No Job for a Woman

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March 4, 2001

No Job for a Woman

A cultural study of wifedom.
By LAURA SHAPIRO

t's always discouraging to sit through

a perfectly delightful wedding
ceremony only to hear it culminate in
the declaration, ''I now pronounce you
man and wife.'' Man and wife? This
ominous locution, which has survived
barefoot weddings, Kahlil Gibran
weddings, visibly-pregnant-bride
weddings and attendants-all-in-black
weddings, apparently hangs around just
to remind us of a principle that long
governed most of history: Man is,
woman better accommodate.

A HISTORY OF THE
WIFE
By Marilyn Yalom.
Illustrated. 441 pp. New
York:
HarperCollins Publishers.
$30.

But the tenacity of ''man and wife'' may

serve another function as well -namely, to explain why we can read a
book on the history of wives without
ever expecting to read a similar book
about husbands. One of the inferences it's possible to draw from
Marilyn Yalom's new book, ''A History of the Wife,'' is that until
very recently there were no husbands, at least not in the sense that
being a husband was a job requiring a whole lot of attention.
Across the ages, men seem to have conducted their married lives
pretty much as they wished -- in fact, pretty much as if they were
single, with law and custom nodding assent. But whenever wifely
duties were at issue, law and custom jumped up snarling. Yalom
doesn't hammer at the point, but it's hard to overlook how ardently
church and state have applied themselves to enforcing constraints
on married women, whether this task calls for sanctifying wifebeating or demonizing day care. She herself emphasizes sunnier
themes, especially the gradual change in a wife's status from chattel
to partner. Nevertheless, in a book that starts with Eve, separate
checking accounts are a long time coming.
Yalom (the author of several previous books, including ''A History
of the Breast'') examines both the history of marriage and the
history of women, chiefly in Western Europe and America. She
gauges the progress of wives over the centuries by tracking two
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No Job for a Woman

10/12/11 3:03 AM

elusive ideals: love and equality. Neither was deemed necessary in

most marital arrangements until the notion of marrying for love
finally accumulated a critical mass of believers late in the 18th
century. Legal equality, which unfortunately never inspired a
Petrarch, a Shakespeare or a Mozart, took a little longer. For most
of the 3,000 years covered here, getting married amounted to a
property transaction between two men.
Of course, any sizable stretch of history has its ups and downs.
Low points on the long and winding road for wives would have to
include ancient Athens, where a girl of 14 was likely to be handed
over in marriage to a man twice her age, after which she spent the
rest of her life confined indoors. (Her husband passed his days in
the agora, the gymnasium and the brothel.) During the Middle
Ages, wives were granted a place in the feudal hierarchy just
slightly above the livestock; meanwhile, French and English law
took to defining the crime of killing one's husband as treason.) As
for the Enlightenment, it certainly wasn't meant to enlighten wives.
Rousseau, the most widely read philosopher of the time, quickly
fended off that possibility with his advice on how a woman should
best fulfill her nature: ''She should early learn to submit to injustice
and suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband without
complaint.''
Yalom scours the record for firsthand evidence of any wives who
enjoyed affection and respect, even when tradition deemed them
wholly owned by their husbands. Some wives, perhaps many,
surely had the good fortune to win a kind master. But the record
was written almost exclusively by men until female literacy became
widespread among upper-class women in the 17th century. Hence
Yalom has to extract what she can from art, poetry and such
influential documents as the writings of Martin Luther. In the early
16th century, Luther insisted, as Yalom puts it, that ''mutual love
between husband and wife was a God-given mandate,'' although
how wives -- or Luther, for that matter -- reconciled this teaching
with his other great directive on women (that they were ''created for
no other purpose than to serve men and be their helpers'') remains
mysterious. When women's voices begin contributing in a major
way to their own history, Yalom can at last turn to letters, diaries
and memoirs. By the early 19th century, these demonstrate that love
had gained pride of place in the concept of marital success. ''Never
could I give my hand unaccompanied by my heart,'' an American
woman named Eliza Chaplin wrote in 1820.
The battle for women's rights, which took off a couple of decades
later, didn't get much help from the new reign of love. The very
prevalence of love marriages allowed both men and women to
scoff at the notion that women had anything to complain about,
even though wives, for starters, had no right to keep their own
earnings and no custody rights in case of divorce. Yalom's
chronicle of the last 200 years describes struggles over law,
employment, sex, housework and feminism, culminating in the bynow allegorical tale of Hillary and Bill. Genuine equality in
marriage, she concludes, doesn't exist just yet.

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''A History of the Wife'' is packed with rich material, but often it
comes across as history lite. The insights tend to be conventional,
and there's a lot of awkward dumbing-down (''most of us know the
name of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but how many know that this
radical founder of the women's rights movement was married for
almost 50 years and had seven children?''). Commenting on one of
the most startling scenes in the book -- a 12th-century French
wedding that took place in the couple's bed, attended only by the
groom's father and four priests -- Yalom offers an analysis that's so
timid she might have been better off leaving it to our imagination.
''The bride . . . may have felt frightened in a strange bed,'' she
ventures. ''She would certainly have felt the solemnity of the
occasion.''
Perhaps the most productive way to read ''A History of the Wife'' is
to keep in mind an excellent question Yalom raises in the
introduction. Anticipating the time when same-sex partnerships will
have the legal status of heterosexual marriage, she wonders: ''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?'' Maybe it can't. Or maybe homosexual
marriage will help give the word ''wife'' a meaning we can all live
with, for the first time. After all, the God-given differences
between male and female are pretty paltry compared with the manmade differences between husbands and wives.
Laura Shapiro is at work on a book about women and cooking in
the 1950's.
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