Owned and Protected

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

I read Margo's Got Money Trouble and the comparison I immediately thought about was The L-Shaped Room. In both novels, the protagonist gets accidentally pregnant and decides to keep the baby despite most men in her life discouraging her. Margo lives in 2020s USA while Jane lives in 1950s UK, but the ways these two women are marginalised are strikingly similar.

On the surface, both women are shamed for getting pregnant outside of marriage. Jane punishes herself by taking the eponymous room in a house on the margins of society, along with a gay Black man, a struggling writer, and two sex workers. Margo keeps the baby because "that's what good people do". Both have internalised society's norms and are punishing themselves for the audacity of having extramarital sex.

Yet in both books, pregnancy becomes a catalyst for autonomy. Jane builds a life outside her father's house, independent of the man who got her pregnant and without support from either her boss or her lover, even though all these men are trying to protect her. These men can't handle that she refuses their help. In Margo's Got Money Trouble, this is said explicitly in a conversation between Margo and Suzie. Suzie notes that women are shamed by society only if they have awareness and control over the situation, even in identical situations. Being seen naked isn't shameful, but wanting to be seen naked (or, God forbid, making money off of it) is.

The shame both feel was never about pregnancy. The shame society inflicts on women is about being in control of their bodies, their lives, their choices. Mothers, especially, must be owned and protected. Their autonomy is the thing that cannot be permitted.