IMPLICATIONS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE CONFLICT
In his introduction to this volume, Deutsch recounts the conflict between a professional couple with whom he was doing therapeutic work. According to Deutsch, “the wife, who worked (and preferred to do so), wanted the husband to share equally in the household and child care responsibilities; she considered equality of the genders to be a core personal value.
The husband (by contrast) wanted a ‘traditional marriage’ with a conventional division of responsibilities in which he would be the primary income-producing worker outside the home, while his wife would principally do the work related to the household and child care. The husband considered the household work and child care inconsistent with his deeply rooted image of adult masculinity” (Deutsch, this book, p. 2).This conflict, as described by Deutsch, encapsulates the professional dual career version of the struggle for increased family gender equality that is playing itself out in varied forms in families of all shapes and colors across the United States and beyond. According to a recent cross-cultural review, increases in women’s opportunities and changes in family roles are occurring virtually everywhere. Yet the world’s nations, including the United States, are still far from gender equality (Adams, 2004).
Over the last thirty years the participation of married women in the U.S. paid labor force has increased dramatically. Thirty years ago, approximately 40 percent of married women with husbands present were employed, with White women less likely to be employed than Black women. By the early 1990s, White women were just as likely to be employed as were Black women and as of 2003, approximately 61 percent of all married women, including nearly 60 percent of married mothers with children under the age of six, were employed (U.S. Census, 2005, Table 579). As a result, children today in two parent families are almost twice as likely to have an employed as compared to a full-time homemaker mother.
As well, these dual earner families have the highest median incomes of any family type and this is increasingly due to the economic contributions of employed wives. In fact, households in which both the husband and wife are employed have 41.5 percent greater income than households in which just the husband is employed (U.S. Census, 2005, Table 675). This increased labor force participation of married women led to the expectations, for many, of greater relationship equality. Yet such expectations have proved difficult to achieve. To understand why, we must understand the struggle as one that takes place between individuals, in relationships, within a complex tangle of deeply embedded and often conflicted family and societal beliefs.The Social Context
Many of the beliefs about gender, work, and families, including the theories that guide scholarly research and clinical practice, had their roots in the 1950s—a time of “remarkable sex segregation, gender asymmetry and stability in work and family patterns” (Barnett and Hyde, 2001, p. 781). The prevalent doctrine was one of separate spheres, which argued that “family functioning is optimized when the husband specializes in market work and the wife in domestic work” (Barnett and Hyde, 2001, p. 782). This view of family life was widely internalized such that a generation later, half of all women and 48 percent of all men continued to say that the most satisfying lifestyle was a marriage where the husband worked and the wife stayed home and took care of the house and children, and more than 70 percent of women said that it was more important for a wife to help her husband’s career than to have a career herself (Mason, Czajka, and Arber, 1976; Roper Organization, Inc., 1980). Similar attitudes continued into the 1980s when national surveys showed that 50 percent of Americans believed that “working mothers are bad for children” and “weaken the family as an institution,” beliefs that have not been supported by the empirical literature (Greenberger, Goldberg, Crawford, and Granger, 1988; see Steil, 1997 for a review).
By 1996, the proportion of survey respondents agreeing that “it is better for everyone if men are the achievers and women take care of the home” and that “it is more important for a wife to help her husband’s career than to have one of her own” decreased to a significant minority (30 percent and 20 percent, respectively, Brewster and Padavic, 2000). Yet, indicative of widespread ambivalence, a 1997 survey found that 41 percent of a nationwide sample of employed adults still agreed that, “It is much better for everyone involved if the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children” (Bond, Galinsky, and Swanberg, 1997).During this period, women, like Deutsch’s client, consistently reported more egalitarian attitudes than men, and women with at least some college education who were employed full time were the most egalitarian of all (Mason, and others, 1976). Among men, older, less educated and married men, especially those with full-time homemaker wives, were less egalitarian in their views than younger, unmarried and highly educated men, especially those who were of a high status with wives who were employed full time (Wilkie, 1993). There are differences by race and ethnicity as well. Hispanic women are less likely to be employed and less likely to endorse egalitarian beliefs than White or Black women. Little is known of Asians, who are underrepresented in these studies.
The findings with regard to men are mixed. Hispanic men seem least likely to endorse egalitarian attitudes. Some studies find Black men endorsing more egalitarian attitudes than White men, while others find the reverse (Ransford and Miller, 1983; Wilkie, 1993). Ethnic attitudinal patterns often parallel the demographics. In Wilkie’s study, for example, Black men, compared to other groups, tended to be younger and a higher proportion were unmarried. Of those who were married, more had wives who were employed full time.
These societal beliefs support structural barriers that impede the achievement of gender equality within the family.
A study of highly educated professionals in forty-eight countries, grouped in four categories, identified as the United States, the affluent west, the developing west, and collective (as compared to individualistic) cultures, found that across all cultures women continue to experience more family work conflict than men and conflict is a more salient feature of their work lives than it is for men (Hill, Yang, Hawkins, and Ferris, 2004). As well, studies of eight industrialized countries in Europe and Asia showed that gendered beliefs were primary factors in determining career opportunities for women and role sharing among couples. Defining masculinity in terms of the provider role, believing that children require full-time maternal care, and alleging that mothers work by choice, creates an atmosphere where there is little societal or partner support for women in the paid labor force. Societies that endorsed these beliefs provided little public child care, freed husbands from domestic responsibilities, and left employed mothers to work out their own support systems (Lewis, Izraeli, and Hootsmans, 1992).And What of the Couples Themselves?
