In that sense, “Advice for Living” is as much a revealing, internal conversation as a ministration to Ebony readership. This is particularly true with regard to gender politics, which, not surprisingly, made up the majority of the queries and was one of King’s biggest blind spots.
King’s response to a cheated-on wife was to suggest that she “study” her rival to learn what her husband wanted in a woman. (“Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag?” he asked.) He informed an unmarried woman grappling with whether to have sex that “real men still respect purity and virginity” and instructed an abused wife to determine whether there was anything within her personality to justify such treatment. “Are you sure that you have a radiating personality, a pleasant disposition, and that feminine charm which every man admires?” he asked a Miss Lonelyhearts. To a newlywed having troubles with her mother-in-law, he remarked, “There is an expression that no home is big enough to have two women at its head.”
“Doc thought of a wife as a support worker, not a partner,” says Garrow, whose book details Coretta Scott King’s frustration with her husband’s insistence that she devote all her energy to her family. “I remember [ranking Southern Christian Leadership Conference member] Dorothy Cotton saying to me in 1979 or 1980 that if Martin had lived, he would have had an awful lot of growing up to do on gender issues.”
To be fair, there are moments in which King shows gender enlightenment: To a mother of seven who wrote in complaining that her husband wouldn’t use birth control, King said, “It is a serious mistake to suppose that it is a religious act to allow nature to have its way in the sex life . . . women must be considered more than ‘breeding machines.’ ” To a woman whose husband was allowed to go out alone but wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to her, King said time alone “is a privilege which should come to husband and wife alike.” And after a stay-at-home mom lamented that her husband had never given her spending money, King all but called the situation immoral.
“I don’t think there had been a column like that from a national leader,” says Bennett, who agreed to cease publication of the column after the assassination attempt on King in September 1958. “It was a hard thing to pull off.”
“Some of [his answers] would not pass muster these days,” concedes Carson. “But remember that this [was written] more than a decade before women’s rights became a major public issue. I think if he’d been writing it later, he’d have been more outspoken. Coretta would have educated him some.”
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