...for He will provide for her, He whom she has taken, everything that she needs while she loves Him rightly with true belief — is not she then grievously, as I said before, cast down and dragged into slavery, who from so much eminence and such blessed freedom shall descend so low into a man’s slavery, so that she has nothing free of her own, and shall leave, for a man of clay, the heavenly Lord, and lessen her ladyship by as much as her latter husband is worth less and has less than her former one had, and from God’s bride and his free daughter — for she is both together — she becomes a slave under a man and his thrall, to do everything and to endure what pleases him, however badly it sits with her, and from such holy security as she was in and could have been under God’s protection, puts herself into drudgery, to manage household and servants, so many miseries, to see to so many things, to endure adversities and annoyances and sometimes shames, to suffer so many woes for so poor a wage as the world ever pays in the end; is not this maiden truly cast down? Is this not slavery aplenty, in exchange for that same freedom that she had while she was Syon’s daughter?
This, woman — if you have a husband for your desire, and happiness also in world’s joy — shall certainly happen to you. And what if they are missing for you, so that you have neither your desire with him nor wealth, and will grieve impoverished within empty walls, and to lack of bread breed your offspring, and besides this, will lie under the most loathsome man, who, though you had every kind of wealth, he turns it into suffering? For suppose now that for you riches are plentiful, and your wide walls proud and prosperous, and you have many servants under you in hall, and yet your husband is angry with you, or becomes loathsome to you so that either of you both are angry with the other — what worldly wealth may be a joy to you? When he is out you have terrible anxiety and dread about his return. While he is at home all your wide walls seem to you too narrow. His gazing on you frightens you. His loathly noise and his wanton uproar make you frightened. He chides you and nags you and shamefully disgraces you, ill-treats you insultingly as a lecher does his whore, beats you and buffers you as his purchased thrall and his born slave. Your bones ache and your flesh smarts, your heart within you swells from bitter anger and on the outside your face burns with rage. What will the joining between you in bed be like? Even those who love each other best often quarrel in there, though they do not show it in the morning, and often, however well they love each other, they bitterly irritate each other over many nothings when they are by themselves. She must endure his will greatly against her will — however much she loves him — often with great misery. All his foulnesses and his indecent love play however filled with filth they may be (in bed, that is!), she must, will she nill she, endure them all.
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Do not consider any of this evil, for we do not at all blame wives for their miseries, which all our mothers suffered for ourselves, but we put them forward to warn maidens so that they seek such a thing less eagerly and may know better, through this, what they should do. After all this there comes, from that child born in this way, wailing and weeping which will wake you up around midnight, or the one who takes your place (for whom you have to care). And, look! — the filth in the cradle and sometime in your lap, to swaddle it and feed it for so many weary hours, and its growth so sluggish, and so slow its thriving! And ever to have intense worry and to anticipate when, after all this, it could die, and bring upon its mother sorrow upon sorrow. Though you may be rich and have a nurse you must, as a mother, worry about everything that falls to her to do.
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Little does the maiden know of all this same misery: of the wife’s woe with her husband, nor of their deed — so disgusting! — that they do together, nor of that pain nor of that grief in the carrying of a child and birth, of the nurse’s vigils, nor of her woeful times in the raising of that child, how much food she should stuff into his mouth at one time, neither to bespatter it nor its baby clothes. Although these are unworthy things to speak of, they show all the more what slavery wives are in, who must endure them, and in what freedom maidens are in, who are free from them all. And what if I ask yet — although it may seem silly — how it goes for that wife who, when she comes in, hears her child scream, sees the cat at the flitch and the hound at the hide, her cake burning on the stone and her calf sucking, the crock running into the fire, and the churl chides her? Though it may be silly to say, it ought, maiden, to urge you more strongly away from it, for it does not seem silly at all to her who experiences it! Nor does that blessed maiden, who has entirely escaped such slavery as God’s free daughter and his Son’s spouse, need to endure anything of such things.
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