220: What Is a Wife?

More at http://philosophytalk.org/shows/what-wife. The concept of a wife has been embedded in cultures, religious practices, social customs and economic patterns of wildly different sorts. Is there a core concept of what it is to be a wife? Is it a good concept, or one that deserves to be thrown on the trash heap of intellectual history because it perpetrates corrosive stereotypes of women? What conceptions of being a wife do Americans have today? John and Ken discuss the topic with Marilyn Yalom, author of "A History of the Wife."