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| Adriana Ortiz |
In the Renaissance, they called it “corruption of blood.” Under a bill of attainder, if a man committed treason, his entire family was legally erased. Their property was seized, their titles stripped and their futures cancelled. We tell ourselves we’ve evolved, but recent headlines suggest we are still holding the rope for daughters and wives while the men walk free.
Take Princess Eugenie. As of March 8, the very day supposedly devoted to celebrating women, she suddenly became vulnerable to a reputational exile from a career she spent years building. Eugenie is suddenly “socially attained.” Her crime? Being the daughter of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was arrested on Feb. 19 on suspicion of sharing trade secrets.
She didn’t commit a crime, yet British media reports suggest a systematic distancing of the York sisters from the official royal brand. She is being treated as reputationally contagious simply because of the man who gave her a last name. Where is the “prince” being shunned for his daughter’s actions? He doesn’t exist. In the theatre of power, the “woman’s tax” is paid in full, and it’s non-refundable.
Then there’s the spectacle in Chappaqua, N.Y. On March 2, we watched the release of Hillary Clinton’s deposition video. The questioning quickly became a display about what she supposedly knew about her husband’s associations, rather than a focused inquiry into her own conduct. She’s a former secretary of state, a senator and a lawyer who has spent decades in the trenches of international law. Yet, she was questioned for six hours about what she “felt” about her husband’s social circle. When she finally snapped, rightfully indignant after Rep. Lauren Boebert reportedly breached rules by leaking a photo of the proceedings, the media didn’t call her principled. They called her “hostile” and “enraged.”
The punchline? The very next day, the same committee sat down with Bill Clinton. Chairman James Comer described him as “charming” and “productive,” even praising his “Southern people skills.” It is a staggering double standard: a woman demanding adherence to the rules is labelled “hostile,” while the man at the centre of the scandal is a “charmer” simply because he smiled through the interrogation. We are still living in a world where a woman’s demand for respect is pathologized as instability, while a man’s charm serves as his shield.
We see this with Melinda French Gates, too. Years after her divorce, she’s still dragged into the spotlight to answer for the “muck” of her ex-husband’s associations. Despite being one of the world’s most effective philanthropists, she remains a proxy for a man she chose to leave. Why is the ex-wife expected to provide answers for a mess she didn’t make?
The scrutiny is forensic. When men fall, we interrogate the women around them: What did they know? Why did they stay? Why didn’t they stop the train before it left the tracks? But when women fall, husbands are rarely treated as extensions of their guilt. We do not treat husbands as custodians of female morality the way we treat wives and daughters.
Martha Stewart became a national scandal in full public view; her prosecution was a modern witch hunt that made an example of a high-status woman for conduct that rarely results in a male executive’s downfall. Yet, despite the scrutiny, her husband did not become an object of derivative suspicion. Similarly, Ghislaine Maxwell became a byword for depravity, but there was no corresponding social instinct to treat the men in her orbit as morally answerable simply for being attached to her. Men are granted an individuality — a “moral silo” — that women are denied.
This is about the truth we look away from: a woman’s value in our society is still tied to the reputation of the men she’s related to. If he’s a king, she’s a queen; if he’s a predator, she’s complicit. She is rarely allowed to just be herself.
This manifests in the media’s obsession with “knowing.” The underlying assumption is that a woman must have been the moral gatekeeper. If she didn’t stop him, she’s guilty. If she’s angry about being questioned, she’s “unstable.” It’s a double bind that hasn’t changed since we were burning witches for the weather.
It is time to break the cycle and dismantle this social attainder. A woman is not defined by the men around her. She is a sovereign individual, not a moral shock absorber for the men in her life. Her character is her own, independent of the shadows cast by those around her.
If we’re going to keep having International Women’s Day next year, let’s make it about more than cupcakes and speeches. Let’s make it about the day we finally stopped the modern social law of attainder. Until we acknowledge this medieval hangover, women will always be “taxed” for the men in their circle.
Adriana Ortiz is a dually licensed lawyer (Colombia/Ontario) and holds a GPLLM from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She can be reached at adrianaortiz28@gmail.com.
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