In October 2019 we published The ____'s Wife blog post in which we harnessed our love for data to identify and make fun rationalizations for how and why certain subjects are treated in book titles. This time, instead of tracking down wives, we were looking for husbands. And what did we find? Technically, we found even more wives and a bunch of unidentified characters also looking for husbands.
Methodology
Identical to our first methodology, we turned to SalesData, the national sales tracking service for the Canadian English-language trade book market, and pulled a lifetime bestseller report of all titles (with sales since 2005) that contained the word "husband." We got less than 900 titles!
But we still went through and narrowed down our sample, removing titles that only mentioned “husband” in the subtitle or where “husband” was part of a clever name for a box set or collection. That brought our sample set down to 423 individual titles, which is a 52% decrease from our “wife” sample. Already we knew there were significant changes to how “husbands” are handled to “wives.” The most jarring being that there were only seven titles that referenced a professional’s husband, so we couldn’t do a direct comparison with The ____’s Wife in this regard.
The silver lining was that because the sample size was smaller we were able to spend more time reading synopses of the books. Disclaimer: While we can’t say that our sample represents all books with “husband” in the title ever put to market, we can say that from what was sold in the Canadian market since 2005, there are some, uh, some themes. So we’re just going to jot down our observations, add some fun charts, and encourage you, the reader, to investigate. Not only to see if you agree with our rationalizations, but also because there are some really good/interesting books in here and you may fall in love — more than once. Word of warning, many of these books are out-of-print, but we’ve linked the ones mentioned below to BNC CataList to aid your search.
Results
Husbands are a real thing
An overwhelming difference between the two samples is the sheer amount of Non-Fiction titles. While only 22% of books focusing on “wife” were Non-Fiction, and then those were primarily biographies, 46% of books mentioning husbands were Non-Fiction!
And biographies were down on the list. Most of the Non-Fiction books gave advice, primarily through a religious lens.
Please, advise
Of the advice-oriented books (joking or otherwise) only 27% were meant for husbands. A whopping 73% focused on partners or pre-partners, ranging from self-betterment all the way to how to successfully get husbands. Many were about coping with caregiving responsibilities. We note this because caregiving books were not standard fare in our last list, in fact only one could fit this category and it wasn’t coded in “health & fitness.” Is this because women tend to live longer or something else? We’re not sure but we think we identified a niche market.
An unexpected delight was how informative and eye-catching many of these Non-Fiction titles are, especially in comparison to how Non-Fiction “wife” titles tend to go. Here are some of our standouts:
Advice for partners
I'd Trade My Husband for a Housekeeper
My Marriage Is Almost Dead and My Husband Doesn't Get It
Praying God's Word for Your Husband
What a Husband Needs from His Wife
When Your Husband Is Addicted to Pornography
Advice for husbands
500 Handy Hints for Every Husband
For the (Oblivious/Indifferent/Skeptical) Husband
Becoming a Godly Husband
I'm Sorry - Your Husband
Another difference from “wife” books is the amount of humour on the market. Many are jokey workbooks or husband-etiquette manuals. But the stand out feature for us were the ones coded as “juvenile.” After just browsing the description it’s clear they are definitely not meant to be for or from kids. And there are, let’s just say, more than expected “how to/I want to kill my husband” books. Most are humourous, but not all…
Second chances
While Non-Fiction more or less centres around saving a marriage, fictionally, it seems it’s all about moving on.
As we saw with “wife” books, Romance reigns supreme. Constituting 32%, the titles are just as informative as they are for wife-oriented books, using many, many adjectives. Most of these novels have a female protagonist, similar to what we say with “wife” books, but because we were able to read some synopses we can go a step further and note down some similar themes:
Woman currently married, or recently divorced. Book follows journey to second marriage
Woman needs a fake husband ASAP to quiet down relatives and/or friends at social gathering
Her husband is from Scilly, Italy
But unlike wife books, most of the time the title frames a husband through an unidentified woman. We don’t really have a sheik or a Texas ranger getting married, but we have a lot of pronouns situational husbands. Here are some of our favourites:
The ____’s Husband
The situation or unidentified woman’s husband isn’t a Romance trend, it’s prevalent throughout Fiction. But we did find seven instances of a husband being identified by their spouses profession. Most of the time, it’s still the incoming husband whose job is on the forefront of the plot. And yes, they are doctors — well, one was a vampire. But what professions are women rocking in the titles of these books?
