Response to Roiphe: A Tale of Two Divorces

Being a child that had once been caught in the middle of a nasty divorce, I can relate to the stories that Anne Roiphe told about her mother's unhappy marriage and her own experience with a hopeless marriage. Roiphe shares that her mother was timid about divorcing, it was a black stain on her psyche. Roiphe's marriage was not a bed of roses either, and when realizing this, she did not stick around with her deadbeat husband the way that her mother had. I believe that in my mother's divorce she had experienced both feelings that these two women had. She had been brought up Catholic and thought that divorce was a sin, that a woman should try harder for a marriage to work. When she finally realized that her own husband was a deadbeat, she left him. But this was not easy for women before, the difference being that in the 50s women were becoming baby makers and men were bringing home the bacon.
It is hard for me to think about a time when women could not stand up for themselves and realize what is wrong with a relationship that they are in. I do not think it was necessarily that women were so subservient to their husbands as Roiphe led readers to believe. That her mother would make sure that her legs were waxed and her nails were painted, just so that her husband could find her attractive (205). This mother was a slave to her husband, nervous as hell, waiting for him to come home so that she could once again pretend that their marriage was happy and perfect (206). I think that the only reason women were like this was because unless they could keep the marriage from falling apart, they would be left alone and without anywhere to go. Women began going home and raising families again at this time, work was far from their brains in this culture. If Roiphe's mom could no longer fake the marriage, she would be unable to survive and raise her children in a "healthy" environment. Today, divorce is at its highest rate because people cannot stand dealing with disastrous marriages and opt out of them. This fantasy of love as oxygen (208) is over and people almost know that romantic love is the first type of love to flicker away. But now women are capable, even more so than men, to take care of themselves and their children.