Wife began as a Germanic word that simply meant woman
A wife is a woman in a marital relationship, and she remains one through a separation until divorce or death ends the marriage. The English word descends from Proto-Germanic wībam, meaning woman, through Old English wīf and Middle English wif, long before it implied a husband.
The original sense of simply woman survives in midwife, goodwife, and spaewife, and relatives include German Weib, poetic Danish viv, and pejorative Dutch wijf. Under older custom still kept in the Roman Catholic rite, a bride is really a fiancée until matrimonial consent is exchanged, after which she is a wife even while the ceremony continues. When two women marry, each is a wife, and some legal codes now replace wife and husband with spouse.
The status ends by divorce, death, or annulment; annulment is usually retroactive, so terms like ex-wife do not strictly apply. Widows in some places face levirate marriage or stigma, and in communities that practised sati a widow burned herself on her husband’s pyre. John Stuart Mill challenged wives’ legal inferiority in The Subjection of Women (1869). Switzerland, Greece, Spain, and France were among the last European countries to establish marital equality, in the 1980s, while Article 1105 of Iran’s Civil Code still makes the husband head of the family.
Since its 1983 marriage law, Greece requires women to keep their birth names for life, whereas in much of the Anglophone West taking the husband’s surname remains common though criticized for its roots in coverture. Dowries are still expected in parts of South Asia, sometimes leading to dowry deaths, and in northern Ghana payment of bride price signals an expectation of children; Pope Francis called choosing childlessness selfish in 2015.
Augustus’s Lex Papia Poppaea rewarded marriage and childbearing and penalized the unmarried. Roman law set 12 as the minimum age for brides and 14 for grooms, and by late antiquity women over 25 could marry without parental consent, while daughters inherited equally when there was no will. In the 12th century the Catholic Church let daughters over 12 and sons over 14 marry without parental approval, even secretly, a policy the French monarchy and Lutherans tried to end in the 16th century.
Source: Wife
