Frances Dolan, University of California, Davis, presents a lecture sponsored by Renaissances, a collaborative research project in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Research Unit.
Although early modern and twentieth-century accounts of household government warn that equality between husband and wife creates fruitless struggles for the breeches, numerous texts in both periods suggest that the husband can ameliorate these conflicts by granting his wife equal power over their dependents, and thus deflecting violence away from the couple and onto their subordinates. I explore how such a compromise might play out in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1592) and in early modern diaries. As I argue, this compensatory strategy, by which the exploitation of servants shores up the apparent equilibrium between husband and wife, persists in subtler forms in twentieth-century assessments of the relationship between marriage and domestic work such as Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift (1989), a ground-breaking analysis of marriage and domestic work, and Barbara Ehrenreich's best-selling Nickel and Dimed.