What would Marianne Weber say to this…

 

In the picture, a man holds his wife in his arms., with a subtitle "The Wife Must Submit" on the side. They are reading a book together happily. This is an illustration from a website that teaches people their logic of a good marriage: the husband must love the wife and the wife must submit to the husband. This is the key to a good marriage and the only way to achieve the peaceful and loving moment on the picture. What would Marianne Weber say to this? Weber would first argue that a woman's submission is an act with deceit to her husband and the price of the submission is the suppression of her reason and the renunciation of her humanity. The submission of the wife grants the husband authority that makes him more and more controlling of the wife. She gradually loses her rationality and ability to produce her own decisions and thoughts and to be a responsible moral agent. In a word, her dignity and humanity as a full person are hindered. Weber also argues that a husband with a wife who submits to him would have no intellectual communications within the marriage and thus loses his own opportunities of mental growth. Therefore, according to Weber, the picture is illusionary, for there is no way that the woman who submits to her husband can still possess equal intellectual opportunities to critically appreciate the book and exchange her thoughts on the book with her husband, unless the husband is reading the book to the wife like to a 3-year-old and they are happy in that sense.