A History of the Wife (2 page)

The “wife” and the “mother” share a fuzzy boundary. Their responsi- bilities often overlap and sometimes conflict. Any woman who has been both wife and mother knows that the time, care, energy, and material resources she gives to her children may be resented by her husband. And this same woman also knows that children can create a permanent bond between spouses, one that projects the couple into the future through the very product of their lovemaking. Even if spouses don’t always love each other, they usually share with one another a love for their children.

In the past, most marriages were affairs of the pocketbook rather than affairs of the heart. Men wed women who had dowries; women wed men who could support them. From biblical days to the 1950s, it was a husband’s duty to provide for his wife. She, in turn, was expected to provide sex, children, and housekeeping. It was a quid pro quo that was not just tacitly understood by the two parties but written into reli- gious and civil law.

Today, whatever the initial monetary considerations of the prospec- tive spouses—such as the bride or groom’s earning power or family assets—there is no longer the assumption that the husband will be the sole provider for his wife. Most couples now marry with the expecta- tion that both parties will contribute to the family economy. Indeed, since it is increasingly difficult for a family to survive on a single pay-

check, the dual-career family has become the norm. More than three out of five American wives are employed full- or part-time. Today a wife cannot count on complete economic support within the marriage, nor on alimony if the marriage ends in divorce. In fact, it is no longer rare for a wife to earn more than her husband, or to be sued for alimony in the event of divorce.

Yet the wife is still expected to provide many of the same services she has always provided, such as childcare and housekeeping. Men, too, one may argue, are expected to share some domestic responsibilities, and they are clearly doing more, but they have not yet become full part- ners as caretakers and homemakers, while most women are working as hard as the men in the workplace and slowly narrowing the gender gap in earning power; women as a group now earn 75 percent of what men earn in the same jobs as compared to 59 percent in the 1970s. With wives sharing the role of provider—a role that used to be exclusively or predominantly male—and men wondering how to reconceptualize masculinity, the malaise between the sexes may have reached an all- time high. The old quid pro quo has broken down, and the new conju- gal model of equal sharing at home and at work has not yet been fully realized.

Love, as we have seen from the letter at the beginning of this chapter, has become synonymous with marriage in the Western world. Scholars are fond of trying to pinpoint the moment in history when love began to take priority over all the other considerations. Some point to the early Middle Ages, when romantic love emerged from troubadour poetry and court life in Southern France. While it is true that the medieval cult of love honored woman as she had never been before, the honored woman was always someone else’s wife. Courtly love required a minimum of three players: husband, wife, and the wife’s lover. The raptures experienced by the nonmarried pair were considered unlikely within the quotidian boundaries of conjugal life.

I’m of the school that believes love began to take priority in marital arrangements as early as the sixteenth century, especially in England; that it came to America with the Puritans in the seventeenth century; and that it slowly began to dominate the scene by the late eighteenth century among the middle class. In aristocratic and upper-class fami- lies, considerations of wealth, lineage, and status continued to influ-

ence the choice of a wife or husband well into the twentieth century. This is not to say that love was absent from earlier unions. We find iso- lated records of passionate love experienced by spouses among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. But since arranged marriages, rather than love marriages, were the norm in premodern times, brides and grooms did not enter marriage with the expectation of “loving” each other as we understand the term.

Most wives would probably have settled for harmony. A wife who fulfilled her part of the bargain by providing sex, children, childcare, cooking, and housekeeping—not to mention the care of the vegetable garden and, in rural settings, the barnyard animals—probably consid- ered herself fortunate if she were treated respectfully by her spouse, without physical abuse. The common law “rule of thumb” that allowed a man to beat his wife with a switch as long as it was not as large as a man’s thumb lasted in many parts of England and America into the nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, the notion that a wife is there to serve and obey her husband and that he has the right to beat and bully her has not entirely disappeared. We find remnants of these old beliefs not only in tradi- tionalist societies, but also in our own. In the United States today, all too many wives are forced to seek shelter in battered women’s homes— that is, if they are lucky enough to find their way out of an abusive rela- tionship. Today, few mainstream American or European men would admit to the belief, held among certain fundamentalist Christians, Mus- lims, and Jews, that wives should be subservient to their husbands, and even fewer would agree that men should be able to beat their wives. Yet old ideas die hard, and some people of both sexes secretly think of wives as lesser beings than their husbands. For some, the wife is still the “little woman,” a “weaker vessel,” the daughter of Eve, who, accord- ing to biblical, medieval, and Reformation theology,
should
be ruled by her husband. Dependence of the wife upon her husband in moral as well as economic matters was the rule for most of Western history, and is still the norm in many parts of the world.

At the same time, the notion of the wife as the equal of her husband has been gaining ascendancy. Since the eighteenth century, when ideas of companionate marriage began to have currency among the middle and upper classes, the trend has been toward more egalitarian partner- ships. From the nineteenth century onward, when American women

fought for and won the right to attend public and private schools, female seminaries, and colleges, they have been increasingly able to share the intellectual, economic, social, and political concerns that once were the exclusive purview of men. Today, the disparity between the sphere of the husband and the sphere of the wife may be smaller than it ever has been, with wives bringing home paychecks and hus- bands diapering their babies.

Law and education have certainly played major roles in this transfor- mation. It is no longer legal for a man to beat his wife, even with a rod thinner than a thumb. It is no longer unusual for a married woman to have a separate bank account in her own name. And with access to education in every discipline, it is now possible for a woman to enter marriage with the same job opportunities as her husband. Today, men look for wives who can provide not only sex, love, children, and house- keeping services, but also wages and participation in community life. The requirements for today’s wife give added meaning to the biblical proverb “Whosoever findeth a wife findeth a good thing.”

