Adult male characters in the novel routinely infantilize their wives, treating them or referring to them as children. Such degradation allows the men to maintain superior status, limiting women to tightly circumscribed roles that are depicted as their natural sphere. Husbands’ social control of their wives also feeds into their legal, financial, and medical authority over them; the assumption that women are inferior beings who have little intellectual faculty makes it easier to justify disempowering them like children.

Henry, Gary, and Jack are socialized and encourage one another to see the women in their lives as unreliable, delicate, and intellectually stunted. Gary has even less consideration for Bitsy’s well-being: He viewed her depression after her sister’s death by suicide as an inconvenience to his desire for a calm life and authorized her lobotomy. Even the seemingly loving Henry micromanages Lulu, questioning her ability to prepare the annual New Year’s party and speaking to her “as if [she] were a child who didn’t complete her chores” when she “dare[s] to take a bath before cleaning up the kitchen” (117). To each other, the men reinforce these sexist attitudes. Jack dismissively portrays his wife as insignificant to Henry and Gary when he excuses her need for mental health as a specifically gendered quirk: “‘She’s off getting her nerves in order.’ Then he turned to Henry and elbowed him. ‘You know how women can be’” (194). When Gary and Henry discuss their wives’ unhappiness one night, Gary similarly minimizes women’s lived experience:, “I guess there’s a reason they call them the fairer sex. I just didn’t know they were so fragile” (179). Such a statement proves that Gary has absolutely no empathy or understanding of Bitsy’s psychological response to her sister’s death and having to hide her niece as her daughter when she was already overwhelmed. She wasn’t “fragile” for struggling with her grief; she was human.

In turn, this repeated underscoring of women’s childlike incapacity primes husbands to acquiesce to male authority, such as doctors. The novel’s medical professionals draw on similar pre-existing biases against women to form conclusions without evidence. Bypassing women’s agency or autonomy, doctors and husbands decide on interventions without consulting the actual patients—exactly as though they were treating young children. Dr. Ruthledge informs Lulu of what will happen to her as a foregone conclusion: “I know you want to get home and we’ve made progress, but I think there’s a way we can get you healthier sooner. Mr. Mayfield and I have already discussed this’” (253). He and Henry have chosen her future, couching it as “for [her] own good” (274). The interaction reminds Lulu of exactly how she treats her son, Wesley, when he needs a vaccination. Frighteningly, the only thing that seems to save Lulu from a lobotomy is that Henry is unwilling to subject her to this extreme procedure: Each of the novel’s wives is solely dependent on her husband’s disposition.