Once upon a time, little girls dreamed not of becoming CEOs, doctors or TV news anchors. What they sought was a job with lifelong benefits and around-the-clock obligations. Although the position came with a simple title–“wife”–it required long, unpredictable hours; offered no guaranteed pay, vacation or sick days; and demanded no less than the skills of a self-starting superwoman.
From biblical times to the 20th Century, being a wife was the best–and many times the only–career a girl could hope for. It was one that was sometimes rewarding, sometimes punishing, but almost always very hard work.
With wifehood at something of a crossroads now, gender studies scholar Marilyn Yalom set about to trace the evolution of what is arguably the most defining and enduring role in women’s history. She packed her findings into a 441-page book titled “A History of the Wife” (HarperCollins, $30).
At its most basic, she concludes, matrimony has for centuries been equal parts fairy tale and business deal: One day a young woman’s prince would come to take her from her parents and, in exchange for her domestic, sexual and mothering services, provide her with shelter and support for the rest of their days.
Up until quite recently, that was the quid pro quo of marriage, says Yalom, whose book begins with the biblical, Greek and Roman ancients and ends with the story of Bill and Hillary Clinton. And that publicly sanctioned and privately executed bargain is what for so long relegated wives to the so-called “sphere of domesticity,” a world of babies, laundry, cooking and cleaning.
“The domestic role has been a [wife’s] role since time immemorial,” Yalom says, speaking from her home in Palo Alto, Calif., where she is a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University.
Since a bride first crossed the threshold, work has been an integral part of what it means to be a man’s female partner, even while the emphasis of the work has changed. Eve was commanded to be “fruitful and multiply,” medieval wives were expected to tend livestock, spin and sew, and modern wives hold outside jobs while still performing the greatest share of housekeeping and mothering duties.
“Ever since World War II, when housewives and older women–35 and over–and mothers went into the work force where their status increased because they were seen as workers as well as wives, there has been this conflict between the wife as worker and the wife as housewife. And it’s not over yet,” Yalom says.
That helps explain the recent “explosion of material” on the subject, she says. Other recent books include “The Surrendered Wife” by Laura Doyle; “Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation” by Yale historian Nancy Cott and “The Price of Motherhood” by Ann Crittenden.
An unkind path to the present
But Yalom’s book, a decidedly Western view of wives, suggests that the challenges facing modern wives pale in comparison to those that their foremothers confronted. In the long course of history, married women have traveled an often unkind and underappreciated path to arrive at where they are today.
In biblical days, wives were considered a husband’s property along with his cattle and slaves. Marriage in medieval Europe was “an institution by which men were confirmed as the masters of their wives on religious and legal grounds,” Yalom writes. In 15th Century Italy, a girl’s father started making deposits into her dowry fund when she was a child and the accrued sum would be paid to the husband at the time of the wedding.
In Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare’s heroine Kate, in the final scene of “The Taming of the Shrew,” suggests that a husband must command absolute obedience from his wife:
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign–one that cares for thee.
But the American and French revolutions, with their political consciousness-raising, got women to questioning their lot in life. Many aristocratic French wives, after fleeing to Belgium, Holland and England, became the family wage earners. And yet, they were not accorded a commensurate increase in rights.
“While Americans threw off the shackles of British rule, no new legal system replaced the British common law: A wife was still mandated to serve and obey her husband. Her identity was still submerged, or `covered,’ by his.”
In fact, Yalom writes, “wives had absolutely no legal existence,” according to an 18th Century commentary on the laws of England by Sir William Blackstone:
“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband . . . “
Laws recognize wives’ identity
It was not until almost a century later, around 1860, Yalom says, that the first laws in the United States began to recognize a wife’s personal identity, allowing her to gain control of her personal property and income, although conservative factions believed that such actions would lead to female independence and immorality.
“The Married Women’s Property laws,” she says, “were the first laws that began to redress the injustice toward the married woman, and state by state those rights were acquired, as well as rights for the wife in divorce. Throughout most of early American history, children were automatically granted to the father in cases of divorce.”
Around the same time as those first property rights were recognized, in the 19th Century, women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone were agitating about the iniquities of marriage.
Stone, who wrote, “Marriage is to woman a state of slavery,” found one way to rebel. She kept her own name after her 1855 marriage.
The 20th Century, however, brought about the greatest challenge to matrimonial tradition. Increased economic independence, the suffrage and birth-control movements, World War II and new attitudes toward sexuality all set the stage for wives’ empowerment.
