Meaning of Wife

Excerpted fromThe Meaning of Wifeby Anne Kingston. Copyright 2004 by Anne Kingston. Published in March 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The Wife Gap Wife. Four letters. One syllable. Simple, or so it seems. Yet this common word has become one of the most complex signifiers in the English language, weighted by past definitions, blurred by personal biases. The associations it elicits are bipolar in their scope: by the beginning of the twenty-first century, wife was variously presented as the source of female damnation or salvation, enchantment or disenchantment, captivity or rescue. Take your pick. Evidence can be marshaled to support either case. The truth exists in neither. At one extreme, the role of wife is perceived as a straitjacket, one an increasing number of women refuse to don, as reflected in a marriage rate that has been declining, with the occasional uptick, in North America for the past one hundred years. By 2004, unmarried women were the fastest-growing demographic. A thirty-year-old woman was three times more likely to be single than she was in the 1970s; the more money a woman earned, the more likely she was to delay or even forgo matrimony. A much-reported 1999 study from the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University found that high school girls were more accepting of cohabitation and children born out of wedlock than they had been in two decades. While they expressed a desire to marry, they voiced declining confidence that their marriages could last a lifetime. This was not unrealistic. The nuclear family--husband, wife, 2.5 kids--had detonated, comprising only one-quarter of family formations in North America. Increasingly, women were giving birth to or adopting children without husbands or permanent partners. Single women professionals in their late thirties or forties came to represent 30 percent of people adopting Chinese babies nationwide in the United States, according to New Jersey-based Chinese Children Adoption International. Mainstream publications appeared to cheer them on. "Who Needs a Husband?" proclaimed aTimecover story in August 2000. It was never a better time for women to be unmarried, or so we were told. Single women were the "new yuppies," according to one report. AsPeoplemagazine put it: "Given so many choices [single women] don't have to settle and are willing to give up the old-fashioned romantic fantasy of being with a man in favor of the fantasy of independence." Certainly, tucking into a single serving of Lean Cuisine while watching reruns ofSex and the Citywas preferable to being a wife, according to the deluge of studies that reported how much more men benefit from marriage emotionally and financially than women and how men are far quicker to remarry after divorce or being widowed. Media reports presented marriage as a dark domicile for women, dangerous and often sexless. Wifely victims of abuse and murder both proven and alleged achieved first-name status--Nicole, Laci, and, of course, Diana. The Australian sociologist Susan Maushart pilloried the role of the modern wife inWifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women, published in 2002: "Becoming a wife will erode your mental health, reduce your leisure, decimate your libido, and increase the odds that you will be physically assaulted or murdered in your own home," she writes. Given such a scathing indictment, it would be reasonable to assume that Maushart had avoided the role as assiduously as she would salmonella poisoning. But no. She married twice, to divorce twice, and argued that the institution of marriage remains the best context available in which to raise children. Within popular culture, wife is a ready term of derision, a sneer. On an episode of the television programWill & Gracethat aired in 2001, Will, the gay central character, tellsKingston, Anne is the author of 'Meaning of Wife', published 2005 under ISBN 9780374205102 and ISBN 0374205108.