After the vows have been said, the rice has been thrown and the newlyweds ride off into the sunset, what is a modern woman to make of her new role as wife? What is our new century to make of the iconic figure of wife? The Meaning of Wife is Anne Kingston's carefully researched and highly accessible examination of the social, political and personal consequences of how we as a culture and as individuals define, refine and confine the "wife."

Kingston builds her argument around the central premise that there exists a profound "wife gap" or cultural "vacuum" that has gradually enlarged over the past forty years. Because our society can no longer fully endorse the wifely image of the apron-wearing, housebound 1950's housewife, the role of wife is now in what Kingston calls a "free-form improvisation" as women's lives have morphed through recent decades of profound social and cultural shifts. Women's lives have irrevocably changed and yet the role of "wife" still exists with all its baggage, romance and potential, creating a tension between role and reality that ripples out through every facet of society. Women are freed from the "legal shackles" of the traditional wifely role and yet the role itself has not "been unshackled from our social, economic, and political infrastructures, a fact that affects all women, married or not."

Through nine absorbing chapters that each tackle a different facet of the "wife gap," Kingston outlines the roots of wifely expectations, traces their transformation and exposes the current "political agenda, corporate imperatives, and commercial forces that use the meaning of wife to exercise an insidious control." These entities are grasping for control in order to define the significance of the wife and contain its increasingly unstable definition. This process gives rise to a simplification and commodification of women's lives. Victim or victorÑSupermom or lonely singletonÑbride-to-be or avenging ex-wifeÑHilary Rodham Clinton or Laura BushÑthe role of wife becomes both a source of desire and an opportunity for self-sacrifice, a domesticated trap or an objectification of women's lives next to the "alpha" male. Kingston's deconstruction demonstrates that the complexity and textures of real women's lives get lost in the cultural competition to contain the woman-as-wife.

In an early chapter titled "The Heart of Whiteness," Kingston looks at bridal fever and what she cleverly calls the "wedding industrial complex" that "dictates perfection" and feeds the myth that women need to be rescued. The modern bride has no longer to worry about the legal restrictions of losing her political rights or social identity when marrying a man, but now "she runs the risk of being subsumed by a huge, white, shimmering artificial engine drive by commercial forces that dictates her behavior and redefines her identity." From Cinderella, to Martha Stewart, to every bridal magazine at the newsstand, women are positioned as objects of desire and/or desiring subjects all dressed in white.

In the "Mystique Chic" chapter, Kingston points to the false dichotomy of the housewife versus. working woman and looks at how the new celebration of domesticity--"domestic chic" -has risen to fill the wife gap as women have continued their careers as they take on marriage and motherhood. The life balancing problems facing working women and the romanticization of the domestic sphere is decades old, but it is being trotted out to fill in the uncertain cultural space between the briefcase and the highchair. According to Kingston, mystique chic was "created a new battle for moral superiority, not between men and women but between working mothers and mothers who stay home." This plays itself out in various ways in the workplace, the playground, the bedroom and, most importantly, in women's own hearts and minds.

Kingston's chapter on "The Unwife" looks at how "single women are reduced to "fictional stereotypes that defined them primarily in terms of not being wives." In the space of forty years, the depiction of single women a "devolution" in popular culture from the happy-go-lucky Anne Marie in That Girl to the homicidal frustration of Alex Forest in Fatal Attraction to the "neurotic self-flagellation" of Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal to what Kingston calls the "glossy consumers on Sex and the City." While I agree with Kingston that some television and popular fiction and films of recent decades have celebrated single women's independence on the one hand, and painted them as sad, lonely spinsters on the other, I would argue that many of these portrayals have also resonated with real women for important reasons.

Glamorous Carrie Bradshaw's ambivalence about marriage and neurotic Ally McBeal's "taboo" desire to have a baby speak to real single women's conflicting desires and honor their wishes to have fulfilling lives on their own terms. Third wave feminists are reinventing the terms of female desire so that the longing for a dynamic career, a loving partner, and a baby are not contradictory and problematic, but rather a perfectly acceptable and reasonable desire for a full, happy life. Society has not caught up with this new paradigm for women and men, creating a dialogue that points to the tensions and contradictions but is not ready to accept them or fully understand them.

Kingston begins to get to this point n the last chapter when she notes that both genders are trying to take back the meaning of wife. They are trying to break through the "institutionalized wife bulwark and recast the meaning of wife. It's apparent in popular culture, in academia, in the everyday lives of men and women. Wife has become the axis around which the next social revolution is fermenting." Speaking as a woman who took on the role of wife and continues to actively define it rather than let it define me, this book is a new declaration of independence and a rallying cry for everyone who is joining this social revolution.