Wives

Famous quotes containing the word wives:

    “A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Traditionally, marriage involved a kind of bartering, rather than mutual inter-dependence or role sharing. Husbands financially and economically supported wives, while wives emotionally, psychologically and socially supported husbands. He brought home the bacon, she cooked it. He fixed the plumbing, she the psyche.”
    —Bettina Arndt (20th century)

    “As fathers, men often feel either like guests in their own homes or clumsy bulls in china shops, deferring to their wives as the “emotional experts” and squelching their own wish to be fully involved.”
    —Ron Taffel (20th century)