‘Why be a wife?’ was the byline of a vigorous 1975 women's liberation campaign in Britain against the institution of marriage. Pamphlets were produced, and we wore YBAW badges. Some of us took the message to heart and undid our own marriages. The argument was that neither the Equal Pay Act of 1970 nor the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 improved the situation of women that much, because they failed to tackle the root of the problem: women's ‘wedlocked’ position in marriage. Tax and social security systems still treated wives as dependants. Public services, as well as husbands, counted on women's unpaid labour at home. Therefore, ‘The question “why be a wife?” needs to be asked by us all.’

This focus on the condition of wifehood is a dimension that is mostly missing from accounts of the first 20th-century feminist movement, which have concentrated overwhelmingly on media-worthy images of angry women in picture hats throwing bricks in their pursuit of the vote. Yet the legal, economic, social and political treatment of wives has historically occupied far more of feminist activists’ attention than the missing right to vote. Wives were traditionally the property of men and allowed no property of their own, and property ownership was for a long time a necessary criterion for voting. The oppressions of married women have generally been worse and more extensive than those of single women (which is not to say that single women, especially unmarried mothers, haven't been subject to awful oppressions of their own).

Forgotten Wives is about marriage as a primary political experience and an institution that defines the work and identity of women. It's about both what actually happens to women in marriage and what is assumed to happen, and the dissonance between these two. It uses four case studies of wives who lived and worked in the late 19th and the first part of the 20th centuries to illustrate the argument that history and biography can be distorted by prior assumptions about who wives are and what they do. This first chapter outlines the themes of the book and introduces the women who feature in it. It considers the history and sociology of marriage as the background against which a focus on wifehood is an intelligent and necessary way of understanding the social representation of women, even today.