I write this book with the belief that it is still “a good thing” to have a wife and to be a wife—under certain conditions. Those conditions involve relative equality between the spouses, mutual respect, and affection. They also include sufficient means—both personal and societal—to provide for one’s ongoing material needs, including educa- tion and medical services. To be a wife still offers the challenging option of going through life as a member of a pair. In the best of circum- stances, we are validated and strengthened through a long-term, loving union. We learn to compromise and to develop a sense of humor about our own peculiarities and those of our mates. We find comfort and sup- port in facing the inevitable ordeals that life puts us through. We are able to share our thoughts, hopes, joys, fears, sorrows, experiences, and memories with an intimate witness of our life. In the worst of circum- stances, we are diminished and undermined by the relationship and forced to consider divorce as a way out—which doesn’t prevent us from marrying again.

To be a wife may no longer be a badge of honor, but it is far from a badge of woe. The employed wife may not want to be identified as “the wife of so-and-so,” and the full-time homemaker is wise to eschew the self-denigrating label “just a housewife.” They may both prefer to use

the gender-neutral terms “spouse” or “partner.” Whatever the particular sexual, economic, and domestic arrangements between a husband and a wife, one cannot be a spouse of either gender for very long without giving up some of one’s independence. This means accommodation and compromise, deep commitment and dogged perseverance. The woman or man who cannot envision living with such constraints would do well to reconsider
before
the wedding day. Being a wife, or husband, is not for everyone, though about 90 percent of Americans do marry at least once in their lives. And even those who divorce marry again in three out of four cases.

Many still marry using the wedding service of the 1552 Church of England Prayer Book (whose roots go back in Latin, French, and Eng- lish to the Middle Ages.) The vows taken by the spouses still sound uncommonly beautiful: “I take thee to be my wedded wife (or hus- band), to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.” Originally, the wife also promised “to obey,” but for some time now, those words have been omitted. With this single change, a woman in the twenty-first century can make the same vows as her medieval and Renaissance foremothers. It is a small but signifi- cant difference, and one that will shape the future of the wife for years to come.

The interdependence of spouses offers a more likely paradigm today than the earlier dependence of wife on husband. As world leaders, Americans and Europeans are creating a model of shared conjugal authority, which may seem foreign to much of the globe, but that much of the globe will probably come to emulate.

And if I may venture into even more uncertain territory, I believe we shall see in the twenty-first century a further development in the his- tory of the wife: American states will legalize same-sex partnerships, following the Vermont model of “civil unions,” which provide gay cou- ples with numerous benefits including inheritance rights, tax breaks, and the power to make medical decisions for a partner. Across the bor- der, Canada has erased virtually all legal distinctions between hetero- sexual marriages and same-sex unions. In Europe, many Western nations (for example, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, and France) offer the option of civil unions, regardless of one’s gender, and Holland has converted its registered same-sex partnerships into full-

fledged marriages, complete with adoption, social security, and tax rights. Who will be the “wife” in a gay or lesbian marriage? Can the term “wife” have meaning in a union where there is no sexual difference between the partners? Or will the “wife” survive as a social and psycho- logical construct implying traditional feminine qualities, such as soft- ness, deference, nurturance, and emotionality?

At this particular moment of history, when the word “wife” has become problematic and could become obsolete, it makes sense to take stock of her inheritance. Where did Western ideas about the wife begin? How were laws and practices affecting wives passed on from generation to generation? What major patterns of wifehood have been woven into the present scene? Which threads have persisted and which have been broken?

From this interface of past and present scripts, we may be able to glimpse future images of the married woman.

O N E

Wives in the Ancient World

Biblical, Greek, and Roman Models

W
hy should we begin with bibli- cal, Greek, and Roman wives? Because the religious, legal, and social practices of those ancient civilizations provided the template for the

future treatment of married women in the West. The wife as a man’s chattel, as his dependent, as his means for acquiring legal offspring, as the caretaker of his children, as his cook and housekeeper are roles that many women now find abhorrent; yet certain aspects of those anti- quated obligations still linger on in the collective unconscious. Many men still expect their wives to provide some or all of these services, and many wives still intend to perform them. Those women today who rebel against such expectations are, after all, rebelling against patterns that have been around for more than two millennia. It’s important to understand what they are rebelling against, and what some of their antagonists—for example, certain conservative religious groups—are trying to preserve.

BIBLICAL WIVES

The charter myth for the Judeo-Christian wife is the story of Adam and Eve. Ever since their story was written into the Bible (around the tenth century
B
.
C
.
E
.), Adam and Eve have been designated, first by

Hebrews and later by Christians and Muslims, as the progenitors of the human race. From the start, Eve has been honored as the foremother of humanity and simultaneously reviled as the spouse who first disobeyed God.

Initially, as related in Chapter One of Genesis, God created man and woman at the same time. “And God created the human in his image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
1
But by Chapter Two, a new version of human creation had found its way into Scripture, which suggested that Eve was something of an after- thought. In this version, God created Adam first, from the dust of the ground. Then, reflecting on His handiwork, He declared: “It is not good for the human to be alone. I shall make him a sustainer beside him.”

The subsequent account of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib has fueled the age-old argument that woman is intrinsically inferior to man and dependent on him for her very existence. Even the Hebrew word
icha,
or “woman”—from man—suggests this one-down position.