I want a wife like that!!!!!! Just kidding.

Week 3 Blog

In response to question 6 regarding Judy Brady’s “I Want a Wife” essay,

I feel that the picture that Judy Brady paints as a wife’s role is greatly exaggerated for the present day. If you consider the fact that our country has become one where divorce is just as common as marriage and blended families and single mothers are the norm, the once “ideal” identity of spousal role has been long lost to the past. For example, my current family (I say current because I am divorced and remarried) consists of myself, my wife, two children from a previous relationship and our son. An arrangement such as this has become all too common a sight in our country and has quite different dynamics than your traditional nuclear family. As a result, traditional role of husband and wife have been blended. Whereas in the recent past, discipline was traditionally a role of the husband with the children, my wife is the key disciplinarian in the house. Why you might ask? It is quite simple, two of the children in our family spent the first four and five years of their lives with my wife as their primary disciplinarian and as a result, she has better a better response from them than I do in discipline. On the other hand, I generally put the kids to bed, get them up and ready for school in the mornings and handle a great majority of the cooking.

Another contributing factor to the blending of husband and wife role is the necessity for dual incomes to sustain a family. With a federal minimum wage for nonexempt employees of $5.15 an hour, it would be impossible to raise a child on one income. Gasoline in Rapid City costs $3.29 a gallon and the average car has a 12 gallon tank, if you do the math that equates out to almost $40 a tank or 7 hours and 45 minutes of work. So looking at numbers like this and assuming that you use a tank of gas a week just to go to work, get groceries, take the kids to school and what not, you have invested an entire day a week of work just to put gas in the car. Here is another shocking cost, the cost of housing. A two bedroom apartment will run between $650 and $1000 a month not including utilities. Plan on owning your home? $200,000 or better will get you a 3 bedroom with unfinished basement in an okay neighborhood, but this won’t guarantee that your neighbors won’t have a meth lab in their garage. I won’t even get in to the cost of food and clothing and medical expenses.

I don’t necessarily think that this essay is meaningless but I do think that it reflects a different time in our society that has been lost to time and inflation. The world is a considerably different place than it was in 1971. Roles of the husband and wife have been blended and the fiber of our country is woven from a different thread and it all costs a lot more than it once did.