LADY COLIN CAMPBELL : HER FATHER and MEN OF HIS STATUS TOOK THE "LORD'S RIGHT" AS THEIR DUE

(Warning: Possibly explicit words here.)

This excerpt is from Chapter 7 of Lady Colin Campbell's book. I read it on Hoopla and my settings could change the page number/count.  In the book she calls her mother Gloria and her father Michael. This passage begins with her father's resistance to travel outside of Jamaica or with his wife.  But that changed and he began to do both when his wife insisted.  Sometimes her mother still traveled without her husband. She well positions her mother as a wife married to a husband who may have tolerated her - mutually. Was it that Michael wanted his wife to travel alone so he could womanize? 

Excerpt: Page 57

His risk aversion aside, two others aspects of Michael's personality would have made living with him a rough-ride for any woman. Like all men of his station and background, he saw nothing wrong with availing himself of the plenitude of available 'pum pum' - as Jamaicans called the female organ - which was always on offer. It is a fact of life that well off men will always be attracted to poorer girls, even if the men themselves are not sexually appealing - which Michael, according to just about every woman who knew him - was. It was also a fact of life that the wives of rich men know that there is a queue of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls who will happily jump into their shoes, if they should vacate the position of wife. The divorce laws in England and America have gone some way towards readdressing the balance in favour of the wife in the latter part of the twentieth century: but even so, the rule of thumb that moneyed men will always find it easy to replace a wife with another - or with a stream of girlfriends -still applies. It keeps wives on their toes and gives them a tolerance towards infidelity that the wives of poorer men rarely have.

Like most of his relations and friends, Michael never saw any reason to deny himself the pleasures of the flesh. To all of them, morality had nothing to do with sex. Indeed, Michael went further than many of his sexually-liberated peers and lived by the rule of droit de seigneur in a way that would be totally unacceptable in today's world. 'As soon as Mrs. Ziadie was out of the house,' our Butler Edward told Joyce, his last nurse, 'Mr. Ziadie would go to the servants quarters and demand to be let in by whichever maid had taken his fancy. He would never take no for an answer. They had to give him what he wanted. Once one of the girls said no and locked the door with a key. Mr. Ziadie kicked down the door."

Commentary:  Eventually Gloria refused to hire any female servants other than a laundress who was shared with another family member. She hired males, including gay males.  However lousy this situation of having a husband who was a sexual predator was for Gloria - or the elite woman of Jamaica in the 1950's and 1960's (for Georgia was born in 1949 and this is about her childhood) - this in it self would not be the origins of her personality disorder of Narcissism. 

Droit de seigneur means Lord's Rights in French. For many centuries the Lord of the Manor (or the royal men and that of the aristocracy) had the right to have sex with women under their rule. This was such an assumed right that it was not fought by law. In recent Me Too Movement days, it is often the boss, owner of he company, or someone powerful in an industry, that wishes to assume the "right." We call it sexual harassment or rape. The sex these men had with women of lower status to them did not imply romance or a willingness to marry women, even if the sex resulted in pregnancy and the man was unmarried.

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