My feminist self is totally shaken by this.
I've remarked many times on how young Lois and Clark are in this story, how they aren't free to run their own lives and make all their choices for themselves. Ah, but that is a quandary shared by so many seventeen-year-olds. What you show us in this chapter is powerlessness raised to a whole new level: the powerlessness of women and children living in a house ruled by a drunken tyrant. There is this feeling of utter, utter helplessness to it, because our society backs the family tyrant up. Society assumes that the family unit will normally be more or less functional, that it will be beneficial to society if we make the family units as strong and independent as possible, and that it will cause too much upheaval to investigate and question well-functioning families just to catch the ones that don't work. Better, then, to let the tyrants threaten, beat up, blackmail and break the members of their own families than to weaken the family as an institution.
So it is better to let the family tyrants do what they do under the umbrella of protection given to all families by society; better to let the family tyrants bask in the blessings of society than to question the wisdom of always letting fathers rule. Because by supporting the family tyrants we support all heads of families, and thereby we support all families.
Obey your father, girl! Why? Because he is your father. Because society wants children to obey their fathers. Because society will let a father have his way with his own children. Because that is the way it is, and that is the way it must be.
(All right; society will usually back up those mothers who are family tyrants, too.)
And you can't ask for help if you are the child of such a father; because you are the one who will have to carry the shame of having a father like that. You are the one who will have to put up with the sympathetic or contemptuous smiles given to you by others. They will all know what your home is like, and what your father is doing to you, and no one will help you. Because there is no help for someone like you, only contempt. It is probably your own fault that you have a father like that anyway.
Well, Laura, you can hear how this gets me going. Now, of course, you are going to do something to help Lois here, I can't believe you won't. If I had been Lois, I would have seriously considered running away from home. Naturally, however, she would have to find a way to support herself first. I believe that she is already good enough to scrape out a meagre living as a reporter. But will society allow her to defy her father's wishes and leave his home and get herself a job and a place to sleep away from his control? Or will society back Sam Lane up if he comes for his daughter and forces her to get into the army?
There is a third possibility - Lois could live with the Kents as their foster daughter. That would be a lovely solution. I wonder, though, if it is possible.
I'm so looking forward to the conclusion!
Ann
