This is not to say that both roles are not equally important. Doyle's was a slow conversion, after the near breakup of her marriage and much counseling. She's even doing instructional-teaching tours. If female high-school students were given Marilyn Yalom's book as their only instruction on the concept of the wife, it's likely the scholarly confirmation of their assumptions would scare them away from ever becoming one of those wives. Yalom's book is written for women's studies professors.
Man is, woman better accommodate.
One of the inferences it's possible to draw from Marilyn Yalom's new book, A History of the Wife , is that until very recently there were no husbands, at least not in the sense that being a husband was a job requiring a whole lot of attention. But whenever wifely duties were at issue, law and custom jumped up snarling. Yalom doesn't hammer at the point, but it's hard to overlook how ardently church and state have applied themselves to enforcing constraints on married women, whether this task calls for sanctifying wife-beating or demonizing day care. She herself emphasizes sunnier themes, especially the gradual change in a wife's status from chattel to partner. Nevertheless, in a book that starts with Eve, separate checking accounts are a long time coming.