White Dog Fell from the Sky by Eleanor Morse

What does that mean to avenge a death - kill once, twice, three times more? Where does it end?

***

"Please don't go. I'm sorry about last night." 
Her eyes flashed. "You might have been describing a cow heading for the Meat Commission. I thought you were a different sort of man. If I'd known that's how you felt, I wouldn't have wasted a minute with you."

"That's not how I feel. Roger wanted to know what you looked like."

"And how would Roger even know I existed if Roger hadn't been told?"

"He wouldn't have. You were on my mind."

Something crossed her face, swiftly replaced by rage. Her voice shook. "You said it like an auctioneer. 'The woman's American, recently divorced.' The woman. As though you don't even know me. Gray hair. Already over the hill. Oh, nice body. But big bones. A lady wrestler. Or maybe an orangutan. And then your old boy laughter. You and Roger, whoever the hell that was, yucking it up at my expense. You're a royal prick, you know that?"

She'd already turned to leave when he said, "I know that. Worse than that. I'm an insensitive lout, a cad, a muttonhead, a piss poor specimen of a man, a foul-mouthed and calumnious knave. If I were a dog, I'd have me put down."

"Good. Now leave me alone." He thought a hint of a smile had flitted over her lips. Her footsteps departed, and he watched her climb into the Land Rover.

Paula by Isabel Allende

My fellowship was part of a program for Congolese, to whom Belgium was indebted for many years of brutal colonization. I was the single exception, a light-skinned woman among thirty black males. After suffering a week of humiliations, I came to the conclusion that I was not willing to run such a gauntlet, and offered to withdraw, even though we would be badly strapped without the fellowship money.

The director asked me to explain my sudden departure to the class, and I had no choice but to face that united front and in my lamentable French tell them that in my country men did not enter the women's bathroom unzipping their fly, did not shove women aside to go through a door first, did not knock each other down for a place at the table or to get on a bus, and that I felt badly mistreated and was leaving because I was not used to such foul behavior.

A glacial silence greeted my peroration. After a long pause, one of them spoke to say that in his country no decent woman publicly exhibited her need to go to the bathroom, nor did she try to go through a door before the men but in fact walked several steps behind, and that his mother and his sisters never sat at the table with him, they ate what the men left. He added that they felt permanently insulted by me, that they had never seen a person with such bad manners, and, as I was a minority in the group, I would just have to make the most of it.

"It is true that I am a minority in this course, but you are a minority in this country," I replied. "I am willing to make concessions, but you must do that, too, if you want to avoid problems here in Europe." It was a solution worthy of Solomon; we agreed upon certain basic rules, and I stayed on.

They never wanted to sit with me at the table or on the bus, but they stopped bursting into the bathroom and physically shoving me. During that year, my feminism got lost in the shuffle: I walked a modest two meters behind my companions, never looked up or raised my voice, and was the last one through the door.