I for one dont mind the headship in the man - if the marriage is evenly yoked and the man is God fearing Catholic. WHO will treat his wife with equal measures and not insist on his own way...
The authority comes from the wife giving it to him - as it pleases God.
Its not demanded.
No the authority is given by God to man after the fall in the garden. Eve clearly being the helpmeet of Adam. A helpmeet cannot give authority to the headship
And it is demanded. It is demanded by God. Right from the beginning of Genesis 3:16 and 1 Timothy 2:12. A women who usurps a mans authority is perverting her household and defying the words of God. This is one of the main reasons why the divorce rate is so high in the western world. Since this simply natural rule cannot be followed, perversion of the family surfaces, which in turn causes the problems we have today..
If the wife has a problem with it, she has a problem with God's law and natural law.
The third part of her sentence refers to her husband - "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." This is evidently a piece of that retributive justice which meets us constantly in the administration of God. The woman had taken the lead in the transgression. In the fallen state, she is to be subject to the will of her husband. "Desire" does not refer to sexual desire in particular. It means, in general, "turn," determination of the will.
And Adam was not deceived - This is the second reason why the woman should occupy a subordinate rank in all things. It is, that in the most important situation in which she was ever placed she had shown that she was not qualified to take the lead. She had evinced a readiness to yield to temptation; a feebleness of resistance; a pliancy of character, which showed that she was not adapted to the situation of headship, and which made it proper that she should ever afterward occupy a subordinate situation.
It is not meant here that Adam did not sin, nor even that he was not deceived by the tempter, but that the woman opposed a feebler resistance to the temptation than he would have done, and that the temptation as actually applied to her would have been ineffectual on him. To tempt and seduce him to fall, there were needed all the soft persuasions, the entreaties, and example of his wife.
"The determination of thy will shall be yielded to thy husband, and, accordingly, he shall rule over thee." The second clause, according to the parallel structure of the sentence, is a climax or emphatic reiteration of the first, and therefore serves to determine its meaning. Under fallen man, woman has been more or less a slave. In fact, under the rule of selfishness, the weaker must serve the stronger. Only a spiritual resurrection will restore her to her true place, as the help-meet for man.
Satan understood this, and approached man not with the specious argument of the serpent, but through the allurements of his wife. It is undoubtedly implied here that man in general has a power of resisting certain kinds of temptation superior to that possessed by woman, and hence that the headship properly belongs to him. This is, undoubtedly, the general truth, though there may be many exceptions, and many noble cases to the honor of the female sex, in which they evince a power of resistance to temptation superior to man.
In many traits of character, and among them those which are most lovely, woman is superior to man; yet it is undoubtedly true that, as a general thing, temptation will make a stronger impression on her than on him. When it is said that "Adam was not deceived," it is not meant that when he partook actually of the fruit he was under no deception, but that he was not deceived by the serpent; he was not first deceived, or first in the transgression. The woman should remember that sin began with her, and she should therefore be willing to occupy an humble and subordinate situation.
The woman had also broken through her divinely appointed subordination to the man; she had not only emancipated herself from the man to listen to the serpent, but had led the man into sin. For that, she was punished with a desire bordering upon disease , and with subjection to the man. "And he shall rule over thee." Created for the man, the woman was made subordinate to him from the very first; but the supremacy of the man was not intended to become a despotic rule, crushing the woman into a slave, which has been the rule in ancient and modern Heathenism, and even in Mahometanism also-a rule which was first softened by the sin-destroying grace of the Gospel, and changed into a form more in harmony with the original relation,that of a rule on the one hand, and subordination on the other, which have their roots in mutual esteem and love.