These past weeks we've been discussing gender stereotypes in class, and one essay that caught my attention was "I want a Wife" written by Judy Brady.
"I want a Wife" is an essay about the demands required of a wife. Brady's purpose was to show the impact of double standards and emphasize the obvious difference and inequality between the roles of a husband and wife. She mainly uses irony and exaggeration to achieve this purpose and informs her audience of the injustices that wives face. Brady writes "I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me... and...who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy." She explains that women must stay faithful in their marriages because men don't have time to be jealous and worry whether or not their wife is cheating, but men don't have to be faithful and their wives should understand that. Brady describes how wives are regarded like objects, or property, that can be replaced by men when she says "If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife...I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one." She also shows how wives are treated like maids when she says "I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt". But the most ironic part of Brady's essay is that she writes all the roles of the ideal wife that men want so that men are "left free", but men are already free since the wives do everything anyway and the men say they want to be independent, but they're dependent on their wives for everything.
I found this essay to be very effective. Brady uses ethos and establishes her credibility as a wife when she explains that she belongs "to that classification of people known as wives" and lets her readers know that everything she's saying is true. The structure and repetition in her text makes it difficult to read, because she uses long sentences without many pauses, which makes her readers realize how difficult it is to be a wife. There were a lot of moments in the text that made me angry and say "excuse me?" because the men in my family are very old fashioned and expect these things from their wives but it's because of that connection that I honestly loved this essay. Because if you can have someone to do everything, except eat, sleep, and use the bathroom for you, "who wouldn't want a wife?"
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