Women, old stories tell us, are the root of all work. Eve’s impulsive snack led to Adam’s curse to till the soil; in Greek myth, the creation of woman was a divine punishment for Prometheus’ theft of fire, and men ever since have been burdened with wives who, in the poet Hesiod’s telling, “stay at home … and reap the toil of others.” In the 17th century, the English pamphleteer Joseph Swetnam, the first man to be called a “misogynist,” tweaked Genesis to reflect his understanding of contemporary bourgeois shopping habits. “A woman,” he wrote, “was made to be a helper unto man, and so they are indeed: for she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painfully getteth.” The harried husband and the spendthrift wife have stayed together for centuries as a durable cultural unit, playing a starring role in novels, sitcoms, and reality TV shows. A 1963 Playboy article titled “Love, Death and the Hubby Image” could only dream of a world where wives no longer enjoy a “cushy” lifestyle financed by their husbands’ heroic self-sacrifice and marriage is no longer an institution where man and woman “live half-slave and half-free,” respectively. Without the burden of women, these stories suggest, men might be free from work — or, at least, work itself might feel freer.