Glenda P. Simms, Contributor
When I grew up in Stanmore district in the Santa Cruz mountain range of St Elizabeth, the wise women who nurtured my generation had sayings to fit every circumstance that women of their vintage had to deal with.
The condition of one woman who had four children by four different men, all of whom deserted her and the children, was captured in the saying 'she has to suck salt through a wooden spoon'.
Some others who were married to philandering men and meekly bore their pain were described as women who had to 'grin and bear it' (GABI).
These early insights into the pitfalls of womanhood helped me to develop a feminist conscious-ness long before I could spell the word woman.
It was, therefore, an eye opener when I was forced recently to acknowledge the reality of the 'grin and bear it' syndrome among highly-educated and power-linked women in all societies.
Indeed, upper-middle-class and upper-crust women understand the meaning and practice of power brokering through their legal and biological attachment to powerful men in society.
If an Ivy League education was sufficient to validate the essence and potential of womanhood, the well-heeled would not have to grin and bear it.
They would have the wherewithal and intestinal fortitude to excuse themselves from arenas of embarrassment and psychological pain.
Emotional abuse
The GABIs are the best examples of emotionally-abused women. Author Beverly Engel describes emotional abuse as a kind of brainwashing that "systematically wears away at the victim's self-confidence and sense of self worth".
I had the opportunity to remain glued to CNN on both occasions when Eliot Spitzer dragged his wife Silda to a podium to acknowledge his sexual indiscre-tions and also to resign from his position as governor of New York.
Mrs Spitzer, on both occasions, presented the most pathetic and traumatised image of a woman who had no choice but to grin and bear it. She looked bedraggled, humiliated and lifeless. She showed no emotion and appeared, from the lay person's point of view, to be in a catatonic state.
No doubt her family physician would have prescribed something, but she needed more than a tranquilliser - she needed a friend to advise her to at least get a hairdo and some make up if she felt the need to face the global television audience beside her sleazy, high-profiled husband.
Ed Koch, former mayor of New York, who is a longtime friend and associate of the Spitzers, remarked to the CNN audience that Silda had aged overnight.
And, despite her husband's deliberate actions, she had to publicly grin and bear it on two occasions in a very short time span.
Jocelyn Noveck, an AP national writer, posits that "when Silda Wall Spitzer stood beside her husband in ashen-faced misery", many women wondered why she made the decision to stand on the platform.
High profile examples
Some women reflected on the similar journey taken by Hilary Clinton when she had to deal with the ghost of Monica Lewinsky having 'presidential sex' in the Oval Office. They also thought of Suzanne Craig, the wife of Idaho senator, Larry Craig, who was accused of soliciting sex in the men's bathroom in an airport.
In this same stream of consciousness, many women also reflect on Matos McGreevey who, in 2004, stood by the side of New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey as he declared to the world "I am a gay American."
These women are high profile examples of the GABIs. Each one, no doubt, has her own reason for standing in her individual humiliating spot. Sometimes, they do it for the sake of the children, as if children are fools. Others say that they do it for love, as if love and abuse are synonymous.
Others have no choice but to take these social, physical and psychological 'licks' because they need to keep their social status, their big houses, the personal credit cards and all the perks that come with their attachment to men of power.
The 'grin and bear it' mentality is deeply entrenched in patriarchal values and these values are valorised and perpetuated by both men and women.
The socially upward mothers who are determined to claw their way to the top ensure that their daughters are properly groomed to bag a powerful man. Once the ideology and activism of the various waves of feminism chipped away at the systemic barriers of the patriarch, such mothers lauded their daughters' access to the Ivy League institutions and ensured that they were carefully pampered to fit the processed and stylised image of the virginal debutante.
It is such a young woman who becomes the desirable wife type to produce two or three 'hot house' children. The Spitzers produced three daughters.
Those of us who have tried to struggle against racism and sexism over extended periods of times have come to realise that achieving equality between men and women is like looking for the Holy Grail.
In this human endeavour, we seek to change the hearts and minds of the citizenry honed and developed in deeply entrenched patriarchal values, and we have come to recognise that, while men's attitudes must be changed, the task of changing the mindset of some of the most privileged women is a mammoth task. Such women will continue to 'grin and bear it' in their effort to prop up the patriarch.
Such women reflect the personal philosophy of Dolly Parton who is reputed to have said, "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain".
Unfortunately, for Mrs Spitzer the rain has become a horrible thunderstorm and at the end of the rainbow is a pot of grime and grease.
Grinning and bearing it is a useless, soul destructive strategy for every woman in every class, caste and race.
Glenda P. Simms is a gender expert and consultant.
