I want a Wife by Judy Brady
Judy Brady became
involved in cancer politics after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis in 1980,
and she has edited books such as Women and Cancer (1990) and One in Three:
Women with Cancer Confront an Epidemic (1991). Congress passed both the Equal
Rights Amendment, which outlawed discrimination against women, and Title IX of
the Education Amendments Act, which mandated equal opportunity for all students
in any school receiving federal funds. At the time, women made up just under
40% of the labor force; today, that percentage has increased to almost 50%,
partly as a result of the severe recession that began in 2008 and resulted in
more job losses for men than for women. In this
essay, Brady seeks to persuade her readers to consider a man's perspectives and
expectations of what he believes a wife is and should be objective. She
successfully employs powerful arguments, keyword repetition, and elegant
language to make her writing compelling.
In
this essay, Judy Brady discusses the expectations placed on the wife. She
underlines that there is an apparent difference, an inequity, between the roles
of husband and wife, and that the roles of a wife are unfair to the position of
the husband. She writes on this topic because she is sick of feeling inferior
to men and that the wife's job is not valued. Brady demonstrates her thesis by
detailing the various responsibilities typically placed on the woman. I want a
wife who will keep the house tidy, keep the clothes neat, pressed, mended, and
replaced as necessary, and who will make sure that my belongings are stored in
their right places so that I can locate what I need as soon as I need it. She
is not only admirable because she is a wife, but also because I am a mother,
therefore I am a wife. She also appears to be very knowledgeable, which lets
the audience know that she is knowledgeable about her subject. She mentions a
lot of "jobs" that are required of wives while using language that
betrays her frustration and annoyance with these expectations.