The New Wives Club

With season three of Mad Men launching this month, women once again get to acknowledge a former version of themselves - the ever perfect, ever repressed, 1960's American housewife; the young career woman trying to break through the old boys club; the sexy secretary struggling with personal ambition, but a job description bent on submission.

The show brings up a lot of different thoughts about past and present gender roles, and I think it makes women come to terms with history and previous obligations to fulfill the role of wife, mother, career woman, housekeeper and "man pleaser".

In 2009, many women and men are still pursuing the seeming traditional, nuclear family, but also a desire for new, expanded definitions for what a husband and wife means. This is particularly astute with same-sex marriage, where the question becomes even more elusive. Who is the husband, who is the wife and what does that all mean?

In today's New York Time's Modern Love column, Sara Sarasohn, explores exactly that question about the concept of wifedom in gay marriage. She writes:

I want to broaden the meaning of “wife.” When I call Ellen my wife I don’t want to mean that she is simply the chore-doer but that she’s the guiding intelligence behind her half of our household. Ellen doesn’t take care of the children the way I would, not by a long shot. If I were the stay-at-home mother, they would wear different clothes, eat different lunches, attend different activities. The cleaning and the laundry would get done in a different order and to a different standard.

It took me a long time to accept that Ellen’s way is legitimate; it was probably 18 months from the time she began taking care of our son full time to when I truly let go of trying to make her do it my way. It was hard because I had to accept that there are ways she is a better mother. I had to accept that her being the wife with the power over the household didn’t take away from my own legitimacy as a person in our family.

ALL those things that many women think their husbands don’t do well enough — the cleaning and feeding and laundry and child care — we think of as drudgery. They are also power. They are how women exercise control over their lives and families. Women naturally don’t want to give up power in any sphere. Many women don’t really want husbands to be more like empowered wives. That would mean women would have to give up some power over their children. I suspect the only reason I finally relented was that I was giving up that power not to a husband but to a woman I call my wife.

It seems that for Sarasohn, the word "wife" now carries more power than impotence. From what she writes in the article, she embraces the word wife as both homemaker and power broker. And perhaps that is one way to look at modern love - it can carry those traditional power structures, but they aren't as threatening because women can make the choice to enter into a traditional marriage contract, while also being seen as more than just a housewife.

While I am still several years away from marriage myself, I want to ask women here at Change.org - what does the word "wife" mean to you? Is it simply a practical term, or does it carry much traditional meaning? What roles do "wives" have these days in the United States, and then abroad where many women are still trapped in the Betty Draper mold?