.

When political candidates or officerholders have an affair, the options for how their wives** will respond are very limited. It’s a huge risk not to buy into an archetype or to buy into the wrong one. Carol Sherwood is definitely choosing the “stand by your man” routine in public, and I wonder if that may hurt her later on if she decides Don’s not a good person and that it may be worth dwelling on why your partner carried on an affair for years. I think Sherwood’s probably safer than Evans because her kids are grown (and hence, she’s a lot less likely to get the “you’re a bad mother!” schtick), but it’s still a problem. Whatever Sherwood decides, I can say with considerable confidence that she’s going to run smack into all of these normative ideas about how husbands and wives behave.

*To say I’m following Sara Evans’s divorce proceedings is an overstatement, but it keeps popping up on CNN, so I’ve clicked through a couple of times. There are a lot of allegations on both sides about misconduct, affairs, and so on.

**Are there any high profile female officeholders who’ve had a publicized affair? I couldn’t think of one.


11 thoughts on Breaking up is hard to do

  1. Are there any high profile female officeholders who’ve had a publicized affair? I couldn’t think of one.

    Sue Myrick, Rep., NC.

  2. My attitude is that unless it’s a crime (Mark Foley) or affects a candidate’s ability to perform one’s duties then it’s a private matter. I’m not a Sherwood fan. There seems to be a morbid fascination with the sex lives of well-known people. It’s the 21 century and people still haven’t grown out of that.

  3. Well, if Sherwood did indeed choke (and not in a kinky way) his mistress, that would be a crime, but the settlement is confidential, so we’ll likely never know that part.

    I think that talking about a candidate’s sex life is fraught (and I’m generally not a fan of the strategy), but I think that when a candidate makes an issue of their own piousness, it becomes fair game.

    When it came out that Jack Ryan (Senate candidate in Illinois) had been urging his wife to go to sex clubs with him, it ended his career. There was absolutely nothing else for people to talk about. I think that Ryan was only limited in his ability to get the job done insofar as there was no other topic of conversation. No one cared about his views on the economy. They just wanted to know what happened at that “avant garde club” in Paris.

  4. I think part of the issue with Jack Ryan was that Jeri Ryan had claimed that even though she had previously told him that she did not want to go to sex clubs and him promising he wouldn’t take her again, he took her into a sex club in Paris without telling her what kind of club it was. Once they were in, she allegedly felt ill and started to cry. Rather than acting like a decent human being, he allegedly told her that crying wasn’t a “turn on” for him. He denies that any of that ever happened,

    Personally, I believe her. At which point, I have to say I think the guy is scum, and I wouldn’t want him representing my interests. If he treats his wife that way, how should I expect him to treat his constituents?

    I won’t say that people’s general squickiness about sex clubs didn’t have a lot to do with his downfall. I do, however, think there are other reasons related to the scandal not to want this guy as your representative.

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