Women and Their Wives

Brady's unremitting views on society's opinionated expectations of women and their roles within the household depict that not only men, but the community as a whole, require the utmost service out of the female gender. Not only in Brady's time, but as well as in the many generations before hers, women were confined under strict standards and were forced to commit themselves entirely to their duties and their husbands.

Judy Brady's valued principles challenge each stereotypical understanding of women of her time. Her constant complaining belittled herself under the fact that everything she claimed she wanted in a wife, was in reality what she was not. She even goes so far in her charade to say that she "wants a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife's duties" (276). In that one statement Brady fully contradicts herself, and verifies the fact that she isn't that kind of wife. She completely pushes herself out of her own view of women as wives by undermining her own reputable status and pronouncing that she wants a wife to "remain at home so [she] can more fully and completely take care of a wife's duties" (277). This comment alone shows that Brady doesn't want to be a part of the "wives", that she would rather have a wife than be one.

Not only does Judy Brady describe the typical outlook of the average household wife as observed by "society," but she begins confronting her own views of women as a part of that society. Brady failed to realize that during the entire process of singling out men and the society, she was spreading her own views about housewives. Brady sees wives as nothing but slaves to men, pawns to society, and she brings each of those attributes to life by simply recounting what she feels is required of a woman. She creates the false appearance of being offended by what the men do, but in turn, she wants it all herself. Her use of sarcasm and heavy emphasis during simple sentences that would otherwise pass unnoticed draw you to the ideas that she is appalled by the way men expect women to behave, but her total grasp of the subject, and the sheer power she enforces her arguments with, provide with the complete opposite views, that she sides with society.

Judy Brady's unrelenting, hidebound remarks on society's presumptuous standards place herself within her own declarations. "I am A Wife.