"Stand By Your Man"

They call it the Battered Woman Syndrome, but I can't understand it.

One of the things that always has surprised and shocked me is the sheer number of women who are willing to stay with abusive men – men who torture them mentally, abuse them in public, beat them up daily, deny them food and shelter, and quite often end up killing them (whether by violence or AIDS or neglect doesn’t matter very much).

It wouldn’t be that shocking (though just as bad) if these women were all uneducated or unemployed and had no social or economic alternative – but so much of the time it isn’t.

I know women, educated, qualified women, who have been publicly insulted by their husbands, who have been turned into virtual marital slaves, who have nothing but the husk of a dead marriage to cling to – and still they won’t quit. I know at least one woman whose philandering, drug-addicted husband has tried to kill her more than once, and spent time in prison for it – and when he came out she took him right back, and he did it all over again.

It's not as though it were the children, either. There are these women with children old enough to withstand a parental separation, or even no children at all. 

I wonder what it is that makes them do it. Is it the brainwashing their parents subject them to, that a woman must sacrifice herself for a man? Have they suppressed their self-worth so much that this seems better than the other alternatives? There are illiterate, “helpless” women who find the courage to walk out on abusive men – and here we have educated women, professionally qualified, preferring the marital hell to the air of freedom.

I’m sorry, I just don’t understand this phenomenon. Maybe someone will enlighten me.