Daughters in Danger by Elayne Bennett

Author:Elayne Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

In Loose Girl, Kerry Cohen did an excellent job of explaining the impact of her parents’ divorce. Her description bears out just about all of what Meeker and Wallerstein have reported in their works. Cohen’s father left home just as she was coming of age, leaving behind “a house with no men.” There were just Kerry, her older sister, and a “grief-stricken and frantic” mother, “busy with need.”21 The departure of the first parent left the two girls with the great anxiety that most children of divorce face, that of losing the second parent as well.

Even more damaging, her parents’ divorce left Cohen feeling unwanted, unloved, and devoid of value. She moved from one boy to another in a desperate effort “to get evidence that I’m worth something.” This she never really did. “I feel worthless, a discarded piece of trash,” she lamented after one particularly futile relationship ended badly.22 Her sister did no better. Both their marriages ended in divorce, as did the second marriage of her mother and the one long-term relationship of her father.

The divorce left both sisters angry. The mother eventually left the girls with their father, and their father was “barely there.” Tellingly, each sister transferred her unspoken rage to some larger cause. Kerry became the editor of her college’s alternative liberal newspaper. “I don’t know as much as I should,” she observed, “but it feels good to get behind something, to channel my anger into something real.” Her “anticorporate” sister did the same, talking “loudly about all the ways she’s getting screwed, about the environment, the government, everything but her real self.”23 Although Cohen did not generalize, one has to wonder whether a collective rage against the home, the father in particular, has soured feminists on traditional virtue and pushed the movement so uniformly leftward.

There are any number of resources to help divorced parents cope with the aftereffects of divorce, but as Dr. Judith Wallerstein urges, if at all possible feuding parents should stay together for the sake of the children.24 Parents cannot communicate any meaningful messages to their children if they are not there to do so. This, the Cohen children fully understood. At one point, for instance, Cohen’s mother attempted to assert her parental control over her girls, now living with their father. Cohen denied her that right: “Not when you’re not around to parent us yourself.”25

Divorce is nearly as rough on the women who have been left behind as it is on the children. With respect to economics alone, women suffer. An analysis of recent data suggests the woman’s standard of living declines by 27 percent on average after divorce, while the man gains about 10 percent.26 This gender gap does not seem to have changed much in recent decades. On the emotional front, women suffer even more. A woman’s identity as a married person is typically stronger than her husband’s, and her sense of abandonment and failure is correspondingly greater.

On the question of physical health, however, women do slightly better than men after divorce, but not as well as their married peers.

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