Wifework
What Marriage Really Means for Women
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Almost half of all marriages end in divorce. Three-quarters of these divorces are initiated by women. Why? Wifework.
In an era of equal opportunity, Susan Maushart reveals, wives still do the vast bulk of the physical and emotional work in a marriage. From counselling to toilet cleaning, strategic planning to quality control, it is wives who shoulder the double burden of childcare and man-care.
Wifework examines with devastating honesty how hard women will work to keep a marriage running, and looks fearlessly at the cost for children when they decide to stop.
This book is lucid, funny and provocative. Every woman will recognise its compelling message-and every married man will have to.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wifework, "the care and maintenance of men's bodies, minds and egos" is a one-way street, says Maushart, something wives do for husbands at great cost to their mental and physical health, with minimal reciprocation. According to her, even fully employed wives do a disproportionate amount of housework, in addition to "child-care drudgework," "monitoring His physical well-being," "deferring to His agenda in day-to-day conversation," maintaining "His extended family relationships," etc. Maushart (The Mask of Motherhood) counters that he, in contrast, is merely a "volunteer" in the marriage; apart from providing an income, he's really only expected to "turn up" at family events. That such inequality endures at least in Maushart's view despite feminism and economic progress for women, is a question the author explores here. This Australian writer asserts that while men use various denial mechanisms to avoid wifework (like trivializing the importance of cleaning), what's worse is that most wives seem to collude in "maintaining positive illusions" about the inequality in their marriages. Her solution? Readers may expect a call for the end of marriage, but Maushart pleads for the interests of the children, for whom she says divorce is worse than living with marital discord. Instead, she advocates that couples relieve some wifework by assigning broad areas of responsibility (laundry, cooking, etc.) to husbands. And women should expect less, she says; they should realize that "marriage entails a sort of base level of unhappiness that couples need to learn to anticipate and accept." Though that's a downbeat ending for an often funny dissection of modern marriage, it is 100% honest like the rest of this smart and witty book.
