From Violation to Sisterhood: The Friend Who Understood | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 1.4

After her violating experience with Phidias leaves Abigail frightened, heartbroken, and facing the possibility of pregnancy, she turns to her friend Harper.

Instead of judgment, Harper gives Abigail the gift of recognition. Understanding more than Abigail expects, she offers practical help, kindness, and what Abigail later calls “that pearl without price”: feminine solidarity.

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin explore female friendship, abortion and sin, feminine innocence, romantic idealism, and the vulnerability women often learn to hide.

Their conversation also returns to Phidias and to the uneasy distance between romantic love and the cold, clinical language that can make intimacy feel ordinary or shopworn.

What can one woman offer another when innocence has been shaken and the future feels uncertain? Sometimes, the beginning of an answer is simply discovering that someone else understands.

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Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically.

Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo

Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated.

Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Transcript

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:00:00

What kind of a hand have we been dealt as women today? And how can we best play it? It's a large question that's always lurking in the background, and since the answers aren't obvious, I find women's lives to be immediately suspenseful and interesting. Don't you?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:00:38

Wait a minute. Who am I? I'm Abigail L. Rosenthal, Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and while my advice has always been not to take my advice, I do write a weekly blog I call Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column. And so, dear listener, I invite you to pull up a chair at this virtual cafe table, no matter your gender, age, convictions, or style of life.

Narrator

00:01:34

Married philosophers Discuss Confessions. Part one continued. Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal discuss her newest book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. In this episode, Abigail turns to a friend and begins to speak about what happened, bringing fear, uncertainty, and the possibility of pregnancy into the open. What she finds is not judgment but a kind of recognition as her friend responds with a perspective shaped by experience rather than idealism. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:02:10

Several points in the book you find a good woman to talk to. And you find your friend Harper, who's also a Fulbright and in Paris at the same time and in talking to her, you tell her what you're going through and oh my God, I could be pregnant and so forth. “Well, Harper told me her whole sad comic picaresque backstory.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:02:40

So, you know, each person you think you're all alone in some predicament, and then you talk to someone else and if they're really a good friend, they say , "Oh, well, let me tell you what I've been through, what I've done, the mistakes perhaps made, or the difficulties I've gotten myself into and so on ." So you listen to her story and you say, ah "So this is what it's like to be real and get your heart broke like other girls.” So what you're going through, that's what it is.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:03:14

Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:03:15

“What she gave me was that pearl without price, the feminine solidarity. ‘But Harper, suppose I get pregnant?’”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:03:29

She says, "’Well, you would have to get an abortion.’” And this was early days, we didn't have all this abortion rights and stuff. You'd have to have an abortion. “‘If I'm still in France,’ Harper says , ‘I'll go with you to Sweden.’”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:03:45

“‘But Harper,’ I looked down to think and then into her eyes directly. ‘Isn't abortion a sin?’”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:03:55

“She shook her head, gave me back a look of pure kindness. Southern kindness.” She was from Virginia, I recall.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:04:06

“‘There are many sins, my dear.’” Now, I don't know what it is about that line, but it's always one line from the book I particularly remembered, and I've met Harper in real life, and I've always, you might say, loved her for that one line, and yet I don't think I could explain why that is so helpful, but I can sense that that's a very helpful thing to say in this circumstance. But why, and what did that tell you?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:04:37

It's almost the secret that women know beyond ... it's not a myth, feminine innocence, so I don't want to say beyond the myth of feminine innocence and high expectations and hopes. It's not a myth, but it's often the gateway to heartbreak and then you scramble. You know, what can you do?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:05:13

How can you conceal the evidence of your heartbreak because the evidence of heartbreak diminishes your value in the marketplace not of ideas. Sometimes people talk about the marketplace of ideas, I don't know what they're talking about, the good ideas undersell the bad ones. But in the marketplace of feminine eligibility, there's certainly a marketplace, and you can be worth zero.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:05:50

So, you scramble there, and the southern woman, unlike the northern woman that I was, has a funny sense, and I don't know… I'm not an anthropologist or sociologist, it'd be interesting to track it if anybody cared about such things today, but there's a sense that we belong to the same, I don't know, metaphor sounds masculine, fellowship of them what has been shot at. We're quite aware that you can lose that bloom, that southern bloom with the parasols and the hoop skirts and the suntan lotion. You can lose that thing and your market value goes down below zero. And so you lie.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:06:58

