Why the Goodwifery?

Goodwives are a historical fact, not a social media fantasy for traditionalists to lean into nor a category of oppression for progressives to rescue. We are good women who want to and can be better.

Goody Two Shoes is not just a (glorious) 1982 song by Adam Ant. It’s something people in my generation and older routinely said to mock someone for being excessively virtuous—too honest, too likely to tell the teacher about some nefarious activity on the playground, too unwilling to endure the telling of off-color jokes between classes.

“Careful,” Corinne would warn Lauren when I came into the four-square court. “Don’t cuss because she’ll tell Mr. Brady, she’s a Goody Two Shoes!” Guilty as charged.

Needless to say, when I was at my most rebellious teenage stage, seeing Adam Ant seduce a librarian-looking reporter in a music video, leading her progressively into shedding more of her clothing, taking down her hair, and ultimately removing her glasses (classic!) to reveal the babe beneath it all, I was into it. For a split second.

Uninterrogated remained the origin of the term Goody Two Shoes. I thought it just meant a goody-goody, usually a girl, who refused to give into the seductions of the men around them. In return, the men referred to them derisively, as in, “nobody likes a Goody-Goody.” And while it does mean that, it turns out the term had a far more serious—and I believe, more meaningful origin. Students of literature will think I refer to The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, an anonymous children’s story published in 1765. The Two Shoes part does comes from that story, which sweetly relates the life of a fictional orphan, Margery Meanwell, who is so pleasant and optimistic that even though she only has one shoe she is happy to have even the one. Spoiler alert: She eventually gets two shoes and marries well and lives happily ever after as a reward for her virtue.

No, the origin I refer to goes back a few centuries before, to the original use of the title Goody, which is short for a term of honorable address: Goodwife. 

Few people use the word goodwife today. Instead, we have plenty of other “wives” that circulate, especially in social media discourse. A hotwife is a wife who sleeps with other men to please her husband; a thotwife is a thot (That Hoe Over There) who is also married and I’m not super sure what that is supposed to imply; and a tradwife is either an object of adoration or ridicule, likely because the part is often played by a girl in her 20s who suggests sexual availability through traditional values including wearing filmy sundresses in backlit settings, pressing flowers, and loving to bake or describe her baking on TikTok in breathy reverence. 

That all of these other “wives” come laced with tension suggests a difficulty we have as a culture with wive-ing at all. I come not to solve this problem but to exacerbate it by bringing goodwife back into the discourse. Originally, the term Goodwife was used in Scotland as early as the 1300s—remember, I’m a librarian, I know how to look this stuff up, apologies if you don’t have an Oxford English Dictionary subscription at your place of work. It often referred to a woman householder the way a Husband (or Goodman in Scotland) didn’t just mean a man who had a wife but a man who owned a home and had land on which he could stake his prospects. As a result, goodwife (I’ll stop capitalizing it now) came over time to mean a stable householding wife and it became a term of respect without any association with a noble title. If you weren’t a Lady, you could still be a goodwife.

The term spread across the British isles throughout the 1500s and in the early 1600s was carried to the earliest American colonies by the Puritans who settled what became the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Even as their British peers ceased using the word, it stayed in use in New England for two hundred more years. That’s one reason why most people who have heard the term know it from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which recreated the Salem witch trials of the 1690s and employed the shortened form of address for goodwife, namely goody. 

Because of the obscurity of the term and how easy it is to misread in our current culture, it’s likely that you, like I, have mistakenly thought of goodwives as Puritanical do-gooders both under the oppressive thumb of their husbands while also busily inserting themselves into other women’s lives in a fussy, gossipy way. Then I read Good Wives, a book by Pultizer prize winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. This book changed my every thought about what it meant to be a wife, a mother, and now a matriarch at my advancing age. 

Things I thought were true about Puritan women, the women Ulrich writes about in her description of women’s daily lives in New England in the 1600s and 1700s, turned out to be completely false. A fiction favored by media elites through my entire life who wanted to claim that women have always been held in oppression by a hegemonic patriarchy, a fiction that simply doesn’t square with the lives of all women at all times in all places, but Puritan women least of all by my humble lights. 

