I am trying to find a cause of Amanda's actions that I can believe in. To believe in her immediate partisan excitement ("instinctive" is the word she will use about Adam's male brutality) upon reading that a woman shot her husband ("Kill him?" Adam inquires; "Nope. Condition critical, though."), I might alternatively imagine that she regards the situation of American women after World War II to be equivalent, morally and psychologically if not materially, to, say, that of southern slaves before the Civil War, where one slave will readily be imagined to have such an instinctive partisan reaction to news that a fellow slave had snapped and revolted against yet another outrage. A sympathetic outsider might well have an analogous reaction. Or I might try imagining the case on analogy with that of a woman whose country is under foreign occupation, or a military tyranny, and whose husband is beguiled by enemy glamour. The fact is that I do not believe this is the way things are for American women, or were soon after World War II, and I cannot imagine that Amanda Bonner believes it either. I do not at all mean that the situation of women in America around 1950 or around 1980 cannot from time to time strike one as similarly outrageous, or insupportable. But this perception, which I take to be valid, differs in two respects from the outrage of those suffering the oppressions of slavery or of foreign or domestic occupation: first, the perception is not stable, but comes and goes, which means that the situation is not simple but mixed; second, the stimulus for an occasion of being struck by the outrageousness of the situation may be something comparatively trivial, perhaps a rude remark, or perhaps its dawning on you, for no apparent reason, that your culture assumes that doctors and lawyers are men while nurses and secretaries are women -- something that reveals a process of arbitrariness and injustice. Mr. Attinger -- or of course Mrs. Attinger -- may have had good cause for straying from home; but nothing is good cause for injustice.