Suffrage, Feminism, Female Agency - Fertility Gives Way To Secular Obsession, Lessons From The Lindsay Clancy Trial

The women shouting for Lindsay Clancy's acquittal, absolving her from the responsibility of murdering her three children because of 'mitigating circumstances' displayed cracks in the feminine ideal.  Somehow the movement for equal rights, shattering the glass ceiling, full and free access to all that modern America had to offer had gone off the rails. The murder trial - Clancy had readily admitted to killing the little ones - had turned into a sad caricature.

There was no way said liberal women, that this woman, beleaguered and besieged by a patriarchal, abusive husband, chained to motherhood and deprived of even the basics of a liberated life, should be convicted.  If anything, she was understandably disturbed, upset, and indeed mentally ill because of the punitive treatment meted out by her typically misogynist man. 

One juror - a man - refused to buckle to this progressive hysteria, held his ground, and insisted that she was guilty of first degree murder.  She had researched strangling on the web, found a suitable errand for her husband that would take him out of the house until she had done the deed, and had planned the whole thing.  

The children had to be rid of, exterminated, eliminated from life.  To rule anything but premeditated murder would itself be a crime, a capitulation to febrile politically correct nonsense, a travesty of justice, and an unholy, immoral act. 

Marcia Griffin was on the fence when it came to the trial.  She had been married twice to fools and ignoramuses and to this day she damned herself for being so credulous and naive.  How could she not have known?  How had she been so shamed and cowed by an abusive father, watched him demean and dismantle very shred of dignity of her mother, that she jumped at the opportunity of loving a good man? Hah! How stupid and hopelessly romantic.  

Yes, Harper Fleming was dashing and virile, charitable and attentive and seemingly kind and caring; but it didn't take long for him to sidle up to the women in his office, the tarts on K Street, and the dames in his corporate boardroom. Marcia thought she was marrying the anti-father when in fact, Skinner, Maslow, and Freud being directly on target, she instead took wedding vows with her father,  Harrison P Griffin himself. 

The second time around should be a charm, but husband number two turned out to be a wheezy wheedler, a randy follower who claimed he knew women but that was just part of his treacly liberalism.  He gave her more space than No. 1, but was so objectionable and totally, completely clueless about femaleness, femininity, and womanhood that she couldn't stand one more painful, numbing hour with him. 

That was Part I of her Lindsay Clancy dilemma. Part II was her hidden desire to have children, many of them, to fulfill the only real reason women were created in the first place, fertility and reproduction.  Of course in today's progressive political environment in which she made her home, she could never even hint at what would be considered treasonous notions, but there there they were, niggling, insistent, thoughts that wouldn't retreat.  

So as much as she agreed with the millions of set-upon women who felt that Lindsay was simply acting out a justified reaction to male subjugation and the prison of motherhood, she could not deny that the woman had snuffed out the life that she had given - that only she, a woman, could give. Murder was one thing, unacceptable, heinous, criminal, and immoral; but when committed against the very flesh and blood that a woman created, carried, and delivered was in a hell reserved for only the most evil. 

The trial which had become a viral, social media caricature of modern politics - liberal vs conservative philosophy - for Marcia it was far more than that. It forced the hidden conundrum - fertility or agency - out into the open, forced her to wonder why she had resisted motherhood so adamantly and ferociously, why she had reviled God's creation. 

 

At the same time Marcia thought of Freud who was quite generous to the mature, intelligent women of his day who simply and austerely chose either single womanhood or a life unencumbered by children. 

He wrote about Aimee Herzog, wife of Austrian financier Henrik Herzog.  Mrs. Herzog was the center of Viennese society, had charmed Freud with her wit, intelligence, and social grace.  She led a life which suggested a new age of female agency, a pre-feminist who admired mothers, children, and childbirth, but who abjured the idea for herself. 

There was room enough in the universe for both kinds of women, surely, so why was it that she was so upset by the subterranean urgings of motherhood?  A lifelong progressive, espouser of every cause in the liberal canon, she froze at the idea of abortion.  

Her colleagues had become cavalier about it.  The fetus was no more than a clot of unwanted phlegm, an irritation, and intrusion to be rid of. And yet the fetus had a beating heart and could feel pain.  Even if one did not grant identity to the unborn child, it was a potential soul and scraping it summarily out of the womb was depriving a life of being. 

So how were these howling hyenas calling for the head of the male juror who resisted their hectoring, bullying, and abuse representative of the modern woman?  Something had gone wrong between suffrage and today.  Something had gotten twisted beyond recognition when women defended the likes of Lindsay Clancy and her heinously conceived and executed execution of her children?

These same progressive colleagues laughed at the stay-at-home moms of the country, the homemakers, caretakers, wives, women content with their calling - the only calling which distinguished them from men.  

Worse, progressive women were questioning the very nature of womanhood.  Wasn't gender self-identified and one could choose from any one of a hundred choices up and down the fluid gender spectrum? How were men, castrated, injected, twisted and deformed into horrible caricatures of women, ever considered women?

When the suffragettes of the early Twentieth Century demanded the right to vote, they only wanted electoral equality and with it the ancillary rights of property, ownership, and wealth. They were vilified, abhorred and rejected, but they were right.  Fertility and agency could exist simultaneously.  No one said that electoral power eliminated the nature of a woman to reproduce. 

In today's culture of identity there is no such thing as a national ethos, a universal moral code to which everyone subscribes.  Race, gender, and ethnicity trump obedience to and respect for commandments of right behavior.  A woman is simply one of many identities, and within that one fungible category, she can subdivide, reconfigure, and reform.  In so doing she has lost both fertility and agency. 

As much as Marcia listened to the blandishments of her colleagues, their pleas for understanding the female condition that Lindsay Clancy represented, their demands for lockstep solidarity in the matter of rejecting male patriarchy and privilege, and their insistence on the irrelevance of motherhood, she remained unconvinced.  The woman had murdered three innocent children, killed them one by one as each watched. 

For Marcia it was too late for husband No. 3, too late for fertility, for children and for motherhood.  She would have to stand on the sidelines and watch, regret her own ignorance, lack of will, and submission to the outrageously deformed canon of the Left.  

There was nowhere for her to turn.  She could no longer abide progressivism and the sanctimony of her liberal friends - the Clancy case slammed the door shut on them - and she had been far too public about her endorsement of the canon she now despised to be looked at as only an operative, a spy, a mole in the conservative camp.

It didn't have to end this way, but she did not have the willpower of the one male juror who stood his ground at the Clancy trial to resist the cant and doctrinaire bullying of her colleagues.

Hers is a sad story.  Now old, without children, with no comforting political camaraderie, no future, no man, and only regrets for a past unrealized she passed out of sight, lamentably out of mind, and eventually away.