Skip to main content

Better or Worse?



“I, (Name),
Take you, (Name),
To be my (wife/husband);
To have and to hold,
From this day forward,
For better, for worse,
For richer, for poorer,
In sickness and in health,
To love and to cherish,
‘Till death do us part.” (or, “As long as we both shall live.”)

 —Traditional Wedding Vows 

 Yesterday when Council Representative Jon Weinstein, a Democrat, endorsed Allan Kittleman, a Republican, for County Executive, armchair analysts on social media soon turned the talk to...

 ...his wife, Margaret Weinstein.

 Being a wife in the world of politics continues to be a constricting and diminishing role. The assumptions people make about political wives just floor me. I wrote a bit about this topic during the last County Executive race. 

 It must be a hard life to be a political wife, (or husband, although there's still much less of that) indeed, harder than I can imagine. Finding the right balance between supporting one's spouse and yet retaining one's own sense of self must be exhausting.

 Margaret Weinstein ran for, and won, a place on the Democratic Central Committee in her own right. If you want to know what her future plans are, reach out to her as you would any person in public life. Do not automatically assume that she exists to manifest the will of her spouse. Is it so difficult to comprehend the concept that Ms. Weinstein is an independent human being, able to make decisions and take action based on her own free will?

 We easily allow this for autonomy for men. We don’t place them in a long shadow cast by their wives. In fact, setting this story in the reverse would almost seem silly to most of us, because we are so used to common, everyday stereotypes that paint women as appendages of their spouses.

 I reached out to Ms.Weinstein for this piece but, as we don’t know each other well, I didn’t expect to hear back, especially on a day like yesterday. The flurry of Facebook frenzy was rather overwhelming. But, if she should decide she has something to say on this topic, I’d be willing to give her the space to share it. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more