Woman's Work—Where the Rhetoric Meets the Road: Reader Response to “Why I Want a Wife” at 30

When I sampled reader responses to Judy Syfers's (now Brady's) "seminal" (with huge quote marks around the word) essay, "Why I Want a Wife," first with 100 and then with 136 first-year college students in 1996 and 2001, respectively, I did so as a text writer and rhetoric teacher. I was seeking an example to illustrate the massive and deceptive simplification that rhetoric teachers indulge in when we call a piece of writing "effective," urging the methods of "effective argument" (as if there were such a thing) on our students in our efforts to improve their writing. The measure of effectiveness, as I approach it, is available only by some sort of market survey - and as with market surveys, the question of who is surveyed is of prime importance, as is the survey instrument itself. It is increasingly clear that there is no such thing as "the consumer," nor is there such a thing as "the general reader." One cannot (although many of us do) say, "this is an effective essay because it grabs the reader's attention," "the writer backs up what she says with facts," or "it is written in down to earth language that everyone can understand," and so on. The interface of these concepts with whomever constitutes the consumers of "popular culture" led me to some interesting conclusions. As academics - and more specifically, as rhetoricians-we have considerable evidence that we agree among ourselves that Brady's piece is "effective." First presented publicly in August of 1970 at the San Francisco celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of women's suffrage, the piece was picked up by Ms. magazine for its premier issue dated 1972 (but physically appearing in December of 1971). When Ms. printed "Why I Want a Wife" for the second time in August of 1990, the editor reported that the essay had been reprinted "over two hundred times" in the intervening nineteen years. That republication date is now eleven plus years in the past, and still the reprinting goes on. On lists dealing with most-anthologized essays, Brady's appears consistently in the company of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and "Shooting an Elephant," and Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." "Why I Want a Wife" is undoubtedly popular among teachers of argument, and I would think that it would be particularly so among those of activist feminist persuasions. As often as it must have been assigned as reading, and presumably discussed, I see no evidence of any cumulative generational shift in attitude toward what seems to remain firmly in place as "woman's work." Indeed, my student samples indicate that at twenty-five and thirty years following its initial appearance, reader resistance to the essay's thesis remains strong. First-year college students surveyed overwhelmingly think that the essay is "effective" (eighty-one [and a large fraction] percent), but nearly as overwhelmingly (eighty-one [and a smaller fraction, although not an identical population] percent) misread it as saying either that Brady "wants a wife," or that she wants wives to be appreciated for the full extent of "their" contributions to "the family." All of those tasks and attitudes unmistakably stripped of their gender associations by Brady's essay remain for these students a "given" of women's work. This attitude is so deeply entrenched in these students that Brady's insistently gender-neutral language (there are neither gendered pronouns nor any gender-restricted activity from paragraph three onward) is ignored as completely as her creation of the eventually comic, thoroughgoing, and finally, monstrous egotism of the writer's ironing board reverie persona. At this point, just to make sure that all of us massively overeducated people are on the same page (or, rather, are reading the same page in similar ways), I am going to insert a brief rhetorical analysis of the Brady essay, a copy of which has been reprinted here along with a sampling of student responses. …