Review
The Meaning of Wife
by Anne Kingston
HarperCollins, 290 pp.
You only have to glance at your channel guide or skim the pages of a daily national newspaper to realize that marriage hype is at an all-time high. Which leads you to wonder – as gays and lesbians fight for access to this so-called dying patriarchal institution and heterosexuals gamble for lifelong love on reality TV shows – Why?!?!?
National Post columnist and author Anne Kingston provides a context for marriage mania by exploring the changing definition of "wife." Why "wife" and not "husband?" Because of the "Wife Gap," for starters. With more women than ever working outside the home, and fewer women than ever becoming wives, there’s one helluva job that needs to be filled, and it’s a job with no pay and therefore, seemingly, no value.
Kingston’s sometimes overwhelming (and for female readers, rage-inducing) exploration of popular culture and the media demonstrates the insidious integration of women into the consumer infrastructure. Part social commentary, part marketing manifesto, The Meaning of Wife hinges on opposing wife (How to find a husband) with unwife (Who needs marriage?) fantasies. Both fantasies cast women as inadequate – single or married – but as Kingston points out, women are driven by this sense of inadequacy to buy things.
Men buy into these fantasies, too, as seen on Kingston’s mind-blowing tour through "The Heart of Whiteness," otherwise known as the "wedding industrial complex." Her history of the diamond engagement ring, a fantasy of "forever" successfully corner-marketed by the De Beers diamond company, will no doubt cause male readers to think twice before forking over three months’ salary for a rock.
Fantasies often make the best stories and, consequently, both the author and the reader tend to dwell more on the history of the vibrator and the Philip Morris (cigarette) Company’s maniacally manipulative marketing practices than on the reality of wife in our culture. That said, Kingston asks important questions. Should the criminal justice system accept our "revenge fantasy" as a legitimate defence for women who kill their husbands? Should we adopt Scandinavia’s style of socio-economic policy, reducing our commitment to the institution of marriage and improving our commitment to parenthood? Should wives of university administrators and politicians earn salaries for their wifely duties?
The reality, Kingston believes, is that "Wife has become the axis around which the next social revolution is fermenting." More men are sacrificing their personal ambitions (and accompanying salaries) for the benefit of their families. Men and women are choosing to create new forms of family and connection with their communities. I only question Kingston’s assumption that it is the role of wife, not husband, that needs expanding. Do we really need to "employ wife as a verb and as a gender-neutral concept" to create "new ways of living as women and men together?"Or do we need to include the concept of caregiving and domestic responsibility in the role of husband?
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