Horse doctor
Opposition leader*
Rabbi
Queen
Forest Ranger
Widow**
*This is the only book we couldn’t confirm whether or not the professional in question is a woman.
**May or many not be an avenger
Tales as old as teenagers
The earliest instance of a book selling in today’s market is 1671’s The Amorous Prince or the Curious Husband by Aphra Behn. It’s a play and for the most part the next two centuries only have one or two noteworthy entries (including Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in 1899). The rise begins in the 70s and 80s where Non-Fiction abounds but by the 90s it’s Romance and Fiction and this trend only increases into the 2010s. However, in the past decade there’s a growth in Comics & Graphic Novels, which seems like it warrants a mention as we expect to see this popularity of this form continue into 2020s. Most importantly, there are no juvenile books.
Here is a closer look to the trends between 1990 and 2020.
A few other things we observed are that Non-Fiction divorce books started to multiply in the later 2000s, alongside that we saw Christian self-help books for hurting marriage double. As we said before, the bulk of these books target women, which may or may not be why we see a focus on areas for which we didn’t see a counterpart among “wife” books. Non-Fiction books from our “wife” list were also targeted towards women, but we didn’t see the same emphasis on issues like “how to date properly so you’ll get a wife,” better communicating with spouses, or questions about a spouse’s sexuality. We do see those pop up more and more in our “husband” list as we enter the 2000s. We also start to see a few titles that focus on same-sex relationships - like a certain comic about Santa’s husband that looks super cute…
In the library
We took a look to see what LibraryData could tell us about the top circulating “Husband” books and it more or less matched the trends we saw from SalesData — Fiction outpacing Non-Fiction. But there’s also lots of Romance! In terms of other Fiction titles, we’re seeing a lot of coveting someone else’s husband books. In Non-Fiction the trend seems to be of the self-help variety, which given that it’s the largest Non-Fiction sub-group, we’re not surprised.
Conclusion(s)
Unlike books representing a wife figure where the formula is pretty stoic, “husband” seems to reflect conflicting stances towards the institute of marriage and the publishing market all at once. While most of these books are openly meant for a female audience, they cater to specific beliefs. These beliefs are consistent over time. Books published in the late 2000s still recommend a wife be totally submissive to her husband. Others place the onus of saving the relationship on the woman, by either learning what a husband expects/needs or by pygmalioning him. There is a market for men looking to become better husbands but not any that jump off the page in terms of changing a wife or correcting behaviour. And as we said, we didn’t come across many if any dating books for men, but there’s certainly a lot for how women can cross that finish line.
In terms of the darker tones of “wanting to murder your husband” which wasn’t as prevalent or presented in such a joking tone as our “wife list” it’s split between philosophy and true crime. Divorce books still represent a very small portion, most favouring trying again. Books that focus on real life individuals, such as biographies & autobiographies focus on living with a famous husband or breaking barriers by discussing their husband’s perceived unhusbandlike behaviour (such as cross-dressing). Not a lot of men tell their own stories in relation to their wives.
Over in Fiction, husband tends to be a concept as opposed to a possession, an end goal for an unnamed protagonist. Unlike the “wife” list where every male name seems to have been represented, “husband” seems to come across as a badge of honuor that anyone reading the book could conceivably wear. Everything is defined in relationships or situational set up. It’s a strange offset, where The ___’s wife seems to allude to a specific person, the many instances of “her _____ husband” makes the role seem interchangeable, like it hasn’t been cast yet but when they do it’s going to be a heck of a story.
So what can we say about this? It’s a little troubling to identify a double standard. You would think The ___’s formula would be consistent between the gender roles, but this isn’t the case. We did see many of the same adjectives use: trophy, perfect, convenient, etc. but it’s usually paired with some kind of fishing expedition, like a sweepstake or a shortlist.
Our takeaway is that “husband” hasn’t really been solved yet, and that it’s just seen as an extension of the “wife” market. Which means that “husband” books aren’t written for the benefit of men, they’re mainly targeted at women, presenting heterosexual characters who see “husband” as a prize as opposed to a extension of self.
Perhaps it’s time to examine if there’s an unconscious belief that husbands are only interesting to one demographic or that men don’t like being defined by that role. And if the latter is the case, where there’s a fear male readers won’t be attracted to books that define them by a role dependant on another - perhaps we can take a look on the flip side and ask: Did we ever think women might feel the same about “wife”?
Sales and library circulation data of Cooking titles during the first quarter of 2024.