Silda standing beside her husband while he apologizes

The image of Silda Spitzer standing stone-faced and inexpressibly sad by her husband as he admits to the world that he patronized prostitutes and apologizes for his behavior should be put in a time capsule so that women from the far future can see twenty-first century subjugation of women in the United States (as well as the rest of the world). Here, an educated woman of high social standing faces pity and contempt.

My heart ached for Silda. I understood why she humbled herself before the merciless glare of the TV cameras. For each of us who live in a patriarchal society, the forces that cause our degradation are different, depending on a myriad of factors, and the form of that degradation is accordingly different, but ultimately, each of us, usually privately but sometimes very publicly, has to yield to these pressures.

Some women have foolishly and unimaginatively condemned Silva. "How could she allow herself to be humiliated?" Others have called it "phony" and "awful". They confuse the particular circumstances of Silva's humiliation-she being a politician's wife and no doubt part of the whole phony political scene-with the universality of her situation. Until we realize how circumscribed our lives really are and how each woman is doing what she needs to do to survive in a world that we women didn't make, we are destined to be manipulable, arrogant, and alienated from each other.

Some condemn her as a sell-out because she quit her lawyer job to advance her husband's career. Had she asked my advice in advance of doing this, I might have counseled her as to the risk she was taking, and maybe I would have lacked empathy for a woman making that choice, but in the final analysis, I really know that she had no choice, and my utmost sympathy goes out to her.