Because where are you gonna go? You know, the moon? You still have to live on the plantation, someplace. Everybody knows everybody, everybody knows everything because of small town gossip. And so you've got to know the arts of concealment.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:07:21

A Southern woman who was a well-known writer said to me , "My mother told me that men are the enemy ." 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:07:34

I can just hear that in a southern drawl. They're moving out of the enemy.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:07:39

Yeah, my mother forgot to tell me that, but the Southern woman especially of those days, perhaps of these days, knew it. You know, men are sneaking out to do what men do, and then they're coming back and demanding innocence from women, demanding that this rosebud has never been opened, and you have got to play along. You can have a lot of power, but only if you give them the illusion of power. So, these stratagems are not… they're stratagems of mutual bad faith. Their concealment and their coquetterie and, it's deeply feminine but in another register. And she was inducting me into that society. I can't think of the feminine equivalent

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:08:48

There was a combat cartoonist who talked about the (Bill  Mauldin) fellowship of them what has been shot at. There's a womanly equivalent of such a fellowship. And she was inducting me into that sisterhood of that. Maybe you could call it of girls who've been ruined.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:09:15

Yeah, yes, that's right. Women whose erotic future has been compromised in some almost fatal way. In part because of their behavior maybe, okay, there are those sins and then abortion, well that would just be another on a long list of things women have in their hidden resumes, the part of the resumes they don't put in the front window. But every woman has them, and men have them too, but men might well be celebrating them, it’s the part of the vulnerability of women. There's nothing to celebrate.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:09:51

No, it's a funny thing, you know, I guess nobody sincerely wants those days back where your virginity was surrendered on your wedding night and you wore girdles and stockings in the depths of winter and high heels in the snow, you know, and pointy bras.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:10:18

Anybody who's outlived those days can't sincerely wish them to return, but there were underlying truths on the combat field of erotic life that were acknowledged then and have been publicly renounced, denounced, outgrown, transcended, whatever you want now.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:10:51

But I feel a certain… there's a French nasty novelist who's written a book called Pitié pour les femmes: pity for women. Those are sentiments. There's a 17th century playwright who writes, “Est-ce que vous ne pleuriez pas le sort des femmes?” Do you not pity the lot of women? And there's a pity for the fate of women that has been suppressed, and it's like an erotic suppression. The vulnerability of women has been suppressed. It's censored. It's unacknowledged.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:11:44

It would give men too much power, blah blah blah blah. So it hasn't gone away. And that's what my friend Harper was…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:11:57

But she knew.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:11:58

Yes, that's what she knew.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:12:00

Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:12:01

Well, you're continuing your relationship with Phidias and I gather that the first whatever it was that was rather surreptitious and last minute, that it was itself manipulative and you could call it a rape. And now he's arguing with you. Well, that was sort of spoiled, wasn't it? And we should do it again in the right way.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:12:33

Okay, here we go. And he goes on talking his usual ways, the materialist reductionist ways. You accuse him of sounding like Stendhal, who has this theory of crystallization that love is just an illusion that happens in the human psyche, and he lays out the theory of how that happens and he poo poos your theory of crystallization. And you comment about this French attitude that he's of course part of.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:13:15

Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:13:16

This French romantic erotic culture. You say, “It wasn't that they make love unimportant. Rather, romantic love was a thing apart. One could die of it, get heartbroken, or demented from it. There was room for all that in their medieval tapestry. You couldn't make it the basis of real life.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:13:45

“Phidias, if we should sleep together, please do not describe what I do clinically.” Which is part of this… on the one hand, there's an element of love here, even occasional idealization. On the other, there are these ways that happen more than once of bizarrely, to my mind, clinical language for what's taking place. And the clinical aspect is not the romantic aspect, right?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:14:18

No.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:14:19

And that's the part that I think you probably mean when you say, “It becomes something shopworn.”

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:14:30

Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

00:14:31

That everybody's been here, done this, so don't think this is a special moment, that you're special.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:14:39

Yes, yes, yes.

Narrator

00:14:42

This is Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions. What remains is not a simple answer, but the question of how to understand something that cannot be undone. See you next episode or sooner.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

00:15:08

Thanks so much, dear listener. If this added value to your life, I'd be happy if you subscribed. You can find me at www. abigailrosenthal. com. I've written a book called A Good Look at Evil, and if that's not too scary for you, you can buy it on Amazon. Another book is called Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and that's forthcoming soon with illustrations.