Can you point me to a single example of a culture that allowed wives equality with their husbands?
This comment was written by mythago. Report this comment to the moderators Ampersand Writes: October 2nd, 2005 at 1:58 pm Everyone always thinks that the changes to marriage happening in their own time are somehow more “essential” than those that happened in the past. But in 1886, the idea that a woman could be both a wife and an independent person was so radical that a judge legally declared that such a marriage could not be legally recognized. All theses changes elevating the wife to an equal postion with her husband, did not change the basic understanding of marriage as a sexual, potentially conceptional, union, of the two sexes. Logically, all you’ve said here is “all the previous changes were not the same as the current change.” But at the time those previous changes took place, they were changing OTHER basic understandings of marriage that were (to the people at the time) just as important. Why was it okay to change basic understandings of marriage back then, but wrong now? Your
