A THOUGHT

Coming up....  Here at Mistress Manifesto we will be revisiting the world of the Courtesans but though we often go back to France, Paris in particular, we will focus on England.

Some Courtesans became Mistresses, some Mistresses became Courtesans. 

Some of the women who have lived or do live an Alternative Lifestyle eventually marry

 and have more ordinary lives.

Today I wonder.  How much has been or is about CHOICE?

It's said that a Courtesan always chooses her lover or lovers, 

while attracting many and sometimes creating a competition for her company.  

Today it is assumed that the days when women could become Courtesans is over.

Instead, I think, because divorce is a way out of marriage, there is serial marriages, 

or staying in a marriage but having a Mistress - or a series of them.

Was it all about sex?

Was it all about "class"?

Was it all about acquiring all that money could buy?

What are your thoughts?

Leave me a comment!

Missy

 

GEORGIE ZIADIE BECOMES LADY COLIN CAMPBELL and SOON LIVES TO REGRET IT : SHE BECOMES A CELEBRATED AUTHOR OF BOOKS ABOUT THE ROYALS and UPPER CLASS

These are my notes selected to further her story from her memoir, Daughter of Narcissus, the prime reference for his month's posts. 

As a young woman who was a fashion aficionado and designer and had lived in Jamaica growing up, Miami for fashion school, and New York, where she had sold some of her designs and earned income, Georgie Ziadie was expecting she would marry before the age of twenty-five.  After successful surgery to correct a birth defect that had caused her parents to raise her as a boy, she was swept away by suitors who were interested in marrying her.  However, she met Lord Colin Campbell because she was close friends with his sister.  There were hints that there was a "darker side" to members of his family but she met him and married him rapidly, only to soon learn that he was not interested in keeping up his side of the relationship and that included a reluctance or inability to earn income.  Although she had grown up witnessing and subjected to her parent's abuse, she failed to realize that she had married without knowing enough about the man.  He was alcoholic and using drugs - probably to self medicate mental illness.  He soon became physically violent, spewing hatred of all women. He bashed her face in.  After corrective surgery he said he would never hit her beautiful face again.  Instead he battered her body.  After one extreme beating even her father who believed in staying in marriage thought it was time she leave hers.

Like many persons who are subjected to Domestic Violence, a cycle of apology, retreat, and then another episode drove the new Lady Colin Campbell to reality. She wanted out of the marriage.  The divorce was fraught with abuse as well, and this involved his lawyer(s) and certain of his family, members of the British peerage. Perhaps she would like the world to know she had been born intersex and had surgery to corrected the birth defect?  Would everyone like to know how she peed?

She kept the name thinking it would only be a year or two before she remarried.  She had boyfriends but was wary and it was never meant to be.  After leaving the fashion world behind and participating in charity fund raising she turned to writing.  Eventually after writing several books, she earned enough income to consider adopting children.  From Russia she adopted two boys - not twins genetically but close in age - who she managed to raise without repeating the horrors that she grew up experiencing. 

Let me say that I found the book I have excerpted from riveting and have gained respect fort this woman. When I listen to her broadcasts via her YouTube station, I do so with new appreciation for her. She purchased Castle Goring and lives there as well as in London.

Below are some of many books she has written: 

Her latest about Meghan and Harry.

The book that made her famous as an author. With her earnings she realized she could afford to have her own family through adoption and became a single mother of two boys.

Lady Colin Campbell gains her information from others who know the inside stories of the royals and peerage and members of international high society.

This one was based on a real person, who so identified with the main character that law suits were threatened... Eventually Lady Colin Campbell prevailed.

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GEORGIE ZIADIE BECOMES A WOMAN AND BEGINS TO UNDERSTAND HER MENTALLY ILL PARENTS

Lady Colin Campbell takes the name she received upon her marriage, a brief marriage. As a young woman known as Georgie she had an ordeal to match her body with her female gender which would require surgery.  These are my notes selected to further her story from her memoir, Daughter of Narcissus, the prime reference for his month's posts. 

