About the Author
Anne Kingston's writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Toronto Life and The Chicago Sun-Times Magazine. She is a columnist for the National Post, where she writes on social and cultural issues.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from The Meaning of Wife by 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 a Time cover 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. As People magazine 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 of Sex and the City was 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 in Wifework: 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 program Will & Grace that aired in 2001, Will, the gay central character, tells his straight female best friend, Grace, who has been nagging him, to "stop being a wife." Grace, of course, is insulted. "That's the nastiest thing you've ever said to me," she responds. The number-one Nielsen-rated domestic sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond conveyed the same message during an episode in which Raymond attempts to placate his wife after he criticizes her cooking. "You're a good wife," he tells her. She looks at him, horrified. "Don't you ever, ever call me that again," she says, as the laugh track swells.
0 The characteristics associated with the traditional good wife--servitude, subordination, self-sacrifice, summarized in the pejorative doormat--were discordant with the qualities of independence, "self-realization," and ambition glorified by the culture. Successful single women scoffed at the wifely role. "The moment I want to get married and have children is when I am tired of being Elizabeth Hurley," the actress confessed in an interview in 2000. Yet she did manage to remain Elizabeth Hurley even after giving birth to a son two years later, though there was no husband or male companion in sight.
The actress Lara Flynn Boyle invoked imagery from the 1950s when she was asked if she was "wife material" in a 2001 Vanity Fair interview. "'I would like to have a wife,' she responded. 'Who wouldn't. Let's see, what does a wife encompass exactly,' she asks, surveying the ladies brunching around us. 'A housemate. Maybe a pool boy. Does laundry. Misses out on all the fun. Doesn't sound too great, does it?'"
We need only look at two of the most dominant female cultural influences during the 1990s--the entrepreneur Martha Stewart and the media mogul Oprah Winfrey, both of whom are so famous that we know them by their first names--to see the disconnect between power and wife. Neither are married. Stewart divorced her husband in 1989 and never remarried. Winfrey, whose daily talk show serves up a virtual Greek chorus of the travails of modern wifedom, has never assumed the role. The talk-show host, one of the world's richest women, explained her decision not to marry her longtime companion, Stedman Graham, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in February 2003: "I'm allowed a great deal of freedom in this relationship now," she said, "and I think that if I married--as good as Stedman is--I think that his expectations of what I should be would change. I really do. 'Cause I think he's pretty old-fashioned in that respect, you know, that a 'wife' ought to be home sometimes, and I'm not ready for that right now. I feel if I had the role of wife, I would become someone else. I would then start behaving like a wife."
Given the perceived limitations of the role of wife, it isn't surprising that divorce is presented as a form of female liberation. Women initiate divorce two times out of three, goes the oft-quoted statistic, and they are less likely to remarry than men. Only in leaving marriages, women are told, and shown in books and movies, could they truly "find themselves." This message is not new. It was conveyed more than a hundred years ago by Nora Helmer, the wife who leaves a suffocating marriage in Henrik Ibsen's once-shocking 1879 play, A Doll's House: "I must try and educate myself--you are not the man to help me in that," Nora tells her husband, Torvald. "I must do that for myself."
Nora's words continue to resonate. Dr. Christine Northrup echoed the sentiment during an appearance on Oprah in 2001. The medical doctor, on a book tour for The Wisdom of Menopause, told the primarily female audience that menopause is a "time of opportunity and growth." It was during her own menopause, she confided, that she realized her marriage wasn't fulfilling. So she divorced and experienced a glorious rebirth. She spoke of "sleeping better, dreaming more, being happier and more creative." Weeks later, a cartoon in The New Yorker magazine parodied the buzz surrounding Northrup's book. Two ladies sit at lunch. The caption below them reads: "I was on hormone replacement for two years before I realized that what I really needed was Steve replacement." The jest was calculated to draw knowing laughter from women. Husband put-downs had replaced the now politically incorrect "Take my wife, please" humor of the 1950s and '60s. Women who meted our revenge on their cruel mates were cheered. Women who killed or maimed the bastards were lauded as heroines. The movies and books that told their stories could be counted on to draw large and appreciative female audiences.
Against this landscape of virulent antipathy toward the role of wife--a wifelash of sorts--a countervailing sentiment took root during the 1990s. Call it wifelust, as the traditional stay-at-home wife became the subject of a romantic revival. At a time when women were earning 57 percent of bachelor degrees, young women were being bombarded with husband-snaring advice so heavy-handed that Jane Austen would have found it offensive. At a time of confused gender roles, dating advice that harked back to the 1950s flourished. Books like the phenomenally successful The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right advised women to play hard to get. Young women were also counseled to hang on to their virginity as if it were a negotiating tool, and to marry young, before their "best-before" dates expired.
Princely fairy-tale rescue was presented as a primal female desire, as Cinderella emerged as a female role model. When Carolyn Bessette walked down the aisle to marry John F. Kennedy, Jr., "the world's most eligible bachelor," in 1996, New York magazine dubbed her "Instant Princess." Oleg Cassini, who designed clothing for Jacqueline Kennedy, announced, "As soon as she married a Kennedy, that immediately elevated her to the rank of top Cinderella."
Famous brides like Bessette were lauded as the epitome of female success. To employ the lexicon of the rash of "reality" dating programs that came to air in the late 1990s, they were "winners." And we couldn't keep our eyes off them. Brides were front and center as an unprecedented wedding mania enve...
