Marilyn Yalom looks at marriage history "from a female perspective." The heroines of this book are wives of ancient Greek and ancient Roman, Catholic and Protestant, wives of the times of the conquest of Frontier and World War II. There are stories here about those women who suffered from the cruelty of society and their own husbands, about those for whom marriage became a welcome happiness, and about those who successfully fought injustice. This excursion into the history of the wife ends with our era, when marriage, which has ceased to be a duty, undergoes major changes. Marilyn Yalom is a historian and an employee of the Michelle Kleiman Institute for Gender Studies at Stanford.