Wifely Role Disappearing as Working Women Need Wives

Women have been railing for some time now about their need for a wife. These days, men might well have the same complaint. Their women are no great shakes anymore at the old wifely skills. It’s been quite some time since a man came home from work, propped up his feet and read the paper to rest up from a hard day’s work while his wife puttered over dinner in the kitchen. Today it’s more likely that he and his wife squeeze through the front door together.

Oh, there are a few hardy stragglers out there, people who still provide that old kind of supportive function. Most of them are women. These women are fading fast and will soon be extinct. A few others of them are men, so few as to be considered curiosities. The reality is that the position of wife has been abolished. Mrs. Field’s is the closest thing we have to a national wife.

And that’s more than just a shame. We’ve got a serious problem.

We’re going through our days with many of our basic needs for comfort and support and a chance for a breather being unmet. We live in a continuously harried state that is bound to take its toll on us and our children downstream, if it hasn’t already.

The traditional wife of times past dedicated herself to making a refuge for her family (and herself), a cozy, snug, safe place--sometimes physical, sometimes existing only in the mind and heart--where family members replenished and restored themselves.

She devoted her days to meticulously planning and creating meals of many courses, balanced in color, flavor and nutritive value. She washed and ironed the clothes, picked up the clutter and tended the garden, sometimes bringing in cut flowers to spruce up the place. This notion is so far-fetched as to be hysterically funny to today’s woman.

Of course, the traditional wife wasn’t always entirely successful in creating a refuge. Squabbles sometimes intruded, and she was frightfully discontent herself. In fact, things eventually got so awful that she abandoned her post.

But that doesn’t mean the job no longer needs to be done. Her position was a critically important one. A quick survey of the frantic, frazzled folks scurrying about these days proves that. What we’ve got to decide at some point is: Who’s going to replace her?

I believe we will steal our new national wife from here and there, much as a plastic surgeon faced with the chore of reconstructing a lost vital body part borrows from other places on the body to re-create what was lost. In this process the national wife will be defeminized as she (it) manifests herself (itself) more frequently in government, private industry and in such traditionally male places as the husband role.

Private industry has already begun to leap into the breech--witness Mrs. Field’s, for instance, and the ever-burgeoning frozen food market. These are the easy moves for industry. Other moves will be harder: loosening up the rigid, mandatory 40-hour workweek, for example, to provide flexible time options so workers can structure in some time to be human beings in their chosen social units.

Such options make a shambles of traditional schedules. They are a royal nuisance. They make sense only in a bigger picture in which employees are going down the drain emotionally. Such employees inevitably become less and less productive. Then, of course, industry will do something. But generations of agony can be saved by starting now to investigate wife-replacing options such as alternative work schedules, paternity leave and industry-sponsored child-care centers.

Our government can become something of a wife, too. Legislation can gradually structure a society that attends to new needs brought about by the loss of the wifely function--help with child care and care of elderly parents, and comparable pay laws, for instance.

The extended family may come back in vogue. Grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles might be persuaded to pitch in during the (probably permanent) crunch. Some of them may have been dying to be persuaded all along and thought we’d never ask. Some of them may also be meddlesome busybodies and cause us more trouble than we bargained for; but nobody said the new world would be idyllic either.

As our institutions begin to ease the pressure, perhaps husbands will be less wearied and be able to do some extra wifing.

Kids are another possible resource. I know some kids who make wicked chocolate chip cookies. Wives might eventually want to take another crack at it when they see that wifing is now a reasonably well-distributed load rather than one that falls primarily on them.

Our old wife is gone. Wishing won’t bring her back. But wailing and moaning (and joking) about our plight aren’t particularly helpful either.

It’s high time we set about finding a replacement.