Before I was bullied by a female employer, Toni Morrison taught me about the ugliness of women who oppress other women. There were, unironically, two other women employees and they considered themselves sisters. And as the “Cinderella” story goes, they watched me suffer her unrelenting cruelty and, at times, participated in it.
I was already suffering from “betrayal trauma,” but it made no difference. These women gathered to abuse their power and me.
This final straw both broke a back humped over from people-pleasing and released me. I used it to pick the lock of a familiar cage for first-born daughters, who are expected to shoulder additional responsibilities as assigned.
This collaborative violence for the preservation of ego was eye-opening. Once considered the source of nurturing, tenderness and care, I would never look at women the same way again.
In her commencement address to the Barnard Class of 1979 titled “Cinderella’s Stepsisters,” Toni Morrison describes the fairy tale as “a world, if you please–of women gathered together and held together in order to abuse another woman.” She questions the stepsisters’ future, not their looks.
Will they hand down this violence to their children? How will it affect their relationship with their own mother?
Further still, Morrison doesn’t ask her audience but tells them not to join in the oppression of another woman. She also makes it clear that accountability lies with people, not systems or the businesses they represent.
“Mothers who abuse their children are women and another woman, not an agency, has to be willing to stay their hands,” Morrison explained. “Women who stop the promotion of other women in careers are women and another woman must come to the victim’s aid.”
Unfortunately, this was not the case for me. The reality that no one was coming to save me, especially not “a nick-of-time prince with a foot fetish,” as Morrison described him, altered my brain chemistry and changed the trajectory of my life.
While power and oppression are often discussed as if they are masculine terms and expressions, there is no shortage of stories of women oppressing other women. Perhaps, they are unbelievable because they are retold as fairy tales. These stories are romanced, like American chattel slavery.
Morrison wrote in a chapter titled “Romancing Slavery” in her book “The Origin of Others”: “It was probably universally clear—to sellers as well as the sold—that slavery was an inhuman, though profitable, condition. The sellers certainly didn’t want to be enslaved; the purchased often committed suicide to avoid it. So how did it work? One of the ways nations could accommodate slavery’s degradation was to romance it.”
“Once upon a time.” What a difference an introduction can make.
One abusive woman and a couple of female bystanders does a “Cinderella” story make. And it will take more than a fairy godmother, a ballgown and a night on the town to save her.
Focused instead on the clock striking midnight, Morrison refocuses our attention. “I am alarmed by the violence that women do to one another: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence,” she said. “I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am alarmed by a growing absence of decency on the killing floor of professional women’s worlds.”
Do American women know what time it is? That you have power and agency? That you can free another woman rather than contribute to her oppression?
Pay attention. Women, what will you do with your power, with your economic and social status? Who are you becoming because of how you were raised?
“Cinderella” is not a fairy tale. Her stepsisters are proof that it is, in fact, a true story.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