By the 1930s, it was a widely accepted idea that women had a right to sexual pleasure in marriage and to birth control, Yalom writes.
When the U.S. entered the war, it was married women who helped support the effort on the homefront. “Of the 6,500,000 new workers hired during the war,” Yalom writes, “3,700,000 were wives. For the first time in history, there were more married than single women in the labor force.”
The household responsibilities of wartime wives did not disappear. “Then as now, women simply added one job to another, and tried not to collapse under the strain.”
And, after the boys returned home, not all the women did. The number of employed wives has never returned to pre-war levels. By 1960, it was 30 percent, and today more than 60 percent of married women work outside the home, Yalom says. Having their own paycheck, combined with access to reliable contraceptive methods, helped move wives even further along in their evolution, allowing more aspects of life to be enjoyed without steadfast commitment and support of a man.
But even if women were working, they still were earning nowhere near the salaries of the average man, and societal attitudes about working women, divorced wives and single mothers still conformed to traditional values.
Around this time, some began to speak out about the secret sorrows of wifehood.
Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” a passionate expose of the housewife’s plight, resonated with many, and the book was credited with launching America’s feminist movement.
“I’m gonna go get a job, because my life has closed in on me to the point where I’ve lost my sense of values. I have to get out of this house! I have to be with other adults,” one dissatisfied wife is quoted having told her husband.
While confrontations over social issues turned the 1960s into a decade of protest, the fight for women’s rights gained more steam. In 1969, California adopted no-fault divorce, a reform that recognized women have reasons other than adultery as grounds for dissolving their marriages.
In the next two decades, other longstanding conventions fell. In 1984 a New York appellate court overturned the state’s marital rape exemption, with other states following.
These profound changes helped reshape the roles of both the wife and husband.
A blurring of roles
“Now the realm of the wife has expanded into the realm of the husband,” Yalom says. And men are being encouraged to take on some of the traditional roles of wives, with some being willing, she says.
“Being a wife today is a confusing picture,” says the author, who has been married herself for 47 years to a psychiatrist. “Even the word itself sometimes has ironical overtones. People are trying to find words other than wife–partner, spouse. There is no specific role for the wife the way there once was.”
As two cases in point, she compares Laura Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the camp of the more traditional wife, there is Bush, Yalom says. But she can’t be as neatly categorized as some might initially think.
“She does have some of the aspects of what we think of as a New Wife: She worked. She seems to have some say in the marriage,” says Yalom, noting reports that Laura Bush has influenced changes in her husband’s behavior, especially his decision to give up drinking.
In contrast, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been widely regarded as the torchbearer for feminist ambition, claiming a political spotlight in her own right.
But, says Yalom, she seemed to defy that label with her stand-by-her-man stance in the face of her husband’s infidelities. And her popularity soared because of that, Yalom emphasizes.
This, she says, “speaks to the ambivalence that Americans were feeling and still feel about what a wife’s role is.”
What can be agreed upon is that, for the most part, being a wife means being a worker outside of the home as well as inside the home, Yalom says. And in this context, motherhood has become perhaps the stickiest aspect of wifehood now, she says.
“There’s a mommy gap in salaries,” Yalom says. “It’s the women who are raising children who are the most disadvantaged, whether they are married or not.”
Choosing singlehood
Clearly, many wives are still getting the short end of the spousal stick. So, many women are making full use of the alternatives.
“Marriage is not the exclusive career of women today that it once was,” Yalom says. “Women have options of marrying later, of not marrying at all, of living with a lover, or living alone.”
And among African-American women, for instance, “you’re talking about a much smaller percentage” who are married, for various reasons, she says.
As she considers the shape of wifehood in the future, Yalom sees lifelong marriages perhaps no longer being the norm.
“Being a mother will not take up one’s entire life. Maybe [not] being a wife.”
But married life still has its good points for women, Yalom adds, otherwise, they wouldn’t still be doing it.
“Surprisingly the myth of marriage or the ideal of marriage persists,” she says, “and most people do want to be married at one time or another, men and women.”
After all, at the end of the carpooling and bill-paying and even the occasional high-decibel argument, marriage appeals powerfully to another very human need–that for an “intimate witness to your life,” Yalom says.
“There is a kind of bonding and even tenderness that occurs when you’re with someone who knew your parents, who knew you when you were a girl or a young woman or a young mother, or the hard times you had together,” she says. “You have a shared history. That’s irreplaceable.”
And that may be the only point any two wives still can agree on.
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Editor’s note: The Working, Relating and Lifelines columns will return next week.
