Mrs. Grundy

Many of Robert Heinlein’s later books are, to our chagrin, little more than monotone sociopolitical tracts spewing his personal ideology with the force of received wisdom from Mt. Sinai. They are gleefully laden with expressions of his own moral ideals, libertarian tropes that seem wildly outdated and unoriginal today but which were controversial and downright racy in their time.

These include (but are certainly not limited to) characters who are homosexual, bisexual, and polyandrous; group marriages and open-sex communities; consensual incest; and anachronistically convoluted autosexuality.

Now, let’s say up front that these spicy taunts, many of which Heinlein parades simply to be provocative, generally only sound alarms in conservative, right-wing brains – as intended. And he called his stand-in for such minds, in his narrative, “Mrs. Grundy”.

We’ll clarify up front that he isn’t speaking of the beloved Miss Grundy of Archie Comics fame, the stern but fair spinster schoolmarm who kept Archie’s and Jughead’s nose to the grindstone and often summoned Mr. Weatherby for disciplinary support; she’s cool, in our final analysis. No, he means someone else.

“Mrs. Grundy”, in the Heinlein epic, is an amalgam of all the hard-core authoritarian Leviticus-quoting sex-policing anti-hedonist judgment-meting morality-dictating guardians of puritanism who have comprised a disappointing fraction of every society since civilization began.

“Mrs. Grundy” is your neighbor who spies on you, hoping to pick up some telltale sign that you are having sex out of wedlock. “Mrs. Grundy” stares when she spots a wine bottle protruding from your groceries as you unload them from your car. “Mrs. Grundy” is constantly on the lookout for some tangible indicator that condemns you as someone beneath her lofty, self-justifying moral standards.

“Mrs. Grundy” legislates in Florida to prohibit LGBTQ gender affirmation in Florida classrooms. And goes to war with private enterprise (no matter how publicly beloved the institution) to punish it for endorsing that affirmation.

“Mrs. Grundy” resorts to authoritarian government overreach to suppress sex education, in a wildly misguided attempt to promote her own prudery, for the sake of impressing her peers. “Mrs. Grundy” invests limitless energy in demoting her own gender back into subservience to men, in particular where her reproductive facility is concerned.

“Mrs. Grundy” was no stranger to Heinlein – and she’s alive and well in the 21st century United States.

And she’s no stranger to us, either. In the Seventies, she went by the name Anita Bryant, doing her utmost to bring about open discrimination against her LGBTQ neighbors in the name of Jesus, breathlessly declaring that they were conspiring to turn everyone else’s children gay – and using the most defective, tortured, scream-for-mercy reason she could muster in that pursuit.

Mrs. Grundy now has a word that wraps up all her disapprovals, condemnations and judgments in a single bundle: woke. When she wishes to disavow someone she considers beneath her as unworthy of the rights and privileges she herself enjoys, she slaps this label on them with chilling disdain and makes it her business to make their business everybody’s business.

Mrs. Grundy always has the option of simply living her life as she chooses and allowing those around her to do the same, whether they choose to live as she does or not. She could leave others alone, make her own choices and grant them the same liberty and courtesy. She could acknowledge, painful as she might find it, that she is not empowered to decide for others how they should live.

But Mrs. Grundy can’t get there. She is compelled – driven – to her intrusive, self-righteous behaviors by failings of her own... failings that are, in the end, far more toxic than the hedonistic transgressions she imagines in her perceived enemies.

Mrs. Grundy is insecure. Her self-awareness is as shallow and opinion-based as her awareness of those she loathes, and she isn’t strong enough in her own identity to separate it from the frivolous tethers of those opinions.

Mrs. Grundy is distressed. Her comfort derives from the uniformity of her environment, its satisfying sameness and accommodation, which she dreads may be at risk.

Mrs. Grundy is afraid. Her security derives from her position in the community, which she regards as dependent upon conformity to mores that elevate her sense of her own quality.

Mrs. Grundy spies on, judges, and condemns those who live differently because, in her mind, they are a threat to her safety, her comfort and her identity. They aren’t any of these things, of course, but Mrs. Grundy’s worldview was built early in her life on misguided notions, imposed by those in her own community, about herself and others.

But Mrs. Grundy is not alone. She is one of millions, and is able to add her voice to theirs, and do more than scowl and disapprove and self-congratulate; she can lash out! She can protect herself by joining their chorus. She can support Anita Bryant by buying her orange juice. She can scream at Ruby Bridges as federal marshalls escort her into her New Orleans elementary school. She can send money to the 700 Club. She can vote for Ron DeSantis and boycott Disney.

Because when she does these things, she feels safer. She feels calmed. She knows who she is. And she has no sense at all of who she might have been, or how it feels to be truly free of the anxieties that make her Mrs. Grundy.