In May on 1968, Georgie had been cleared as psychologically well enough to consider surgery to correct her intersex condition and be a woman by gender. At the time there was intense pressure of young women to marry well before the age of twenty-five. Both of her parents were hostile towards her. In 1969 her narcissist mother denied that she had ever made the promise to her that she and her father would consent to surgery. Georgie however went to fashion school in Miami and had begun to sell some of the clothing she designed in New York. She needed $5000 for the surgery and attempted to earn it. But surprisingly she learned that her grandmother, Maisie, her mother's mother, had never known of her condition and, while visiting Jamaica, offered to pay for the surgery! She needed her vagina to be reconstructed and her clitoris reduced in size. Her parents offered to pay for it as suddenly and wanted her to forget her New York doctor and go to a Jamaican doctor instead. She had the surgery in New York with contributions from family and it turned out to be not as long a surgery as expected. Her mother bought herself jewelry with the money contributed in excess of the surgery costs rather than give it back to donors. Georgie had the surgery without family there but anorexia was another consideration and the doctors demanded that a parent come to New York. Her mother did, under duress, and then kept the medical paperwork needed to actually change her ID to female.  Eventually the redone birth certificate was done.

The other aspect of this change was that the upper classes in Jamaica were stunned to see a beautiful twenty-one year old woman rather than a young man in their midst, fashionable and a model. Her mother decided to tell the story her way, starring herself and all her suffering, blaming her husband for delays, and exaggerating all that Georgie had been through as well. Georgie chose to be straight-forward when asked but did not want to become news. It was time to let a suitable husband from the island's elite find her. But her mother was jealous of the attention she was getting and her beauty and an incident occurred in which Gloria, her mother, stabbed Georgie's cheek with a lit cigarette. In response she began battering her mother. I was 1972 and her mother would die without ever apologizing.  No chance of closeness, Georgie was through with trying or believing it would ever get better.

Georgie slowly became more aware that her parents were mentally ill and suffered from personality disorders for which they would not seek help.  She came to understand they were a mismatched couple dedicated to preserving the marriage but that the terms and conditions of marriage for women of their class could be especially difficult.

She came to understand that as Narcissists they were incapable of true care and concern for their children. Eventually accepting what they were and were not allowed her to deal with them with the distance she needed to keep to further be abused by them.

But psychology and psychiatry was not then what they are today today.  Georgie Ziadie was expected to marry early and well before the age of twenty five. Her beauty and status as a person of the British Jamaica colony attracted many a like-minded suitor who was prepared to marry, but the man she did marry proved to be exactly like her parents - and worse. She had to come to terms with the effects her parents abuse had on her without the acknowledgment we have today of Domestic Violence.

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HAS YOUR RICHER-THAN-YOU PARTNER MADE YOU FEEL BAD ABOUT PAYING THE WAY?

I seems that most women I know expect the male of the species to have the money to pay for dates, but also feel funny about not contributing in some way.  That means something like, she throws some money in for a tip, or soon invites him to do something she can afford to spend on.  I won't pretend that feminist values or not, I was raised to be what is now called conservative but which was basically how everyone seemed to live. There was little emphasis on education or careers, the assumption being that marriage, being a stay at home wife and mother, was the expectation - even if you had other ideas. Women who did not work for money outside the home didn't want to change that because they thought their husband's might stop supporting them and the children if there was a divorce and divorce -especially before the children were grown up and launched - was rare.

But now?  Friends report having dates - and boyfriends - that have other expectations.

One man I had not heard from for over a year since I met him out with friends and became a friend of sorts to a group of us phoned me after having been asked to leave by his partner of a year. He had by her invitation moved in with her in the condo she had purchased and was paying the mortgage on. When he failed to find a better job than the one he had she decided it wouldn't work.  He had to move back into his parent's house.

Another man I met in a class told me that he had met a woman he wanted to marry but she said up front that she would only do that if he got a job that paid at least $65,000 a year.  He had returned to college hoping that someday he would qualify for such a job, but graduation was a way off and he feared loosing her.  Should he quit school and become a car salesman?

You can take pride in your education, your work, your ability to support yourself without a partner, but is that realistic?  As housing becomes unaffordable for many, and home ownership impossible for many more, it seems as if the women with children who have been abandoned is also a crisis.

Are you in a relationship in which your partner is the one who has or earns more money?  Much more? Does that person make you feel bad about paying the way?  I would like to hear from you!

Missy

LISTEN!

 

WHY MISTRESSES OF EQUAL STATUS THREATENED THE SOCIAL ORDER

Why had her mother, and women of aristocratic status - members of Jamaican society and of the British peerage, accept that men were possibly not capable of fidelity.  For that matter, why did men also accept that the woman they married would not be the only one for them?  Is sex really meaningless?

