Brash's "new wives".

Carrie Hill Wilner conducts a Nerve.com interview with Susan Shapiro Brash about her book, The New Wife, in which Brash describes the modern young mademoiselles choosing to push prams and play wifey amid the ruins of modern feminism. Actually, Brash reveals that these young wives might not be trapsing on the corpses of feminist canons as much as it seems. Really thought-provoking in the vein of Wendy Shalitt-style arguments and neo-victorianism. According to Brash:

"In the '50s and early '60s, wife was a very prescribed role. With the feminist revolution came the idea that women are entitled to more. This led to the naïve '70s wife, who marched to work thinking that she could have it all. By the middle of the '80s, wives realized this isn't all I had hoped it would be, and the '90s wife really crashed.

The twenty-first-century wife is someone who finally has taken a look at the examples. There's her grandmother, who's probably still married to her grandfather. There's her mother, the baby boomer, who's disillusioned. There's her aunt who's forty and has a great job as a lawyer, but is dealing with fertility clinics. The new wife wants the self-confidence that her mother had in the workplace, the education that the '80s and '90s made a necessity, and the glamour and nourishment her grandmother had. She wants to get married younger, she wants to be available to her husband. She'll be well-educated, but doesn't feel this pull of right or wrong over missing one beat in the workplace. Her attitude is I'll have children young, I'll go back to work and use my degree as I see fit. Women have never said that before."