Attitudinal Factors. Comparing data from two national surveys conducted in the years 1980 and 2000 respectively, investigators found that nontraditional attitudes toward gender were associated with greater marital happiness and higher levels of interaction for both husbands and wives (Amato and others, 2003). Overall, those with similar belief systems and, particularly, those in egalitarian relationships fare best. When belief systems are discordant, however, adopting less traditional gender attitudes is associated with lower marital quality among wives but higher marital quality among husbands (Amato and others, 2003). As in Deutsch’s opening example, wives who adopt less traditional views often encounter resistance from husbands, whereas husbands who adopt less traditional views more often receive support from their wives.
Discordant belief systems have a number of other costs as well. Studies show that full-time employment is generally associated with positive outcomes for women. Yet, the quality of a woman’s work life is linked both to the characteristics of her work environment and to the quality of her parental and marital relationships. Women whose husbands supported their employment both behaviorally, by sharing the responsibilities of the home and children, and atti- tudinally, by respecting the importance of their wives’ work, were less depressed than women who had unsupportive husbands (Amaro, Russo, and Johnson, 1987; Elman and Gilbert, 1984; Hughes and Galinsky, 1994; Kessler and McRae, 1982; Krause and Markides, 1985; Ross, Mirowsky, and Huber, 1983; Ulbrich, 1988). There is a parallel effect for husbands. Wives’ employment is negatively associated with husbands’ well-being only infrequently, but when it is, it only occurs when husbands believe their wives should be home full-time. The source of the distress seems to lie in a husband’s belief that his wife’s employment is inconsistent with what “should be.”
Societal Beliefs Give Meanings to Our Behavior. Gendered beliefs can give different meanings to the same behaviors when they are performed by wives as compared to husbands or by husbands as compared to wives. It has been shown, for example, that for husbands, the more they earn relative to their partners, the lower their involvement in domestic work and the better they feel about themselves as spouses. Yet, this is not the case for women. Wives who earn more than their husbands do not feel better about themselves as spouses. As wives’ earnings increase relative to their husband’s earnings, the proportion of housework they perform declines until it reaches its minimum at the point where their earnings are approximately equal. But, once women’s earnings surpass those of their husbands the pattern is reversed. As a wife’s income surpasses her husband’s, the proportion of housework she performs again increases while that of her husband decreases (Brines, 1994; Greenstein, 2000).
In a similar vein, the asymmetries of domestic work take on different meanings in the context of opposing belief systems. For Deutsch’s clients, the husband believed that the work of the home was his wife’s responsibility. From his perspective, participation in domestic work would challenge his masculinity. His wife, by contrast, believed her husband should be more involved in domestic work. Equality was a core belief system for her, and it is likely that she viewed marriage as a partnership in which both partners are employed and fairness demands that housework be equally shared. Women who endorse more traditional values, however, often view housework as an expression of love and a way of caring for others. Indeed, studies have shown that feeling appreciated by their husbands for the domestic work they do is one of the best predictors of wives’ perceptions of marital fairness (Hawkins, Marshall, and Meiners, 1995). From this perspective, a context of support and appreciation changes the meaning of domestic tasks, and women perceive their relationships as fair, not on the basis of how tasks are shared, but when they receive the interpersonal outcomes they value.Yet, even in couples where both endorse egalitarian views, partners can struggle with their own deeply entrenched gender expectations. An interview study with White, professional, dual-career couples found that almost all men and women felt it would be easier for wives’ careers to be less successful than their husbands’ careers than for the reverse. Among the reasons wives gave for this disparity were (a) his work has more importance to his sense of self, (b) she needed her husband to be successful, and (c) she feared that people would say his lack of success was her fault for making him help at home (Silberstein, 1992). In a subsequent study, Rosenbluth, Steil, and Whitcomb (1998) found that when women and men assessed the importance of their own careers, both rated their careers as “highly important” with no differences by sex. When these same men and women were asked to respond on behalf of their spouses, however, men perceived their wives’ careers as only “moderately important” to them, whereas women perceived their husbands’ careers as being “extremely important” to them.
Dual-career couples, it seems, “build life structures with one foot in the past, mimicking traditional marriages of their parents’ generation, and one foot in the feminist influenced present” (Silberstein, 1992, p. 174). They hold not only “consciously altered expectations (about gender roles, work, family, and marriage) but also deeply socialized, internalized and probably change resistant experiences, emotional needs, and entrenched patterns of behavior” (p. 13). These entrenched beliefs often emerge after children arrive, influencing the numerous large and small decisions and acts that make up everyday life, limiting conscious choice, and impeding the achievement of more equally sharing relationships. Clearly, these beliefs, both one’s own and one’s partner’s, need to be fully examined if couples are going to move forward. To do so, however, requires faith in one’s partner’s willingness to listen and change as well as the courage to bring the conflict forward. The kind of strategies used, the way the conflicts are defined, and the context in which differences are discussed determine the kinds of outcomes that can be achieved (Bradbury and Karney, 2004).