Wife

[2][3] The original meaning of the phrase "wife" as simply "woman", unconnected with marriage or a husband/wife, is preserved in words such as "midwife", "goodwife", "fishwife" and "spaewife".

Occasionally, this naming is considered appropriate after the wedding ceremony or the honeymoon, though she is typically called a wife within the marriage.

Unlike mother, a term that puts a woman into the context of her children, "Wife" refers to the institutionalized relation to the other spouse.

In some societies, especially historically, a concubine was a woman who was in an ongoing, usually matrimonially oriented relationship with a man who could not be married to her, often due to a difference in social status.

In response to this naming change, many countries and societies are rewording their statute law by replacing "wife" and "husband" with "spouse".

In some places, they may be subject to potentially harmful practices, such as widow inheritance or levirate marriage, or social stigmatization.

However, this practice was curtailed to a great deal in many countries in the twentieth century, and more modern statutes tend to define the rights and duties of a spouse without reference to gender.

Among the last European countries to establish full gender equality in marriage were Switzerland,[5] Greece,[6] Spain,[7] and France[8] in the 1980s.

In northern Ghana, for example, the payment of bride price signifies a woman's requirement to bear children, and women using birth control are at risk of threats and coercion.

The exchange of any item or value goes back to the oldest sources, and the wedding ring likewise was always used as a symbol for keeping faith to a person.

Therefore, marriage and childbearing was made law between the ages of twenty-five and sixty for men, and twenty and fifty for women.

[19] Women who were Vestal Virgins, were selected between the ages of 6 and 10 to serve as priestesses in the temple of goddess Vesta in the Roman Forum for 30 years after which time they could marry.

[24] The father had the right and duty to seek a good and useful match for his children, and might arrange a child's betrothal long before he or she came of age.

Christian cultures claim to be guided by the New Testament in regard to their view on the position of a wife in society as well as her marriage.

[31] In the 12th century, the Roman Catholic Church drastically changed legal standards for marital consent by allowing daughters over 12 and sons over 14 to marry without their parents' approval, even if their marriage was made clandestinely.

[34] The New Testament made no pronouncements about wives' property rights, which in practice were influenced more by secular laws than religion.

Under the English common law system, which dates to the later medieval period, daughters and younger sons were usually excluded from landed property if no will was produced.

Under English common law, there was a system where a wife with a living husband ("feme couvert") could own little property in her own name.

Until late in the 20th century, women could in some regions or times sue a man for wreath money when he took her virginity without taking her as his wife.

[40][41] Both a wife and a nun wore Christian headcovering, which proclaimed their state of protection by the rights of marriage.

As first demonstrated quantitatively by John Hajnal, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the percentage of non-clerical Western women who never married was typically as high as 10–15%, a prevalence of female celibacy never yet documented for any other major traditional civilization.

[43] In addition, early modern Western women married at quite high ages (typically mid to late 20s) relative to other major traditional cultures.

At the beginning of the 1970s the traditional dynamic was that women performed domestic labor and that men worked for income due to the economic pressures in place.

[54] In Indo-Aryan languages, a wife is known as Patni, which means a woman who shares everything in this world with her husband and he does the same, including their identity.

A wife usually takes care of anything inside her household, including the family's health, the children's education, a parent's needs.

In recent times however the western culture has had significant influence and the new generations are more open to the idea of marrying for love.

Indian law has recognized rape, sexual, emotional or verbal abuse of a woman by her husband as crimes.

[55] In Japan, before enactment of the Meiji Civil Code of 1898, all of the woman's property such as land or money passed to her husband except for personal clothing and a mirror stand.

Women in general are supposed to wear specific clothes, as stated by the hadith, like the hijab, which may take different styles depending on the culture of the country, where traditions may seep in.

Isaiah 8:3 There is a widely held expectation, which has existed for most of recorded history and in most cultures, that a wife is not to have sexual relations with anyone other than her legal husband.