Their "carnal brotherhood" is gradually poisoned by straight society's influence: both her husband's shame in front of his real revolutionary brothers (other men) at her
unwifely role and his cowardly regression to the norms of his bourgeois family, ruled by a sullen and imperious patriarch.
(159) Freeman quotes judges and scholars who wrote that, even in the twentieth century, a wife's suit against her husband would be "unseemly, distressing, and embittering," and that "[i]f a husband 'beats up' his wife, she cannot sue him, because to sue him would be
unwifely." (160)
She was, after all, trying to be perfect, not for herself, (that would be selfish and thus
unwifely), but for her husband's benefit.