#husbands

Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes. ↗

— John le Carré

#circumspection #husbands #marriage #married-life #separation

Besides what endless brawls by wives are bred, The curtain lecture makes a mournful bed. ↗

— Juvenal

#curtain-lectures #husbands #marriage #wives #marriage

I don't have any gnawing guilt over contributing to any unhappiness suffered by my husbands. They were as much to blame as I was. ↗

— Hedy Lamarr

#blame #contributing #gnawing #guilt #husbands

The implication that women work for pin money and can manage on a worse pension, presumably by relying on husbands, riles. But even more galling for women is that few government ministers seem to even appreciate the value of the work they do. ↗

— Frances O'Grady

#even #few #galling #government #husbands

Irish women are always carrying water on their heads, and always carrying their husbands home from pubs. Such things are the greatest posture-builders in the world. ↗

— Peter O'Toole

#carrying #greatest #heads #home #husbands

How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it! ↗

— Hortense Odlum

#been #bewildered #death #face #face reality

I'm still friends with all my exes, apart from my husbands. ↗

— Cher

#friends #husbands #i #still

Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#courtship #dignity #empowerment #happiness #husbands

Why?” she whispered. “Why should I dance with you?” “Because I love you. Because I love you so much I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it go differently this time.”... "Because we should be a married couple, because I never wanted to not be married to you. Because all these men out here dancing with their wives can’t possibly love them as much as I love you. Because for me, there is only one woman, and I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’re it. ↗

— Erin McCarthy

#husband #husbands #love #wife #wives

It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord. ↗

— Antonia Fraser

#common-law #empowerment #fathers #feminism #feudalism