Piatkus £9.99 pp336

Some of us pretended not to be interested, but most of us couldn’t resist sneaking a look. Anne Kingston, on the other side of the world, actually set her alarm for four in the morning so that she could watch it on television. “It was as if I had been drawn by a mysterious gravitational force,” she writes. “Free will had nothing to do with it.”

On a warm July day in 1981, half the world stopped to gaze at what was indisputably the wedding of the century. The Prince of Wales was plighting his troth to Lady Diana Spencer — not that anyone was looking at him. The groom was nothing on his own. All eyes were fixed on the bride, a fresh-faced 20-year-old, dressed in miles and miles and miles of pure white silk. Later, after the exchange of vows and the ride in a horse-drawn carriage, the prince and princess sealed their nuptials with a public kiss. For little girls of seven to 70, Diana was the embodiment of the ultimate fantasy.

The fairytale always ends with a wedding. It’s like the walk-down at the end of a traditional pantomime, when the young lovers are united and the entire cast, including the horse, makes a valedictory appearance in white-wedding garb. The end. Roll credits. Lights up.

In the case of Charles and Diana, of course, the end of the fairy tale turned out to be the beginning of quite another sort of story — more Henrik Ibsen than Charles Perrault. “We didn’t see,” says Kingston, “that Diana had been slotted into her position like someone sent from personnel.” It doesn’t matter. More than 20 years later, poor Diana is still frozen in the image of the virgin sacrifice. What, exactly, is the power behind that enduring image? And what does the word “wife” mean to a modern woman?

The Meaning of Wife is Kingston’s pitiless meditation on a myth that won’t leave us alone. If you know an otherwise sensible woman who has started drivelling on about white frocks and wedding place-settings, please give her this book. Encourage her to wonder what the act of becoming a wife will do to her relationship. What will the world expect of her once the gold band is on her finger? More crucially, what will she expect of herself?

When nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, Kingston asks why women are still in a state of collective pixilation about weddings. A traditional marriage will be most advantageous for the blushing groom, but it’s not the oppressive males who are forcing us up that aisle, or shoehorning us into white meringues. Oh dear me, no. A traditional wedding is something that brings many a man out in hives. It’s us girls who are keeping what Kingston calls “the wedding industrial complex” booming. We’re hurling ourselves up the aisle like lemmings. A woman can head a corporation and split the atom, but her appearance as a bride is still seen as her moment of triumph and the pinnacle of her career.

As a divorced woman in her mid-forties, I am only too aware of the ghastly truth that feminism has never touched. My career is irrelevant. Not having a husband makes me a total loser in the eyes of the world — particularly, I’m sorry to say, in the eyes of other women. We have a dismal tendency to look behind a successful woman, and to pity the poor dear if she hasn’t managed to grab a man and a couple of children on her way up the ladder. She may be successful, we say, but she can’t possibly be happy.

Happiness, Kingston suggests, is the new tyranny. Feminism exposed traditional marriage as a prison for women, so it can no longer be pushed as a career-move. Instead, it is all about love. Today’s wife does the lioness’s share of the housework out of love. She places herself at the disposal of her husband and his job — out of love, just as wives have always done since Adam delved and Eve span. She maintains the home and the children, providing a kind of power-base from which her husband can conquer the world.

I would love to have a wife — but that doesn’t seem to be the deal. Men, quite understandably, regard that supportive role as crap. They often want the kind of career that requires the input of two people. In many careers — politics, diplomacy, academia — having the right wife is vital. A man saddled with a bolshy wife, or a wife who works full time at her own career, might not get promotion. When Americans elect a president, they are also quite consciously electing a president’s wife. A proper wife can only have a job if it doesn’t impinge on her main job, which is — or ought to be — full-time wifing. Interestingly, Kingston identifies a new trend of acknowledging the role of the prominent wife with a salary. This, she says, has to be the future.

This book is a witty, incisive deconstruction of the entire bridal myth. It is not a call to arms. Kingston is not urging us to burn our white frocks. Although unmarried herself, she is not against the institution of marriage. She thinks that marriage is still the best framework for the bringing up of children. She acknowledges that “for some, self-fulfilment can be realised by supporting and inspiring those we love”. Well, isn’t that the point? Some of our chains are made of daisies, and we love them. Which is why the Woman in White will continue to hobble the progress of feminism for the foreseeable future.

Available at the Books First price of £8.49 plus 99p p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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