The Meaning of Wife

I found The Meaning of Wife by Anne Kingston as I was browsing in the UTEP library two weeks ago. The clever pun in the title drew me in. The title sounds like it could be a novel for women, but reading the back cover I found that it's actually a nonfiction book examining the role of wife in Western society. No, I'm not getting married, LOL. But the topic sounded interesting because the cultural roles of wife and woman are so entwined. My recent interest in Mary Astell sealed the deal and I decided to give this book a try.

Kingston, a Canadian writer, does a fantastic job of putting together research for this book. She brings in some fascinating stats and examples from magazines, books, television, and movies. She looks at public figures such as Martha Stewart, Princess Diana, and Hillary Clinton. Intriguing court cases are also a big part of the research for the book, from spousal murder cases to divorces.

At first I was going crazy trying to figure out Kingston's angle for the book. What is she saying--never, ever get married? She doesn't mention what her marital status is until the end of the book, so you don't know if she's a frustrated single or a frustrated wife (or a happy single or a happy wife, for that matter). But what I realized is that the book isn't for or against marriage; rather it's a deconstruction of messages from society about what a woman should or should not be. On the one hand, women are more liberated than ever before; on the other, we’re fed these images of marriage as an ideal. Kingston delves into how marriage is back in vogue on TV and in movies and the mini-trend of highly-educated upper class women opting out of the workforce to stay home with their children. She also describes how single women are portrayed in the media as insecure Bridget Jones-types all desperate to find a husband (for a more recent example, see this NY Times article). On the surface, it looks like we as women have regressed into old modes of behavior. But how much of this is real and how much of it is an attempt to sell wedding dresses and cleaning products? I think what Kingston accomplishes in this book is cutting through many of the stereotypes and presenting a more realistic view of women. Kingston is able to address the images of women in pop culture and expose them as often-silly, exaggerated, even manufactured constructions of what women are and should be, often quite different from what the reality is. It has made me think a little more about the messages I’m getting when I watch another movie that ends with a wedding or another TV show that depicts a flighty, neurotic single woman.

Kingston finally provides some overt commentary in the last chapter of the book. She suggests that Western society is evolving toward a state where "wife" is a gender-neutral term, a verb even, where men are just as accepted as women in the role of homemaker, someone who provides behind-the-scenes support to the spouse. It’s an interesting idea, but to me it seems a long way off. Society is changing, but not that quickly. There’s still a lot inequality in the workplace for women, and there remains an inherent unfairness in that tasks such as taking care of children and doing household chores are often automatically assigned to women. Gender roles and family roles are complicated, and from this book and from my own life, I get the feeling that we’re all just improvising solutions as we go along, which is both a good and a bad thing. Bad because it’s confusing, good because we aren’t tied to old roles and are free to make up new ones.

I highly recommend this book, especially for women. It’s hands-down the best nonfiction book I’ve read this year. It’s a well-researched book on a fascinating topic, and I think its greatest strength is that, rather than allowing this to become one of the books she analyzes that tells women what to do or what to think, Kingston lets her research and examples speak for themselves about the institution of marriage, allowing the reader to draw her own conclusions.