The delightful equality between me and my wife. The pleasure in strength I enjoy by being joined emotionally, physically and mentally with this incredible woman. In another time and place my circumstances, education and experience would not have fitted me to appreciate her, and I would have wandered through life blind to the qualities of people who are female. Brought up in a more masculine country where the divisions between genders was more emphasized and when the anxieties of sharing labors and concerns of a woman's state were more acute, I would have been excluded from and cheated out of a stream of experiences, thoughts and relationships that in this world I find sustaining and precious.
"In common law, wives had no rights over their children or to matrimonial property. This was because 'in marriage, husband and wife are one person, andthat person is the husband', as Sir William Blackstone deftly explained, glossing 'the very being, orlegal existence, of thewoman is suspended during marriage.'" From "English Society in the Eighteenth Century," by Roy Porter.
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