4. "Damned if you do and damned if you don't!"
Double punishment!
No matter how hard you try, things often go wrong! This, in a nutshell, is the method of dominance known as double punishment. Women often suffer from a bad conscience about everything. They should almost always be somewhere else. At work, with the kids or with their husbands. The stress of this is insufferable. Worst of all is the feeling of not being good enough. Women are accused, often indirectly, by those surrounding them, of failing to be worthwhile mums especially when they get involved in their jobs or in politics. At the same time they have to put up with criticism for a lack of involvement when they choose to put their home lives or families first. When they choose both they face dissatisfaction on all sides.
Women want nothing better than to be able to combine family life with working life and they have every right to say "No" both in the home and at work! Men, unlike women, seldom face this sort of double punishment. They find it more that often a matter of course that they can say "Yes" and "No" in the home! This situation is both unacceptable and unfair. Women must have the same rights as men to a decent working life and family life.
Act as follows:
- Choose your husband with extreme care.
- Choose your boss with extreme care.
- Demand of your boss that he/she accepts a No - or a Yes - without the usual punishment in the form of no promotion.
- Draw up "an agreement" with your husband or partner giving you the right to work politically.
It is strange that the double bind is such an effective master suppression technique. It is manifestly illogical and unjust! But centuries of making women and female culture invisible and ridiculing either or both, do make even the strictest logician go soft. Meantime, women exposed to this master suppression technique, become stressed out when they try without much success to avoid attracting criticism from either side.
