Love is the sole ingredient. Review on History of the Wife, A - Marilyn Yalom

When I was young and now whenever I watch a Bollywood film, marriage is the end of the story. Marriage is mostly, as the general belief goes, about male authority and female passivity. Penelope at her loom for more than 20 years waiting for Odysseus to return, or Queen Victoria of Great Britain mourning her husband for half a century Or the typical Indian woman of Bollywood, whose husband has deserted her, raising her children single handed, yet hoping that one day her husband might return. I was always disgusted to see this “sacrifice, penance and pinning “ for someone who has eloped.

So when I came across the book “A history of the wife” my curiosity was aroused and I decided to read it. Marilyn Yalome’s “A history of the wife” is published in an era when more and more women choose not to marry and so many marriages end up in divorce. Even today whilst women are building their careers, embracing women’s lib and shrugging off male dominancy, yet within the domestic confines the traditions still prevail. The book is not analytical or suggestive but a survey of the roles and expectations of wifehood since the beginning. The book has two objects – one to show that women’s rebellion against the notion that “wife is a man’s chattel, as his dependent, as his means of acquiring legal offspring, his caretaker and cook” is not new but has been going on for centuries.

Yalom argues that the attitudes to marriage have changed dramatically. It used to be a religious duty but now it is a secular one. She illustrates this with wonderful quotations through Europe and American revolutions and Victorian period before reaching the wives of the 20th century. Today, as the book goes, young people engage in sex with several partners before they fall in love with one of them. Love, is the strongest basis of marriage. The writer admits that it was normal for Indian families and classical Romans, for love to come after marriage. This seems to be second object of the book to emphasise that love the sole ingredient to ground a marriage and that the history of wives cannot change until the history of husbands does. The book praises husband that help their pregnant wives, take turns to change and feed the baby, but Yalome says that this change is very little and still there is more of a bargain in marriage for men than it is for women.