From Chapter 7 again, page 59

It always futile to judge people by the rules of another time, and the values of that age certainly seem breathtakingly hypocritical  and unreasonable from a contemporary viewpoint, until one examines what motivated them and realizes that their objective was preservation of the family unit and conservation of the social fabric. Divorce was still something to be avoided at all costs, not only because of the disruption to family and social life, but also because it usually undermined the financial foundation of a divorced couple. As few marriages were conducted across class and colour lines, choice was also restricted, and there seemed little merit in 'swapping a black dog for a monkey' , as Jamaicans used to say. Therefore a mistress like Miss Khouri (her relatives's mistress of equal status to the family), being wife material, was a living, breathing, throbbing threat to the social order, while a girlfriend like Mrs. Powell (her fatther's supposed mistress) was not.

Commentary: Lady Colin Powell states in her book that her father, Michael, often openly declared that he had never looked at another woman other than his wife, their mother, though many knew of his sexual adventures. However, she realized that he was also signaling to his wife, Gloria, that he was not contemplating actually divorcing.

Page 60

,,, Gloria's ascendancy over Michael was reinforced by the fact that he was more emotionally involved with her than she was with him...

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?

 

MESSAGE TO ALL YOU GOOD DADS OUT THERE

I want to say hello to the father's out there - the loving ones - who put that love into action and have earned the right to be called Dad. Sadly, too often these days we hear about the fathers who are nowhere to be found. I'm still betting most dad's are Good ones!

KATHLEEN "KICK" KENNEDY, SISTER OF J.F.K., BRIDE and WIDOW OF BILLY HARTINGTON aka William CAVENSIH, then MISTRESS OF PETER WENTWORTH FITZWILLIAM, 8th EARL FITZWILLIAM

KATHLEEN "KICK"  KENNEDY, SISTER OF J.F.K.,   BRIDE and WIDOW OF BILLY HARTINGTON aka William CAVENSIH, then MISTRESS OF PETER WENTWORTH FITZWILLIAM,  8th EARL FITZWILLIAM

First Published March 2 2017

Go to the archives to read the whole month!

This book is the primary reference for this month's

Mistress of the Month post!

KATHLEEN "KICK"  AGNES KENNEDY CAVENDISH, LADY HARTINGTON

(1920-1948)

The story of Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, one of children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, and sibling of John Fitzgerald Kennedy who one day became President of the United States, has long been repressed.  Maybe that's because her behavior was scandalous.  Or maybe it's just that her other siblings lived longer, did more, or became more famous that she.  Paula Byrne, author of the book that is the primary reference for this post, had access to Kick's own diaries and other materials not previously seen by a biographer, and brought the lively, self depreciation good sport that Kathleen was to life, noting that her unusual nickname was based not only on the use of the term 'kick" to mean fun, but because she had a habit of kicking off her shoes at staid parties and dinners, and once had to wear a mismatched pair of right-foot shoes when her English companions hid the rest of her shoes in one of those huge mazes created out of shrubbery on a great estate. She was a good sport.

When her father Joseph Kennedy became Ambassador to the Court of Saint James,  London, England in 1938, during the Roosevelt Administration, World War II loomed.  Kathleen and her sister Rosemary, who was "slow" probably due to oxygen deprivation at birth, took their bows before the Queen that year as the British press and Life Magazine in the United States took interest in the  American family. In 1938, the 18 year old Kathleen was voted England's Most Important Debutant!

The young, energetic Irish-American woman's introduction to English society was also fostered by one of the most famous American Ex-Patriots, Lady Astor, who was into English politics.  Soon Kick was attending house parties on Great Estates owned by outstandingly anti-Catholic British peers and became friends with other Catholic girls who were in love with Church of England aristocrats. 

Due to their Irishness and Catholicism, both in America (Boston) and in England, Joseph and his family had experienced social exclusion.  Maybe that's one reason the many children of Joseph and Rose became such good friends with each other. Joe Senior's elite college education, his amazing career in banking, his investments in Hollywood film making, and the many connections he had made in business and in politics, including President Roosevelt, hadn't made the Kennedy family acceptable in Protestant- American  WASP circles.

