wifedom

English

Etymology

From wife +‎ -dom.

Noun

wifedom (uncountable)

1. The condition of marriage for a woman.
   • 1869, Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler, Woman's Work and Woman's Culture: A Series of Essays, page 359:

     I have seen a procession of monks, with a nightmare of faces, wearied, dejected, purposeless, hopeless, when not brutalized with the traces of furious rebellion against their world, and in that woful panorama of debased human nature I see the figure of what we condemn women to, when we bid them grow old in listless idleness, if they fail to secure to themselves the privileges of wifedom.

   • 1991, The Winged Dancer, page 159:

     "In your view of wifedom,” I began, “is the wife to acknowledge having a personality and will of her own, or do you see her as simply being responsive to her. . .her husband?

   • 1994, Dale Spender, Weddings and Wives, page 27:

     Wifedom is a job, she argued, and the only approved one available for half the population.

   • 2004, People - Volume 61, page 56:

     As Winfrey recently told TVGuide, “Stedman and I have a great relationship that allows me to be me in the fullest sense, with no expectations of wifedom and all that would mean.

   • 2012, Alison Diduck, Felicity Kaganas, Family Law, Gender and the State: Text, Cases and Materials, →ISBN:

     As marriage is displaced by family, wifedom by motherhood and the support/dependency structures of the patriarchal family assume greater importance than the legal form, it is actually counterproductive to the real purpose of social policy to exclude from regulation a family type that is so obviously here to stay.

   • 2018, Suzanne Leonard, Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century, →ISBN:

     Specifically, I argue that twentyfirst-century American wifedom is emblematic of the identity formations actively encouraged by postfeminist entrepreneurial regimes.

2. A woman's devotion to meeting the needs and/or desires of another, as if they were a marriage partner.
   • 1868, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, Art, and Finance:

     We suspect that Mr. Dixon has exaggerated both the extent and intensity of the defiance of common sense as well as common decency which spiritual wifedom implies.

   • 1871, Mayne Reid, The Wild Huntress; Or, Love in the Wilderness, page 161:

     There the motive for concealment was removed, and the apology of a spiritual wifedom ceased to exist.

   • 2011, Marjorie Sandor, The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction, →ISBN:

     Help me to become a pure waterer, weeder, and deadheader of our little plot, to mature from manic bride and bonnarder to the calm, the jen, of deep and ancient garden wifedom.