First I want to excuse myself for the repeated spelling and grammatical mistakes I make when posting as I generally don’t have the time to proofread what I’ve written.
If someone knows of a way that my computor can spellcheck for me what I write in a post I would appreciate if they let me know.
Kasha, here’s my view of who figuratively wears the pants in the house.
Fist of all, women in general are not inferior than men. Men are not inferior to women. They are both equal. A woman is not mechiuv to marry because she complete spiritually. A man is not complete in a spiritual sense until he gets married whereupon he can then be called a comlpete Man.
Can one take this concept and say women are superior then men? Absolutely not! A woman can be superior in a certain spiritual or physical sense just as she can be inferior in a different spiritual sense, such as noshim can’t posken shaalos. Every gender is equal, but different each with maalos and chasronos.
A wife is also not a slave that a master in the form of a husband, owns. She is not a chefetz, an object, but an equal partner to the husband to be treated with respect (and vice versa).
The ideal Yiddishe marriage is a partnership of three : the Aibishter, the husband and the wife.
However , although the genders are equal, they each have different roles to fulfill in marriage and in life in general.
I will not elaborate what each, the husband and the wife are mechiav to do for each other, rather I will focus on the aspect of who has the last word in the marriage.
1. According to halacha if a father and mother tell their child to do something the child first obeys what the father asked him to do and only then obeys the mother.
2. Halacha also dictates that a child cannot sit in a seat that is considered his father’s, however he may sit in his mothers seat
3. I’m not sure this is a halacha or a minhug, but I think it’s a minhug that in most heimishe communities the wife takes on the husband’s minhugim after marriage
There might be other halachos pertaining to this issue, but now I can only think of these.
One can see from the above halachos that the husband is the authority in the house.
That does not negate the fact that they are equal in terms of one not ruling the other in all aspects in the marriage or over one’s life, but rather in general, we go according to what the husband says.
For example, I took it for granted that my son will attend the cheder that my husband wanted. End of story for me here.
However when I felt my husband took a wrong approach chinuch wise to a certain behavior that my son needed to correct, I voiced my opnion. We had an argument (gasp) about that. In the end my husband conceded to my request to do it my way. B”H with siyatta dishmaya my opinion was the correct approach that helped my son with that particular issue.
So Kasha, yes, within the correct framework we need common sense to know where husband has the last word and where husband and wife need to compromise.