Ada Limón explicitly situates "Wife" in a tradition of feminist critique by quoting Judy Brady's "I Want a Wife." Limón shares Brady's objections to patriarchy's expectations that wives be, essentially, emotionless automatons serving their husbands. "Wife" refuses this oppression, but not simply as a generic catch-all feminist slogan. Rather, Limón writes on personal, specific feminist topics from her unique position as a full-time writer. Limón's life and creative occupation serve as an important context to her poem, as does the strong presence of melancholy. For a poet whose job it is to notice the world, to delve into emotions (including negative ones), and to express herself deeply, the traditional expectations of wifehood are especially incompatible.
To be a full-time writer as a woman is a reality only possible occasionally within the last few centuries, and for a poet as opposed to a novelist, still extremely rare in the 21st century. Feminist writer Virginia Woolf explored women's creativity in her groundbreaking 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, famously arguing that a woman needed an income of "500 pounds a year" and "a room of her own" in order to have the freedom to write. In Room, Woolf invents as an example the character of Judith Shakespeare, a hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare. Judith, she imagines, had all the same intellect, curiosity, and talent as her brother, but was disallowed by her society to write or attain economic independence and ended her life in suicide and obscurity as a result. Woolf argues that it is thanks to patriarchy and misogyny, not some superior masculine intellect, that the "great literary canon" is so dominated by men. Woolf's writing prompts a question: how many more great women writers would we have, if women were not shackled into marriage and wifely servitude, and instead had the means and time to write freely?
Financial independence and time away from menial labor (housework, chores, etc.) are both crucial for a writer. Yet, for much of Western history, financial independence for women has only been attainable through marriage, which often saddles the wife with menial labor: a tricky paradox.
Judy Brady makes this the premise of "I Want a Wife":
Why do I want a wife?
I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically independent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me. I want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while I am going to school I want a wife to take care of my children. ...
Brady goes on to describe how this hypothetical wife's own career, flexibility, health, and intellectual pursuits come second to her spouse's. She acknowledges, in dark humor, the reality that she would likely only be able to achieve full independence if she had a wife of her own serving her behind the scenes. For a wife (i.e. woman) to be independent she needs a wife (i.e. maid) of her own, and so on and so forth, in an infinite dystopian spiral of offloaded domestic labor.
Jane Austen (1775-1817), author of masterpiece novels including Pride and Prejudice and Emma, is a rare and tenuous example of an unmarried woman writer. In her life, she was barely able to stay afloat financially thanks to meager book sales and the support of family members, under the constant threat of a Judith Shakespeare–style fate. While her novels have been lauded and canonized in the centuries since, the sexism of her day severely limited her books' recognition and forced her to publish anonymously until her death at the age of 41. Not for any lack of talent or enthusiasm: Austen was a devoted novelist from childhood, but this path was disparaged as impractical. While spinsterhood brought constant challenges, it may also be what enabled her to create the books we now prize: see History's article on Austen.
Women's rights in Europe and North America have evolved since Brady, Woolf, and especially since Austen, but many of the old assumptions still remain, hanging over artists like Ada Limón. "Wife" carries the torch from A Room of One's Own and "I Want a Wife" in critiquing men's freedom to achieve greatness through taking advantage of their wives' domestic labor, stunting the wives' intellectual agency in the process. In Limón's poem menial labor presents an obstacle to creative freedom. And indeed, her work as a poet necessitates the deep contemplation of "someone who stares long / into the morning." From an interview with the New York Times:
“My poet self is super spacey, can’t hold a conversation,” she said, laughing. “That is the person who’s wandering off and saying, ‘Oh, how long have I been in the backyard? I’ve been watching the birds for three hours.’”
Given the context of how Ada Limón writes, that poetry requires the deep and intentional practice of noticing the world around her, it is clear why her primary "job" (an intentional word choice in line 8) needs to be "poet" and not "wife." In lines 15-20 the speaker shows the murky, emotional side of the process she was able to laugh about with the NY Times. This is the creative freedom or "spaciness" that allows her to dive deeply into thinking about gun violence while on a dog walk, for example, or think about environmental justice while taking her trash to the curb.
Limón reflects on the uncharted territory she entered after quitting her career in marketing to focus on writing, and highlights how rare and lucky it is that she can do so as a poet. The New York Times summarizes her unique path:
She had assumed writing full time would mean writing fiction, she said. She’d spend most of her days pretending to be other people, and then she’d write poems that allowed her to be herself. In the process, she said, she was more tender and vulnerable than she’d been in her poetry before.
For Limón, being a "wife" cannot restrict this creative freedom, and especially the freedom to be vulnerable. Judy Brady highlights the emotional suppression women face:
I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife’s duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies.
Brady describes a woman whose emotions and grievances are completely disregarded. For a wife who "does, fixes, / soothes, honors, obeys," there is no freedom to feel sorrow. A poet "who tears a hole / in the earth and cannot stop grieving," on the other hand, sacrifices the social acceptability of traditional wifehood for the creative freedom of being an artist.
Ada Limón is a rare and lucky example of a successful full-time female poet—poet laureate, no less—a woman who gets to have a creative career and a loving marriage. She "recognizes this makes her something of a unicorn" (NYT), that society assumes these identities cannot coexist without insurmountable tension. "Wife" draws strength from the rich feminist literary tradition to make sense of these tensions.
