"Wifework" ends, disappointingly, with a sort of whimper. Maushart ends up reluctantly endorsing marriage -- for people with kids. "For many women, husbands really are expendable. The fallacy lies in assuming that fathers are too." One hopes her more easily swayed readers reach this point in the book before taking any drastic action. I can imagine women who only read through the first 200 or so pages of husband-bashing deciding to banish their husbands and then wondering why the children are upset.

Maushart even admits that if she had to do it over again, knowing of the negative effects of her second divorce on her children, she would have done things differently. Urging us to regard marriage as an institution for the raising of children rather than as a relationship, Maushart finishes where she began, by asking us to make marriage more fair for women. But how?

To reform marriage, she tells us to work at "getting the emotional division of labor right." Women need to feel cared for. Fair enough. The nitty-gritty of household task division must change. Men must not be allowed to cherry-pick desirable tasks, they must develop what businesses call "ownership" of those responsibilities they undertake and they must specialize in some sufficiently to become proficient at them. "Maybe it really is true that 'any idiot can do the laundry', but I've got a whole drawer of splotchy pink bras and underpants that says some idiots do it better than others," Maushart writes. Less compellingly, she also calls for us to "put sex in its place," which seems to mean having a lot less of it. She apparently hasn't talked with any of the married women who want more of it.

These are for the most part good, if hardly original, suggestions. The problem is in what Maushart doesn't say, and particularly in her refusal to look beyond the individual household to society. While Maushart notes that the nuclear family is historically aberrant, she fails to draw the conclusion that even two-parent child raising is too stressful for the vast majority of households who cannot afford domestic help.

Part of the trouble with marriage is that it used to involve whole families, not to mention servants; child care and household production was not concentrated in the hands of just two individuals. The best way of improving most marriages for women and children would be moving toward the European levels of affordable day care and parental leave that Ann Crittenden ably advocates in her 2001 book "The Price of Motherhood." I don't even think I saw the term "day care" in "Wifework," though many of the anecdotes she gives suggest that if it didn't exist we ought to invent it immediately. Compared to toddler tending, Maushart admits, "even the dreariest office work can seem like good sport. In my experience, many working mothers with young children regard their worklife as a form of leisure. I would gladly have worked for free."

Marriages will also improve when wives and husbands alike assume that women will take as much pride, and invest as much ego, as men do in their work outside the house. This means accepting the bad along with the good, the body blows as well as the triumphs. It doesn't apply only to professional or managerial work, either. Men who are plumbers or welders or firefighters or gardeners, dry cleaners or cooks or bus drivers often take great pride and satisfaction in their labor. Women in these and more traditionally pink-collar trades do too.

There's another, very important way that Maushart's failure to look at marriage in a social context vitiates her argument. Our view of marriage has careered from institution to love relationship to Maushart's negotiated cease-fire, and the reasons why it is worth saving have been forgotten in the process. Maushart tries a list: "In order to raise children, in order to obtain economic security, in order to establish adult identity in the community, and in order to experience love and companionship."

I think these are all beside the point. Child-rearing is being accomplished quite well by any number of loving, responsible and committed cohabiting couples. Economic security is a contemptible reason for entering marriage. And while it may still carry some importance as a rite of passage into symbolic adulthood, these days, as Maushart notes, most of us marry too late in our lives for it to perform this role. (Nor would this explain the plethora of second and subsequent marriages.) Finally, love and companionship, by Maushart's jaundiced account, rarely seem to be found within marriage; she makes much of studies that show that married women often claim to be more emotionally intimate with a female friend than with their husbands.

Yet despite the divorce rate, many Americans still elect to get married rather than to live together. One in three American children may be born to unmarried parents, but two in three aren't. Apart from the legal benefits of matrimony, some of what people are after is symbolic. The riskier marriage gets, the more important it may seem. Maushart doesn't acknowledge that it's exactly the leap of faith that we crave, and the possibility of making it in public.

We must return to the ceremony itself -- the ceremony that seems to have a power all its own. Marriage is one of the few chances most of us have to stand up in front of our community, self-created or inherited, and affirm our capacity of pledging our word and receiving that of another. By doing so, we proclaim ourselves worthy of our own and others' respect.

We have paid too much attention to emphasizing the promise to love and to eliminating the promise to obey -- we've forgetten the injunction to honor. In an era when honor often means nothing, this is not surprising. But feminists ought to embrace this ancient word. Honoring one's husband means something much higher than doing his laundry -- in fact it probably means not doing it.

Women with a sense of honor will not sacrifice their capabilities and talents to become Stepford wives, both because this dishonors what makes them unique and valuable human beings and because it dishonors those of their gifts that can be used for the good of the wider society. Honorable men will not accept such unwise sacrifices. That they are offered out of love and trust is even more reason not to countenance them. If a bride has a word to give and honor to pledge, her groom has an obligation to treat her as an equal, with aspirations and ambitions and also crotchets, obsessions and sometimes unreasonable or inconvenient desires, as important as his own.

If marriage ennobles relationships and is worth encouraging, respect for one's spouse's time and capacity for growth is built into the vows. Acting on this respect doesn't look much like the traditional marriages conservatives endorse, but neither does it look like the grim (and sexless) truce Maushart proposes. It demands far more than both but offers unexpected gifts. One, I think, is to the children.

For many of us women who grew up in traditional marriages, what we saw of our mothers' lives poisoned our ability to give them the honor they deserved as our parents. What we saw our fathers accept left us unwilling to trust men to cherish our interests as their own. We may reflexively want to wed, but we have few good associations with the word. Hence Maushart's two bitter marriages and her preoccupation with the shortcomings of men.

If there is a way to reanimate the archaic institution of marriage, it is through a greater rather than a lesser generosity between the sexes, through a new liberality based on mutual honor. As my French teacher told me the other day, "When I came to this country I was astonished to find what 'liberal' meant. In my country, it means you are giving." That is what it once meant here, too. In the last line of her book, Maushart unexpectedly invokes the notion that in marriage's mutuality two become one, but this is a romantic interpretation of wedlock that arguably has harmed women. Husband and wife don't become one; they each decide, overriding everything they know about human nature, to accept the other's good as of the same value as their own. Can we find the courage for this equality?

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