Book Review: More than Wife

Title: More Than Wife

(Amazon has a page for this book, but no picture.)

Author: Margaret Widdemer

Date: 1927

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

ISBN: none

Length: 310 pages

Quote: “I know that you had what seemed to me an irrational terror of being made into an adjunct of your husband, knowing yourself as forceful and as talented.”

Yes. That’s the way Widdemer’s characters talk. But first a bit of historical rant, which is common knowledge for baby-boomers but may be new to the young:

Up into the early nineteenth century, although most people worked, few people commuted. Both men and women usually lived very near where they worked. During the nineteenth century a gender split, first visualized and publicized by the French Socialists, took place; more men began to commute to jobs “outside the home,” while women stayed with the childen all day. Not only schools and crop fields, but stores and offices, gradually began to be built more than a five-or-ten-minute walk from the workers’ homes. The mass marketing of automobiles allowed really exploitative employers to assign people to jobs in completely different cities from home.

As individuals began to adjust their lifestyles to all this commuting, bickering arose about who ought to do what. The French Socialists and Humanists embraced a strange new idea that women had a sacred duty to preserve the home in a pristine pre-industrial state. In order to do this, women needed not only to be protected from the sexual temptation of mingling with men in schools and workplaces, but also to be spared from the emotional burden of having any adult responsibilities at all. By remaining as ignorant and sheltered as children, women were supposed to sustain some sort of mystical emotional atmosphere that would revive the burdened spirit of the middle-class working man. In feudal France women had been denied the right to inherit titles and property; the Socialists and Humanists wanted to revive this system of sexist discrimination and make it stronger. To a surprising extent, these anti-Christians succeeded in spreading the strange gospel of modern sexism through Europe, Britain, and America.

Poor women were not expected to be full-time permanent “angels in the home.” Though denied education, property, and the vote, poor women (and children) were usually paid less than their men, but not necessarily assigned lighter tasks. Affluent women were, however, barred from “competing with men” for jobs anybody was likely to want.

By 1927 many Americans believed the easily refuted claim that the Bible teaches that women should not have jobs of their own outside the home.

In fact the Bible does mention that women were banned from the regular army—and were accepted, and admired, in most of the “career roles” that existed in ancient Israel. Proverbs 31 rather plainly says that the ideal wife is not the prettiest or the most charming (“Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain”) but the most enterprising. At first, when the family are young, “she seeks wool and flax, and works willingly with her hands,” to clothe the family first. When “all of her household are clothed in double garments,” “She delivers a garment to the merchant.” With the profits from that venture “She considers a field, and buys it...she plants a vineyard.” Solomon was considered a wise king, not because he was a great preacher or philosopher, but because he built up the wealth of Israel, and in the books associated with his name the ideal woman is wise in the same way.

Nevertheless, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries competition for good jobs was real and earnest. Many universities simply refused to admit female students; many employers simply refused to hire women. When women persisted in becoming competent doctors, engineers, etc., they were solemly told that they would now be regarded as freaks,  outcasts, heartless greedheads who were competing against their own husbands. And who’d hire them? Women architects? Whoever heard of a woman architect?

This is the context in which More than Wife, which I’m encouraged to hope many young readers will find bizarre, was written. Silvia, we are told, loves being an architect, and is a good one, though we don’t see her actually being one in this story. She marries Richard. Does she have to give up her work to be married? At this period it was normal for marriage to be synonymous with retirement for clerks, waitresses, and schoolteachers, but an architect could work partly at home...I’m sure Widdemer was inspired partly by newsreel coverage of Lillian Moller Gilbreth, an engineer who drew some inspiration from also being the mother of twelve children.

What readers can like about More than Wife is that Silvia is not bullied into “choosing” to be a full-time mother and leaving that architect’s job open for some hypothetical veteran. Silvia and her family a “modern” and sophisticated and avant-garde enough to agree that a woman can be competent on a job even if she takes a few years off to have babies.

What I didn’t like about More than Wife is that Widdemer fails to convince me that Silvia is an architect. In The Fountainhead we’re not convinced that Howard Roark is a really good architect, that we’d want to live in a house he’d built, but we are convinced that Roark is...inspired by published interviews with Frank Lloyd Wright. In More than Wife we don’t see Silvia studying, drawing, planning, or building. I find myself looking up and thinking, “Likely Widdemer didn’t know any architects and made Silvia one because, in real life, she was talking to, for, and about a woman with some other sort of vocation.” And, of course, Silvia’s lack of passion for architecture admits debate: “This character could be a full-time mother, or a short-order cook, instead of an architect; all she’d miss would be the money and prestige.”

Nevertheless, if (as the publisher put it) you’re in the mood for a clean, wholesome romance, More than Wife is one. If I can’t quite suspend disbelief that Silvia has a real talent and future as an architect, I can suspend disbelief that she and Richard were based on a real couple. More than Wife was probably never on anyone’s short list for Novel of the Year, but for train, waiting-room, or bedtime reading it’s adequate. (And, of course, for those who buy any "antique"-looking book as a decor item, it's excellent.)

More than Wife has not been reprinted. Currently the best I can do online will be $10 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment; three other books would fit into one $5 package along with this one if at least one of them was thinner. In real life I can offer a better bargain on a more antiquey-looking copy.

(Does this post need some kind of photo link? Why not...Lillian Moller Gilbreth was not an architect, but her idea of "the efficiency kitchen" happened to overlap with Frank Lloyd Wright's. Here are two different books than the ones linked to their names, above.)