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A History of the Wife QUOTES

A History of the Wife QUOTES

1 " Do we still expect spouses to exert a moral influence upon each other? The notion that husband and wife should make each other better people does not resonate with the most visible goals of contemporary American society. How many young people marry with the conscious expectation that they will become kinder and wiser by virtue of choosing a decent, generous mate? Happier, richer, more successful. Yes! But better human beings? "

― Marilyn Yalom , A History of the Wife

2 " Until recently, many historians tended to idealize the lives of colonial women in comparison with their twentieth- century descendants. How could wives today complain about the pains of childbirth and child rearing, when they have only two or three offspring as compared with the brood of six or eight that was common in the past? How could they, with their electric ovens and washing machines, bemoan the demands of housework, when their American ancestors made everything from scratch, including the soap? Those “noncomplaining” women, noted for their industry and piety, were held up as models to “decadent” modern women, much as Roman women of the republic were glorified during the empire. But neither the imperial Romans nor hagiographic American historians bothered to ask what those “exemplary” women of the past might have thought of their own situations. They never asked whether those women were happy. It is one thing to judge a society by its public face on the friezes of temples or the pages of government documents, all created by men; it is quite another to look at the expressions of women’s subjective experiences in their poems, letters, diaries, and memoirs, or wherever else one can find them. "

― Marilyn Yalom , A History of the Wife

3 " While love marriages had certainly existed in prior centuries, now they became the popular ideal and perhaps even the norm.4 Many theories have been advanced to explain why such a definitive change occurred. Was it a natural evolution of the ideal of companionate marriage, as practiced previously by the enlightened bourgeoisie of Great Britain, Northern Europe, and America? Was it the general spirit of revolution that helped release children from their parents’ tutelage and allowed for more independent choices? Was it backlash to the Age of Reason that permitted the passionate torrents of Romanticism to flow among readers of love poetry and fiction? Was it the revival of Christianity by Anglo- American evangelicalism, which spread the belief that “heaven-sent” marriages should have the urgency of divine love? Was it the result of nascent industrialization, which removed many young women from the home and placed them in mills and factories, where they were no longer under the watchful eye of parents? Whatever the reasons, the gradual emancipation of young adults from their parents and the primacy accorded love matches solidified during the nineteenth century. "

― Marilyn Yalom , A History of the Wife