GLORIA ZIADIE, LADY COLIN CAMPBELL's MOTHER and HER EQUALS TOOK THEIR HUSBAND'S OTHER WOMEN IN STRIDE

In this memoir, Lady Colin Campbell recalls that her mother, Gloria, and father, Michael, were abusive to their children, her mother especially, which she credits to her mother's personality disorder, Narcissism. Her parent's were not happily married and her father was one to make sexual demands of the house servants and women who worked at his office as his natural right. But one woman emerged as his mistress, a woman from the office called Mrs. Powell who was thirty-some years younger than him.

In this passage from Chapter 7, she explains her mother's attitude about Mrs. Powell, who, in my opinion, might have been a relief to her mother, Gloria, considering that Michael, her husband, might have settled on one other woman.

Pages 58 - 59

Towards the end of her life, I discovered, while speaking to another member of our family whose husband had always had mistresses, Gloria's true attitude towards marital infidelity. 'She makes a fool of herself carrying on the way she does.  As long as the wife's position isn't threatened, or he doesn't bring home unwelcome presents in the form of venereal diseases, it doesn't really matter what a man does. And men, let's face facts, will always be men,  They can't help it. All men are unfaithful. A wife who even acknowledges that her husband is being unfaithful lowers herself in his eyes. If I had created a scene every time your father had another woman, I would have spent my life ripping my hair out. Where would that have got me?  I had far too much self respect for that."

'So you really didn't mind?"

"When you're young and impressionable, you mind those sort of things, but, as you get older and learn the ways of the world, you realize there is little point in letting things like that bother you. As long as it wasn't done under my nose and I could ignore it with grace, it wasn't an issue. Women today make far too much fuss about infidelity, but seem quite happy to tolerate things that my generation would have never done.'

'Like what?'

'Men who don't know, and don't want to know, how to take care of their wives. Whatever your father's faults, he always took good care of me. Man was made to protect women and your father was a real man, not one of those namby-pamby freeloaders whom one meets so often nowadays.  Believe me it is better to be a man's darling - even an old man's darling - than any man's slave. Whether or not they've been my slave or not is something else,' she laughed.

Commentary: Lady Colin Campbell goes on to say that the discussion exttended to what if the mistress was of the same status or class.  A relative of theirs had such a mistress and the entire family supported his wife in the matter, so it seems that the attitude that taking a mistress in stride for these British-Jamaican aristocrats, seeing them as Other, keeping them separate, had much to do with a man taking a lower status woman as a mistress.

What is your opinion on that?