What have you done for your marriage today?

I saw this billboard, funded by the Catholic Communication Campaign, somewhere in central Pennsylvania when I was driving home from Oberlin this summer. It seemed so surprising to encounter this message on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. While the overall message of remaining vigilant and keeping up communication is valid, it is obviously targeted at women. I found this image on a website accompanied by:

Like a garden, [marriages] require constant attention: fertilizing, watering, and weeding. More often they fade away from a gradual lack of attentiveness, letting things slide, taking each other for granted.

The woman's role as a wife is clear: child-bearing, attending to her husband (in more ways than one), and generally making life easier for her family.

In Anne McClintock's section, "The Labor of Leisure," she discusses the middle-class Victorian housewife's responsibility to not only clean and manage the household, but also to conceal all of her efforts. She must erase every sign of her work in order to appear as though she lived a life of leisure. This billboard portrays a middle-aged woman in a sweater and pearls, happily thinking to herself, "what more could I be doing?" She must fulfill her responsibilities and do so gladly and cheerfully.

The Wife's role seems to have evolved from 17th c. New England's emphasis on child-bearing and populating. But there is a similar religious force impelling women to conform to a certain model of wifehood. Her value and work are recognized by God, accruing her spiritual capital -- an idea put forth by McClintock when describing an S/M relationship between Cullwick and Munby. Christianity offered Cullwick the promise of deferred recognition for her debasement. While I wouldn't equate being a modern wife with being in an S/M relationship, putting yourself before your family similarly makes the "low exalted" (McClintock 158). The role of the wife is portrayed as noble to rationalize the inequality of the responsibility for the success or failure of the marriage.