Twelve. Abuse

The only thing that holds a marriage together is the husband being big enough to step back and see where the wife is wrong.

Archie Bunker, All in the Family

There’s an old saying that “the woman keeps the home fires burning”. It’s a romantic reference to how well a woman can cook and keep a homely environment ready for her man. Sweet, eh? The original saying comes from the Roman practice of chaining wives to the kitchen so they kept fires burning to the gods, along with all the other slave tasks they had to perform. This is not far from the barefoot and pregnant idea women have fought so hard against in the last century. But the really concerning thing for me is the vague Christian notion of what a woman’s place is in a relationship and in the home. These notions are largely based on historical Judeo-Christian values that are rooted in, among other things, old rabbinical prayers thanking God for not making them women, or in the Christian church’s problem with acknowledging women as leaders until recently. Perhaps the founding mistake in this area has been a poor translation of Genesis 2:18, where the first mention of a woman’s identity has her labeled “helper” and “suitable” for man.