![]() ![]() I want a wife who will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want a wife to keep track of the children’s doctor and dentist appointments. I want a wife to take care of my children. I also remembered, with some fondness, Judy Syfers’ short satirical essay, I Want a Wife, based on a speech she delivered in August, 1970, to mark the 50th anniversary of American women’s suffrage. She’d lost her wife, she said, when she shifted continents. As when, quite recently, I heard a successful professional woman complain about how, now that she lives in Australia, she doesn’t have the underpaid, second-class citizen, 24-hour, 7-days-a-week live-in maid she had in Hong Kong. Or, sometimes, not laughingly, but in a gobsmackingly problematic way. I had heard other women say, laughingly, that they wished they had a wife. In her program, she is smart, engaged, witty, playful. ![]() ![]() I enjoy Kitchen Cabinet, in which Ms Crabb cooks/eats with politicians while interviewing them. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually liked it. Which is why, right about now, I’m wondering why I started the year reading Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought. It’s 2015, and this year I promised myself I would post a little bit about each of the books I read. ![]()
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