I do, I do, I do everything

Susan Maushart, an American academic and writer now living in Australia, is well qualified to write about the horrors of marriage, specifically the horrors of being a wife. She is one, or rather was one, twice over, and the bitter memories of wifehood followed by divorce are what seep from these pages, every bit as much as the copious research she presents to support her thesis that marriage is "in crisis". Divorce rates are steadily rising with more women than men initiating proceedings, because marriage is not changing as fast as women's attitudes towards it. The only beneficiaries of marriage now, she claims, are men and children.

Historically, she reminds us, marriage was a contract, to which both parties brought something precious that the other wanted. In crude terms, he brought brute strength and the bacon, she brought a fertile womb. For her to survive in a more-or-less continuing state of pregnancy, labour, lactation and child-rearing, she needed his constant support and protection.

He might be prepared to stay to ensure the survival of his offspring, but, according to Maushart, he would be doubly likely to stay if other perks were on offer. And these perks are what she calls "wifework".

Wifework includes cleaning, laundry, cooking, grocery shopping and taking care of children; it also includes such "services" as giving emotional support, listening to men's jokes, laughing at them, deferring to their judgment, maintaining their family relationships, and, of course, supplying sex as and when.

But thanks to the Pill and IVF, women can now control their fertility, are no longer in this perpetual state of vulnerable neediness, and can (and should) withdraw whichever services they choose. Women who don't, moreover, are colluding with men. For shame!

She complains about how rare it is to see men shopping and pushing prams, and describes her own response: "I tooted my horn at him and raised my fist in a sisterly (?) salute. In the best of all possible worlds, I'd do the same to another woman." But I bet she doesn't.

Little else she writes is based on her own observations or interviews; rather it is backed by "researchers", "academic analysis", "scholarly observers", "reports that predict" and "according to data", although even that, as she admitted in an interview on Women's Hour last week, was not "primary" research of her own. Occasionally we glimpse a real-life, collusive, downtrodden wife. There's Sarah, for example, who complains about her husband's failure to deposit his dirty clothes in the laundry basket rather than on top of it: "'Have you tried to talk to David about this?' I ask cautiously. 'Sure,' she replies. 'Have you been direct? I persist. 'How have you framed the problem?' She thinks about this. 'I think my exact words were: What kind of bullshit is this, anyway? Just lift the fucking lid, for Chrissake ... So I don't think directness was a problem'."

But he didn't change, and Sarah, presumably, is still lifting the lid.

Then there's the question of what Maushart engagingly calls "sex work", another of women's "bargaining chips" that has become superfluous to requirements. She quotes a woman who "happens to earn enough money to change dresses hourly, if she feels like it - who rewards her husband with a blow job for remembering to take the garbage out. 'I don't make value judgments,' she comments wryly, 'but I can tell you it works.'"

Maushart believes many women stop enjoying sex after two to three years of marriage, while husbands carry on indefinitely, poor sods. "My own theory, which I admit to be utterly unsubstantiated by any data beyond my immediate acquaintance, is that it is perfectly natural and entirely appropriate that a woman's interest in sex should abate after the birth of her children," and concludes that " sexuality remains yet another aspect of post-feminist married life still characterised by asymmetry and imbalance".

But isn't making it work, whatever "it" is on both sides, what marriage is about? If it isn't working, women are at long last in a position to say no - whether to picking up socks, having sex or staying married. But Maushart, perhaps because of her own marriages - about which, incidentally, one would have liked to have read more - is so filled with contempt for men, and for those women who like men the way they are, that she seems blind to this point. It's as if marital happiness can only be a conspiracy by the married: "This business of maintaining positive illusions might be another form of unpaid labour," she writes sourly. As for the women who dare to enjoy a bit of scrubbing, her pronouncement is withering: "There are some women, strange as it may seem to some, who just like the work itself." Indeed there are. Some quarter of a million of them have bought a huge and infinitely rewarding volume in the two years since its publication. It's called Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson (Cassell, due out in paperback in June, £14.99).