I am reading "The Meaning of Wife" by Anne Kingston. It "delves into the complex, troubling and sometimes humorous contradictions and realities of contemporary wifehood", or so the blurb says. I have read the first two chapters and am really enjoying it. The part I have enjoyed the most so far is where Kingston talks about how on the one hand women are free to be independent within marriage and are not our husbands' chattels any more, but still, the concept of what a wife is remains strong. (Even women sometimes joke that they "need a wife". To quote:

"There is only one problem, a massive one. Legislation has freed individual women from the shackles traditionally associated with the role of wife. Yet the need for the wife has not been removed from corporate, economic and political infrastructures. It is as if the wife has been left by the raodside (circa 1965), her important, if invisible, social and economic contributions marginalised. Women assume they have been freed from wife, but wife hasn't been freed from women. Individual women may have been untethered from the wife role, but the structural need for a wife remains entrenched in the culture; and this, in turn, remains tethered to women like an invisible anchor."