Joseph and Rose taught their children to be competitive, to not cry in response to tragedy but get on with it, to exceed the high expectations placed on them, and to stand out. Defying the stereotype that the Irish were all drunkards, no alcohol was allowed in their home. As the Kennedy couple continued to be married and procreate, they also came to live separate lives, an arrangement that Kathleen didn't realize was strange until she was older. Joseph having more influence on the sons and Rose on the daughters, both young Joe Jr. and Jack had affairs with married women, while Kathleen and her sisters were sent to convent schools and expected to conduct themselves as devout Catholics. One of her favorite ways of gifting someone was to go to Masses, say rosaries, and do good deeds in their honor.

Kick was great friends with her brothers and in the know about their affairs. While she personally held back from sexuality, and was considered prudish, her warm personality gained her many admirers and several marriage minded suitors on two continents. Could it be that she was thinking, "if it's OK for them, why not me?"  Would the devout, convent educated young woman really sell her soul for a title or become a Dollar Princess, one of those wealthy American girls who were pursued by broke nobles?

After her debut and introduction to the wealthy aristocrats and royals in England, Kick came to love the country and the people, feeling she had experienced her true home.  When she married Billy Hartington aka William Cavendish*, she had been in love with him for six years and likely he felt the same.  After the family returned to the United States at the onset of the war, Kick had spent four years away from Billy.  She was popular and pursued but she had not forgotten him and endeavored to find her way back to England.  She joined the Red Cross where some gritty work awaited. 

Then, there were difficulties in which the couple and their families wrestled with the issue of their incompatible religions. As time went by, Billy's family had come to love Kick and believe in her.  Even his Catholic-hating father who had a mistress, Lady Dufferin, came around.  Kick's mother, Rose, was the hold out.  Billy's parents had the feeling that this long ordeal, for which there never were any easy answers, had proven the young couple's sincerity and that they would make it as a couple.  From the beginning the two of them had easy conversation, sometimes long into the night.

Through those years Billy had also matured. As England was targeted by the Germans and the bombings of London began, he wanted to fight for his country and became a war hero.  As an officer of the Cold Stream Guards who stood out, Billy was killed by a sniper with single bullet through his heart. Kick and Billy had married in May at a humble registry office, he had left for the war five weeks later, and he was killed in September. Now the 24 year old "Widow Hartington," Kathleen would have to step aside for her debutant friend Debo, married to his younger brother Andrew, and was left with the title Lady Hartington and a small inheritance. Yet Billy's parents, the Duke and Duchess did not abandon her, not ever.  After grieving with them and being supported by them, which would continue until her death, living here and there, she got herself an apartment, and with that Kennedy view of life, knew she had to move on somehow. She threw herself into Red Cross volunteerism again.  She also spent time with her family in the United States where they had homes in Hyannis Port, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida.  Her time in America seemed to only reaffirm that she belonged to England.

KICK AS A RED CROSS VOLUNTEER IN ENGLAND

picture from FIND AS GRAVE

FIND A GRAVE- LADY KATHLEEN HARTINGTON - GRAVE AT CHATSWORTH ESTATE

(Though she died with the married man she was Mistress to,

she was given the burial of the wife of Billy Hartington.)

This book gives in detail the excruciating Protestant and Catholic clergy diplomacies that Kick and Billy went through, looking for some way for him to keep to his Church of England legacy and familial anti-Catholicism, while in love with a devout Catholic woman whose mother would check herself into the hospital when word reached her that the compromise of a simple civil marriage had taken place. Kick's brother Joe Jr., was the only familial representative of the Kennedy's there. This detail, the crisis that was occurring as Kick attempted to marry into one of England's oldest, riches, and most Protestant families, was surprising to me.  This detail comprises most of the book, with the story of Kathleen's Mistresshood taking just a small end portion of the book. Yet, because of all that struggle with religion and grief, the story of her Mistresshood would not be as interesting or understood. 

Unlike the many years of waiting for marriage to Billy, the Widow Hartington, while chairing the Commando's Benevolent Fund Ball in June of 1946, was seduced by Peter, 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. Peter had been a Commando, which was an independent army company, and had completed twelve missions, and came back a decorated war hero himself.  Peter was married with a young daughter, and so unlike Billy Hartington.  He was a gambler, fond of fast cars, fast horses, fast women. He had been around in society for some time and she'd been introduced to him at the end of the summer season in 1945 when they both attended a fall hunt in County Wichlow. If people had doubted that Kick and Billy were made for each other, but had been won over...

