Woman's Work—Where the Rhetoric Meets the Road: Reader Response to “Why I Want a Wife” at 30

Abstract

When I sampled reader responses to Judy Syfers's (now Brady's) seminal (with huge quote marks around word) essay, Why I Want a Wife, first with 100 and then with 136 first-year college students in 1996 and 2001, respectively, I did so as a text writer and rhetoric teacher. I was seeking an example to illustrate massive and deceptive simplification that rhetoric teachers indulge in when we call a piece of writing effective, urging methods of argument (as if there were such a thing) on our students in our efforts to improve writing. The measure of effectiveness, as I approach it, is available only by some sort of market survey - and as with market surveys, question of who is surveyed is of prime importance, as is survey instrument itself. It is increasingly clear that there is no such thing as the consumer, nor is there such a thing as the general reader. One cannot (although many of us do) say, is an essay because grabs reader's attention, the writer backs up what she says with facts, or it is written in down to earth language that everyone can understand, and so on. The interface of these concepts with whomever constitutes consumers of culture led me to some interesting conclusions. As academics - and more specifically, as rhetoricians-we have considerable evidence that we agree among ourselves that Brady's piece is effective. First presented publicly in August of 1970 at San Francisco celebration of fiftieth anniversary of passage of women's suffrage, piece was picked up by Ms. magazine for its premier issue dated 1972 (but physically appearing in December of 1971). When Ms. printed Why I Want a Wife for second time in August of 1990, editor reported that essay had been reprinted over two hundred times in intervening nineteen years. That republication date is now eleven plus years in past, and still reprinting goes on. On lists dealing with most-anthologized essays, Brady's appears consistently in company of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, George Orwell's Politics and English Language and Shooting an Elephant, and Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Why I Want a Wife is undoubtedly popular among teachers of argument, and I would think that would be particularly so among those of activist feminist persuasions. As often as must have been assigned as reading, and presumably discussed, I see no evidence of any cumulative generational shift in attitude toward what seems to remain firmly in place as woman's Indeed, my student samples indicate that at twenty-five and thirty years following its initial appearance, reader resistance to essay's thesis remains strong. First-year college students surveyed overwhelmingly think that essay is effective (eighty-one [and a large fraction] percent), but nearly as overwhelmingly (eighty-one [and a smaller fraction, although not an identical population] percent) misread as saying either that Brady a wife, or that she wants wives to be appreciated for full extent of their contributions to the family. All of those tasks and attitudes unmistakably stripped of gender associations by Brady's essay remain for these students a given of women's work. This attitude is so deeply entrenched in these students that Brady's insistently gender-neutral language (there are neither gendered pronouns nor any gender-restricted activity from paragraph three onward) is ignored as completely as her creation of eventually comic, thoroughgoing, and finally, monstrous egotism of writer's ironing board reverie persona. At this point, just to make sure that all of us massively overeducated people are on same page (or, rather, are reading same page in similar ways), I am going to insert a brief rhetorical analysis of Brady essay, a copy of which has been reprinted here along with a sampling of student responses. …