Two Sides of the Gender Coin.

When I was 19 (which was quite a long time ago) I worked with a man who told me one day that his wife wanted to get a job. His response was typical of the age: ‘No wife of mine is going out to work’ he said with much indignation. Well, this attitude has nuances.

The first is his assumption that he had the right to tell his wife what he would and wouldn’t allow. It’s worth remembering that although the Church of England allowed the bride’s undertaking to ‘obey’ her husband to be omitted from the marriage vows in 1928, it didn’t become normal practice until the 1980s. (I was a little older than 19 by then…)

The second concerns the accepted attitude to gender roles. My work colleague no doubt considered – as did many men in those days – that a wife’s place was in the home and nowhere else (except, perhaps, the performing of voluntary work which made no pecuniary contribution to the household and therefore broke no taboos.)

But there’s also the other side of the gender imperative. A husband considered it his duty to work in order to provide for his wife and family, and so having a working wife would have diluted that role and been injurious to his pride. Knowing the man in question, I suspect that was his major concern.

Things have changed now, of course. Wives are expected to work because relatively few husbands earn enough to provide the sort of lifestyle regarded as normal in modern developed economies. And I suspect that this development has largely been driven by the corporate world and its lackeys as part of its drive to rule society and become obscenely rich in consequence. That’s the part I dislike.

And therein lie the nuances, so take your pick. I expect people of my generation will tend to see the situation quite differently from the younger ones, and I’m tempted to think that there’s a competition going on here between what some people consider preferable and not preferable, and what other people consider normal and not normal.