"Kick's friends were horrified when they learned about the romance.  Nobody could understand the relationship as she and Peter appeared on the surface to be so different." 

(page 271)

Rose Kennedy was furious with her daughter and went to England to confront Kathleen personally. 

Revealed in this book, and also surprising to me, was that Joseph Kennedy, Kick's father, while gone a whole lot on business, wrote heartfelt and advisory letters to his children, showing support for them, and that even younger brother Robert Kennedy wrote letters of encouragement to his big sister. I came away from the book thinking of Joseph Kennedy, as a much more loving, wise, and involved father than I'd ever imagined.  He was far more wise to the world than his wife, Rose who seemed to hold to high ideals while ignoring her husband's womanizing, that included hitting on Kathleen's friends. It was to her father that Kathleen would now appeal to, after hiding the More-Scandalous-Than-Billy  affair from her family, and easing the truth that she wished to marry yet another Protestant, this time after he got a divorce. So while mother Rose attempted to prevent her daughter and family from any further scandal, it was her father Joseph who said he would try to help, and agreed to meet the couple in France, where it was planned that Peter, not divorced, would ask her father's permission to marry her.

Here is where my own sense of Kathleen emerges after reading the spare pages in this book about her affair with the married Peter. First, Kathleen went to several convent schools, and when she was at the school in Paris, where she studied French literature and needlepoint, in my mind nothing more than a finishing school for rich Catholic girls destined to marry well, the nuns called her "Mademoiselle Pourquoi"  meaning "Miss Why" because she was such a questioner.

I believe that Kathleen had come to question her Catholicism and did not think religion should or did matter so much, though it was her upbringing and the only religion she had known or come to depend on. I think she was torn, knowing the high profile of her Catholic family and the discrimination that people from her heritage had experienced.  She had been raised a privileged young woman, far removed from the earthly poverty of her Kennedy ancestors in Ireland who still lived without an indoor toilet. She had been a media darling. She had received hate mail after marrying Billy. 

At 26 she was a woman of independent means, beautifully dressed with some important jewelry, capable of chairing charity events in high society, intelligent, college educated, though not as well as her father and  Harvard alumni brothers. She was not expected to be in mourning or stay a widow forever. She was expected to remarry. 

I think the death of her husband and brother and the war in general had informed her that life was not to be taken granted, but seized.  She had but a brief  month of sexuality in her marriage. Having been married, she was no longer expected in English society to pretend to be a virgin.  Billy's parents and sister, her brother Jack, and several close friends were aware that she was in a full-on affair with Peter.  It was a whirlwind.  Peter was as keen.  Maybe he had never much been into the glamorous woman he had married and cheated on during their honeymoon. World War II was an era in which women stepped outside the roles of wife and mother, even to do hard physical labor in factories for the war effort.  It was a step ahead in the liberation of women from traditionally expected roles.

As Rose Kennedy threw a fit, Kathleen's maid couldn't believe her ears, that a 28 year old woman who was widowed would allow her own mother to talk to her that way.  Kathleen's sister Eunice Kennedy had come to visit for a couple months in the fall of 1946 and had not been aware that her sister had become a Mistress.

In a small plane, on the way to meet her father for that respectful moment in which the married Peter would, cart in front of the horse, ask permission to marry her, Kathleen and Peter were killed when it crashed. Joseph Kennedy found himself in France identifying her body instead.  Much has been made of the fact that with her she had lingerie and what could be used (in those pre Pill days) to prevent pregnancy - another sin for a good Catholic girl - in her suitcases.  Her worldly father was supposedly stunned to realize. I have to wonder.  This was, after all, a married man who was not sexually faithful to his often pregnant wife, and who had the actress Gloria Swanson as a mistress for some time.

Quoting Angela Lambert on Kick, on page 265, '"Gaiety, like honesty, is a kind of social courage.  It is not easy to be unfailingly charming, lively, and original.  It requires energy, and generosity, always to make the effort to be on one's form."

We may never know if it was love at first sight for the "hard smitten" Kathleen AND Peter, the seducer. What we do know is that the young woman took risks and had ambitions of her own, like so many of her siblings and the Kennedy Family, but hers were of the heart.

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