A Wife’s Four Disadvantages

There are four areas in which a married woman’s position is weaker than that of a married man.

1. The child of a married woman and any man other than her husband is a mamzer. In contrast, the child of a married man and a single woman is not a mamzer.
2. A married woman who committed adultery is prohibited both to her husband and her lover. (In practice, a rabbi should be consulted.) In contrast, a married man who committed adultery is not prohibited to his wife.
3. A woman whose husband has disappeared cannot marry again, because she is still married as long as he is alive. However, a man whose wife has disappeared may remarry after receiving special permission from a rabbinic court, since the original Torah law allowed a husband to have more than one wife.
4. For the same reason, if a woman refuses to accept a get, after a long process the husband is likely to be permitted to remarry even without divorcing his first wife. In contrast, if a man refuses to give his wife a get, there is no way to permit her to remarry. Nevertheless, as we mentioned in the previous section, there are solutions for these cases as well.