A quick survey of a scholarly library in the humanities will reveal a popular, though little studied, literary form, “the acknowledgment to the wife,” which brings to light a common problem of women in the academic world. We turned to the library closest at hand, a religious studies library, but the form appears with equal frequency in libraries of other disciplines. An analysis of the conventions of this form (which, in most scholarly books in the humanities, is found at the end of a list of acknowledgments to mentors, librarians, editors, and sometimes typists) reveals a socio-political presupposition of academic publishing in America. The political fact is that an academician needs a wife to manage his life for him, to raise his children, and to put up with his irritability so that he can have the leisure to devote himself to the creative work of his scholarly concern.

In the above example of the art, two of the five themes which appear and reappear in “the acknowledgment to the wife” are represented. These we shall call (1) “the wife as typist” theme and (2) “the wife as wife” (or “all those wifely things”) theme.