Judy Syfers: Explaining Domestic Slavery

Judy Syfers: Explaining Domestic Slavery through Repetition and a Different Point of View When a man kneels in front of a woman and proposer to her, it is not a tradition of love, but rather a tradition of bandage between a master and his servant for life. The husband gives his wife to be a ring, in exchange for a lifetime of servitude. All of this is unbeknownst to the wife, who only in her old age will realize the truth and her folly. This view on the relationship between a husband and a wife is what Judy Syfers talks about in her essay “Why I Want a Wife”. Syfers presents her thesis that “it is more advantageous to be in a husband’s position than a wife’s” (Syfers 64) effectively; by using the literary devices of repetition and point

This new perspective makes the reader think differently about the situation, and allows the reader to more easily empathize with the point of view of a wife. Syfers uses the empathy from this new perspective to support her thesis, saying at the start of the essay “I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am a Wife” (64). By explaining at the start of the essay that the author is a wife, all of the following explanation of a wife’s many duties compared to a husband’s few are strengthened; as these arguments are being told by a person who has first-hand experience and be more reliable. This insight into a perspective which the readers do not know about, makes it easier to change their opinion on the relationship between a husband and wife due to the new found empathy from the point of view of a wife. This empathy helps convince the reader that being a husband is much better than being a wife, and shows how the author’s use of point of view as a literary device strengthened her argument

By using both of these literary devices, Syfers effectively presents her thesis that “it is more advantageous to be in a husband’s position than a wife’s”. However, the essay itself is outdated, and although gender roles are still prevalent, a wife does not have that many more, if any, laborious tasks than a husband does in present time. The ageless statement made by Syfers in her essay is not how husbands are much better off than wives; it is a question asking, what will you do about the inequalities in our