Page 70 of Woman on the Verge

“I know you’re having a hard time lately,” he said. “Things will get better.”

That tired promise, as familiar as it is vague.

He just left for the day, and Nicole is not yet awake (a minor miracle). I should stop writing, take this time to do the dishes. The dishwasher is broken (again), so I’m back to wearing rubber gloves and handwashing like a 1950s housewife. Rob has left his clothes on the floor (again), so I must decide whether to just leave them there or pick them up (as he must assume I will and as I usually do).

In 1889, a magazine offered a prize to the spinster who could provide the best answer to this question: Why are you still single? The magazine never picked a winner, but this one’s my favorite:

“I find it more delightful to tread on the verge of freedom and captivity, than to allow the snarer to cast around me the matrimonial lasso.”

Ah yes, the matrimonial lasso.

I will leave the clothes where they are. A small rebellion.

When Nicole wakes up, we’ll go to the library. Rob is right—I need to get out of the house more or I’ll go insane. I was thinking the other day about Sylvia Plath, about how she taped herself shut into her kitchen, sealing all the cracks, then rested her head on the drop-down door of her oven, turned on the gas, and went to eternal sleep while her children were waking from their nightly slumber upstairs. It is not so hard for me to understand her choice now. She went over the brink. That is all.

I do what I can to avoid the brink.

At the library, I can do research for my little project, my faux dissertation. There’s a children’s area with toy blocks and books and whatnot. It’ll entertain Nicole for a half hour, max, but I’ll take it. Oh, how I long for the days of eight-hour stretches of time to be with my thoughts. I have not come to terms with the fact that those stretches will not happen again. Or not any time soon, anyway. By the time those kinds of hours are available to me, when Nicole is older, it’s likely I will have lost the attention span and brain cells necessary to work.

I don’t have a title for my project yet. It’s about the history of marriage and motherhood. I have always found comfort in history, in the way it enables us to contextualize our own lives, to understand ourselvesin a grander picture. Nothing about the present is that surprising when you consider the past.

If you look at the historical record, the most culturally preferred form of marriage—and the type of marriage referred to most often in the first five books of the Old Testament—was actually of one man to several women. Some societies also practiced polyandry, where one woman married several men.

Modern marriage, with one man and one woman pledging their lives to each other, is quite strange, historically speaking. The original purpose of this type of marriage was not to ensure that children had a dedicated mother and father but to acquire advantageous in-laws and expand the family labor force. Women were deemed property, passed from one male caretaker to another—father to husband—as a business arrangement between families.

A quote from Sir William Blackstone’s eighteenth-centuryCommentaries on the Laws of England:

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.”

The woman is suspended.

She performs everything, but controls nothing.

Seems about right.

Just a handful of years ago, most states had “head and master” laws giving special decision-making rights to husbands. In these laws,rapewas defined as a manhaving forcible intercourse with a woman other than his wife. In other words, forcible intercourse with his wife was just fine in the eyes of the law.

Before 1973, a woman couldn’t serve on a jury.

Before 1974—just a decade ago—a woman couldn’t apply for a credit card (and before the 1960s, she couldn’t open a bank account).

Before 1978, she could be legally fired for being pregnant.

Considering history, it’s hard to blame today’s men for their sense of entitlement. It has been passed down through generations, imprinted on their DNA. And it’s hard to blame women for their subservience, also ingrained.

I cannot hate Rob. I hate The System. I hate the unspoken rules. Rob and I have never had an actual conversation about who takes care of Nicole, who cooks, who cleans. It’s assumed to be me. I am not faultless. I have done nothing to counter the assumption. I am in The System as well.

InThe Second Sex, published in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that equality between the sexes could only be achieved if the institution of marriage was eradicated. She described marriage as slavery for half of humankind. InThe Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Betty Friedan expressed similar thoughts, comparing the life of an American housewife to being trapped in cage.

Why did I get married?

I see why Rob wanted to marry. The role of husband is a grand one. A husband is the king of the household. He is doted on by a self-sacrificing wife.Marriage is like an ongoing ego stroke for men. What is in it for women? A sense of security? The satisfaction of fulfilling one’s prescribed life’s purpose?

I fear I fell for a marketing ploy. The institution of female subjugation was repackaged as a fairy tale, and I fell for it.

I love Rob. I do. I just feel ... stuck. Trapped in a squirrel cage.

I hope things are different for Nicole. I hope her generation sees through the marketing ploy.

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