Think of what comes to mind when you hear the word Puritan. Prim, proper, Hester Prynne-oppressing types. Truth be told, I wouldn’t want to be a woman living in colonial New England for a lot of reasons. Their lives were hard on many levels, whether male or female, and in fact Puritanism was a source of strength for the men and women of Massachusetts Bay Colony. For women especially, judging by how many of them were formally on the rolls of their churches, more so than their men. Puritans, unlike many other religions of the day believed that women have souls. Yes, that was actually a doctrinal innovation! The Anglicans of the time weren’t so sure yet. The Quakers would come along later and agree, but it was the Puritans who first colonized America not only with their bodies and, sadly, their viruses, but with this idea: A woman had to have her own relationship with God. Women had to apply to be members of Puritan congregations independent of their husbands, signing their names to the rolls of the church. They had to read scripture, they had to pray, and they had to live Christian lives, and in return membership in the church gave them community, strength in numbers, and a belief that they were creations of a God who gave their lives meaning and purpose.

You know what else God gave Puritan women? A belief that sexual intimacy was an important thing for men and women to both enjoy not only for procreation but for keeping the marriage bond strong. That they should expect to enjoy it, not just do it. This revolutionary doctrine gave Puritan women, goodwives all, full mastery over their lives to the degree that such a thing was possible in an era without iPhones or flush toilets. They were individually responsible to God, they were partners or “helpmeets” to their husbands, and they were expected to enjoy physical intimacy. All without Esther Perel’s help. 

If the term has such a wonderful origin, why are we left with a shadow of its inspiring potential? The reason is as obvious as it is regrettable: We have decided that being a wife itself is a suspect state of affairs, therefore being a good one is oxymoronic. All the better to just define womanhood without it. That’s why, even as books like Rob Henderson’s painful memoir Troubled and sociologist Brad Wilcox’s Get Married are providing the statistical and experiential proof that marriage is not only okay under certain circumstances, but the best path in life for most people, we still have to read in the Washington Post that Liz Lenz’s new book, The American Ex-Wife is a blistering “exultation of divorce itself, meant to empower certain women,” in the same vein as every divorce memoir published since the 1970s made divorce fashionable.

But maybe we’re turning a corner here. Even the Post reviewer, Monica Hesse, closes her review telling an endearing anecdote about her own marriage and husband. Referring to hers as as “the kind of marriage you get if you are lucky.” Though that’s exactly the problem. It’s not luck. It’s not an odds game. As with much in life, you get the marriage you pay for. And a goodwife is a woman who has chosen to pay for the best marriage she can, starting with who she prepared herself to be long before she found her man, the standards she set for him to understand how he would earn her love, and the interactions she would invest in in her marriage. 

Marriage is not a crapshoot, it’s not even a poker game where counting cards can give you an edge against known odds. Marriage is a life-making decision that you make every day, long before you’re married and continuing beyond the day you say, “I do.”

Where is the factory that produces such women? It’s not TikTok, that’s for sure. It’s not tradwife cosplay on any social media site. Good families can produce them, but only if the parents are intentional in encouraging their daughters to become them, which is harder and harder these days than it used to be, given the mocking of us Goody Two Shoes types not to mention the many Adam Ants out there, singing seductive songs that promise more fulfillment if you just let your hair down and, importantly, let them take your glasses off to increase your appeal while also, sadly, dimming your vision.

Hence the Goodwifery, a place where I hope to make goodwives, or better said, encourage those of you who already want to be one to keep being one. I won’t persuade famous polyamorous influencers or rabid anti-marriage feminists to convert, that’s not at all my plan. My hope is to do what I’ve been doing behind the scenes for two decades now, be there for women when they feel the conflicting waves of want, duty, desire, obligation, and routine washing over them and just need someone else with feet planted firmly on the shore to extend a hand to them and say, “Goody Two-Hearts, I got you.”

Welcome to the Goodwifery.