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.

***

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.