[PJ] The nature of hierarchy in marriage, I suspect, is biologically ordained, as expressed in the ancestral distinction between the spear and the distaff. The Old English word for man is hläford ("lord") and for lady, hläefdige (bread). The idea was that men rely on their strength and hunt for the larder. Women are concerned with nourishment and cook for the family. The male is, so to speak, the breadwinner; the female is the breadbaker. This is obviously not always the case but it remains a hoary cultural archetype — a distinction that is now being erased and overthrown, to nobody’s benefit. The failure of masculinity, of the spirit of captaincy or guardianship, or, to put it differently, the misalignment of traditional gender roles, is one of the major factors behind the increasingly common scourge of discord in married life.
When the spear/distaff relation is reversed, a rift will open up between partners. One thinks of the host in The Monk’s Prologue in Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales" whose hot-tempered wife, fuming at her husband, cries:
Emphasis added.