Sable Monroe

There was a girl I knew only as Miss English.

That wasn’t her name.

At least I don’t think it was.

Nobody ever called her anything else around me.

She was the daughter of a man my mother dated many years ago. The girl had moved to England with her mother when she was young and, sometime around early adolescence, reconnected with her father.

She must have been thirteen or fourteen when the adults decided she should spend the summer in the United States with him.

On paper, that sounds lovely.

A father and daughter reconnecting.

A young girl getting to know the parent she had lived apart from.

A summer in America.

But that is not how I remember it.

I remember adults watching her.

Judging her.

Testing her.

And, most of all, shaming her.

I was older by then, old enough to notice when something about the way adults treated a child did not sit right with me.

The first thing that bothered me was the way they talked about her hygiene.

Apparently, Miss English would wear the same bra or undergarments for several days.

Now, I understand that you should change your undergarments regularly.

I also understand something else.

Children have to be taught things.

If a thirteen-year-old does not know something about hygiene, the reasonable response is not humiliation.

You teach her.

You take her aside privately.

You explain what she should do.

You make sure she has enough clothing.

You show her how the household works.

You help her.

Instead, her aunt, her father’s sister, yelled at her.

She called her nasty.

She mocked her.

There was something said about how even a black bra should only be worn for a day or two before being changed.

I remember listening to all of this and thinking:

Why are you talking to this girl like that?

She is a child.

She had just come from another country into a household where she was still learning the expectations, personalities, routines, and relationships around her.

That should have made the adults more patient with her.

Instead, it seemed to make them more suspicious.

Her aunt especially seemed to have already decided there was something wrong with Miss English.

I never understood why.

And my mother never challenged it.

If anything, she seemed to enjoy it.

That part bothered me too.

I recognized the tone.

It was the kind of treatment my mother would have liked to get away with giving me when I was younger.

The difference was that by the time I was a teenager in America, I had started realizing there were limits to what adults could legally do to children here.

My mouth got a little looser.

My resistance got a little stronger.

Miss English did not seem to have that same footing.

She was in someone else’s country.

Someone else’s house.

Surrounded by adults she barely knew.

Then came the story that really stayed with me.

Her father decided to test her.

That is the word I remember being used.

A test.

He wanted to see whether his daughter was smart enough, respectable enough, or perhaps enough of a “good girl” to reject inappropriate male attention.

So he recruited one of his adult male friends.

The friend approached Miss English and pretended to be interested in her.

Again, she was around thirteen or fourteen.

The man was an adult.

Miss English apparently responded positively.

She “failed.”

The friend reported back to her father.

And her father immediately sent her back to England.

That was the punishment.

The adults told this story like it proved something about her.

My mother told it with what I remember as almost a sense of satisfaction.

See?

She wasn’t a good girl.

See?

Her father was right.

See?

She had been exposed.

Even then, something in me rejected the entire premise.

You do not protect your teenage daughter from predatory men by sending an adult man to pretend to prey on her.

You teach her.

You talk to her.

You explain power differences.

You explain why an adult man showing romantic interest in a young teenager is inappropriate.

You make yourself a safe person for her to come to when something like that happens.

You do not manufacture the danger yourself and then punish her for failing to navigate it perfectly.

That is not protection.

That is a trap.

And the older I get, the more this memory makes sense to me within a larger pattern I have seen repeatedly.

Many women are extraordinarily male-centered.

I do not simply mean women who love men.

I do not mean heterosexual women.

I mean women whose understanding of morality, respectability, family, and even other women is filtered through the protection of male authority.

The man is assumed to be reasonable.

The girl is assumed to be suspicious.

The man creates the situation.

The girl is judged for her response.

The man’s behavior barely gets examined.

The girl’s behavior becomes evidence of her character.

And sometimes women become enthusiastic participants in that system.

That is the part people do not like talking about.

We often discuss patriarchy as though men enforce it all by themselves.

They do not have to.

Women can become some of its most efficient foot soldiers.

A girl wears the wrong clothes.

Women shame her.

A girl attracts attention from an older man.

Women ask what she did to encourage it.

A husband cheats.

Women sometimes direct more rage toward the other woman than toward the husband who made the vows.

A teenage girl makes a mistake.

Women help turn the mistake into proof that she is sexually reckless, badly raised, disrespectful, fast, nasty, or some other word designed to make everybody stop seeing the child underneath it.

I have been thinking about this more as I examine the stories I inherited from my own family.

How often was a girl or woman treated as the problem because holding a man fully responsible would have required the family to rearrange its entire understanding of him?

How often did women participate because siding with male authority gave them a kind of borrowed power?

And how often were girls taught that their job was not simply to grow up safely, but to prove continuously that they deserved protection?

That is what I think about when I remember Miss English.

I do not know what happened to her after that summer.

I don’t know whether she remembers any of us.

I don’t even know her real name.

That bothers me more now than it did then.

She passed through the family as a nickname and a story.

Miss English.

The girl who was supposedly nasty.

The girl who supposedly failed the test.

The girl whose father sent her back.

But I remember something different.

I remember a young teenager surrounded by adults who seemed much more interested in judging her than guiding her.

I remember a girl being expected to understand things nobody seemed willing to teach her kindly.

And I remember realizing, even before I had the language for it, that adults can manufacture a child’s failure and then congratulate themselves for predicting it.

Today, if someone told me that story about a father and his teenage daughter, my first question would not be:

Why did she say yes?

I would ask:

Why did a grown man think that was an appropriate test in the first place?

And I would probably have another question for the women standing around applauding him.

Why were you so eager for the little girl to be wrong?