Wife

• 1. Introduction

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  A wife is a woman in a marital relationship, and the word itself once meant something far simpler. In Old English it was wif, meaning only "woman," with no husband attached at all. That older sense still hides inside familiar words like midwife, goodwife, and spaewife. So how did a word for "woman" become a word for "married woman"? And why have the rights of a wife, her property, her name, her freedom to refuse a match, varied so wildly across cultures and centuries? The answers run from ancient Rome to modern statute books, from convent walls to common law, from a dowry returned for cruelty to a marriage law that forbids a woman from ever changing her name.

• 2. Roots Of A Word

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  Proto-Germanic gave us the word wibam, which translated simply into "woman." By Middle English it had taken the form wif, and its relatives still survive across Europe. Modern German keeps Weib for woman or female, Danish has the usually poetic viv for wife, and Dutch carries wijf, a generally pejorative term for woman. The meaning shifts again the moment a wedding begins. On her wedding day a woman is usually described as a bride, a label sometimes held appropriate only until the ceremony or the honeymoon ends. In the older customs still followed by Roman Catholic ritual, the word bride actually means fiancee. It applies only up to the exchange of matrimonial consent. From that point, even while the rest of the ceremony continues, the woman is a wife and no longer a bride, and the pair are now the newlyweds.

• 3. Marks Of Marriage

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  After marriage, many cultures expect a woman to take her husband's surname, though the practice is not universal and remains controversial. Its critics tie it to the historical doctrine of coverture and to the historically subordinated roles of wives. Others argue it is now a harmless tradition that should be accepted as free choice. Some jurisdictions have gone further and restricted or banned it. Since 1983, when Greece adopted a new marriage law guaranteeing gender equality between spouses, women in Greece are required to keep their birth names for their whole life. Other markers of marital status take physical form. In Western culture a married woman would commonly wear a wedding ring, and today some women wear one specifically to show their status as a wife. In India, married women may wear vermilion powder on their foreheads, a necklace ornament called Mangalsutra, or toe rings, none of which are worn by single women. The title "Mrs" has long signaled the same thing, though some married women prefer "Ms," a title also used when a woman's marital status is unknown.

• 4. Wives Without Rights

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  "The husband and wife are one, and the husband is the one." That assessment came from the English conservative moralist Sir William Blackstone, summing up the system known as coverture. Under English common law, a wife with a living husband, a feme couvert, could own little property in her own name. Unable to easily support herself, marriage became central to most women's economic status. The denial of equal education and equal property rights kept her power limited. Change came with the Married Women's Property Act 1882 and similar reforms, which finally let wives with living husbands own property in their own names. The debate over a wife's legal rights had run since the 19th century, and was addressed in particular by John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women, published in 1869. Full equality came slowly even in Europe. Among the last European countries to establish full gender equality in marriage were Switzerland, Greece, Spain, and France in the 1980s. In some marriage laws the husband still holds authority. Article 1105 of the Civil Code of Iran states that the position of head of the family is the exclusive right of the husband.

• 5. Rome And The New Testament

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  In ancient Rome, the Emperor Augustus introduced the Lex Papia Poppaea, marriage legislation that rewarded marriage and childbearing while penalizing those who failed to marry or committed adultery. Marriage and childbearing became law between the ages of twenty-five and sixty for men, and twenty and fifty for women. Vestal Virgins were a separate case, selected between the ages of 6 and 10 to serve as priestesses in the temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum for 30 years, after which they could marry. Roman law set the floor for marriage at 12 years old for brides, a standard later adopted by Roman Catholic canon law. Noble women were known to marry as young as 12, while lower-class women tended to marry slightly later in their teens. A daughter was not entirely powerless. If she could prove a proposed husband to be of bad character, she could legitimately refuse the match. Roman law also recognized wives' property as legally separate from a husband's, as did some legal systems in Europe and colonial Latin America. Christian cultures looked instead to the New Testament. It condemns divorce for both men and women and assumes monogamy, instructing that the wife have her own husband and the husband his own wife. In the 12th century the Roman Catholic Church changed marital consent standards, allowing daughters over 12 and sons over 14 to marry without their parents' approval, even clandestinely.

• 6. The Western Spinster

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  If a woman did not want to marry, one path led into a convent, to become a "bride of Christ," a state protecting her chastity and economic survival. Both a wife and a nun wore Christian headcovering to proclaim their protected state. Far more significant, though, was the option of non-religious spinsterhood. An unmarried woman, a feme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. The scale of this was striking. As first shown quantitatively by John Hajnal, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the percentage of non-clerical Western women who never married was typically as high as 10-15%, a level of female celibacy never documented for any other major traditional civilization. Western women also married late, typically in their mid to late 20s, far older than women in other major traditional cultures. Many parish reconstruction studies have shown this high age at first marriage to be a traditional Western pattern dating back at least as early as the mid-16th century. The 20th century brought two further breaks. First, marriage shifted from an institution to a companionate bond, and wives became distinct legal entities able to hold property and sue. Second, in the 1960s middle and upper-class wives began working outside the home, and divorce gained social acceptance.

• 7. Payments And Children

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  A dowry could be a wife's protection as much as a transaction. In some cultures it was paid not only to help establish a new family but as a condition: if the husband committed grave offenses against his wife, the dowry had to be returned to her or her family. For that reason it was often made inalienable by the husband during the marriage. Other exchanges took different forms, the bride price paid by the husband or his family to the bride's family, or the dower paid by the husband to the wife. Dowries continue to be expected in parts of South Asia such as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, where conflicts over payment sometimes turn violent through dowry deaths and bride burning. The role of wife has long been tied to that of mother, with a strong expectation that a wife ought to bear children while an unmarried woman should not. In northern Ghana, the payment of bride price signifies a woman's requirement to bear children, and women using birth control face threats and coercion. Some religious teaching reinforces the expectation. In 2015, Pope Francis said that choosing not to have children was selfish.

• 8. Widowhood And Fidelity

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  On the death of her partner, a wife becomes a widow, and her social standing then varies sharply by culture. In some places widows face potentially harmful practices such as widow inheritance, levirate marriage, or social stigmatization. In cultures that practice sati, a funeral ritual within some Asian communities, a recently widowed woman intentionally commits suicide by fire, typically upon her husband's funeral pyre. The status of wife can end in other ways too: by divorce, which yields the terms former wife or ex-wife, or by annulment, which is usually retroactive and treats the marriage as invalid from the beginning, as though it never took place. Across most of recorded history and most cultures runs the expectation that a wife not have sexual relations with anyone but her legal husband. A breach, called adultery, has been treated as a serious offense, a crime, and a sin, and can still shape a divorce, a property settlement, or the custody of children. In parts of the world it can bring violent acts such as honor killings or stoning. As of September 2010, stoning was a legal punishment for adultery of married persons in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and some states in Nigeria.