The wife of Bath married five times, and described each marriage, before telling a tale of a knight who made a habit of treating women with little respect. The knight was asked to take a year and find out what all women want, if he could answer the queen without hearing any women present object to his answer, he would not be punished further for his crimes against women.
The knight’s answer was that a woman wants sovereignty over her husband.“...generally, women want to have sovereignty over their husbands, as well as over their lovers, and to have mastery above them.”
Is that true? No, women do not want to have mastery above their husbands, but they do want sovereignty. The word is ill defined by the knight. Throughout his year-long journey to find out what all women want, he asked many ladies what they want, and no one had the same answer. No one has the same lives, everyone wants something specific to their lives, but women don’t know what they want.
People want the power to want what they want, and that is what it is to have sovereignty over yourself, and over your spouse, but in a marriage that goes both ways, it is not for one to have mastery over the other.
Marriage is meant to be about equality, but many confuse equality with doing and having things equally, that is not how society works, people are different, men and women are different. Equality is about the lack of a hierarchy within social dynamics. To be equal to your spouse is to have the power to check each other. Part of sanity is the way we contend with each other as people.
The same can be said for the use of the word submission when people have described how a wife should behave in a marriage, particularly in the Bible. The word is misused in this context and is taken to an unnecessary extreme, just like sovereignty. but it's a give and take, and a good, healthy marriage does require the ability to be submissive. Not to be a doormat, but to listen to your partner’s critiques and the willingness to submit to them.
In today’s world, to have a husband you can have mastery over is to have a guy playing video games in the basement. Women seek men like this out because some are too timid to contend with their spouses, and if a man will not contend with his wife, the wife doesn’t have responsibility, they can live like they are the center of the world. A woman in a healthy marriage has sovereignty over her husband, but her husband can be masculine enough to be disagreeable with his wife so two people can work together and contend with each other.
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