Marriage survives as obsolete custom leaving wives with duties but no rewards

Evidence

There have been periods when these claims were generally satisfied: periods when happiness was also the man’s ideal, when he was primarily attached to his house and family, and when the children themselves chose to define themselves by family, their traditions, and their past. Then she who ruled the home, who presided over the table, was recognized as sovereign; she still plays this glorious role as wife in relation to some landowners, or some rich farmers who occasionally still perpetuate the patriarchal civilization. But on the whole, marriage today is the survival of obsolete customs with the wife’s situation much more thankless than before since she still has the same duties while these no longer confer the same rights; she has the same chores without the rewards or honor from doing them. Today, man marries to anchor himself in immanence but not to confine himself in it; he wants a home but also to remain free to escape from it; he settles down, but he often remains a vagabond in his heart; he does not scorn happiness, but he does not make it an end in itself; repetition bores him; he seeks novelty, risk, resistance to overcome, camaraderie, friendships that wrest him from the solitude of the couple. Children even more than husbands want to go beyond the home’s limits: their life is elsewhere, in front of them; the child always desires what is other. The wife tries to constitute a universe of permanence and continuity: husband and children want to go beyond the situation she creates and which for them is only a given. Thus, if she is loath to admit the precariousness of the activities to which her whole life is devoted, she is led to impose her services by force: from mother and housewife she becomes cruel mother and shrew. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1254

Categorization

• XREF: This reverses the direction of the ADDENDUM connection — the same ‘obsolete customs’ mechanism later appears in the article-sacrifice interest in stratified societies; also resonates with the earlier chapter on the family. — connects to: Courtly love compensated for women’s barbaric marriage conditions but never liberated them.; Children do not compensate a wife for a loveless marriage
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing causal chain — wife building permanence while others seek transcendence, driving her from housewife to ‘cruel mother and shrew’ — is a dense, paradigm-level account of how structural asymmetry manufactures domestic tyranny.