INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW

In this chapter, we examine some of the changes that have led to one of the major conflicts of the last half century—the struggle for family gender equality. We examine the conflict primarily within the context of couple (particularly marital) relationships beginning by examining the precursors to change.

Precursors

Over the past quarter century, women have entered the paid labor force in sig­nificant numbers; the number of single-parent families has increased, as has the number of births to unmarried mothers; the number of married couple house­holds has declined; and the racial gap in marriage rates has widened. These changing demographics have led some to argue that American society is cur­rently at a unique juncture with regard to families (Vandewater and Antonucci, 1998). Others, most notably Coontz (2004), counter that many things that seem new in family life are actually quite traditional. According to Coontz, two- provider families were the norm throughout most of history. Stepfamilies were more numerous in much of history than they are today, and, at various points in history, cohabitation, out-of-wedlock births, or nonmarital sex were more wide­spread than they are currently (Coontz, 2004).

The truly radical change in western families, according to Coontz, was fomented by the transition from a view of marriage that was primarily about property, politics, and natal family duty to one that was about love, intimacy, and satisfaction in the nuclear family. For thousands of years, marriage was a way of raising capital, constructing political alliances, and organizing the divi­sion of labor by age and gender.

A second significant factor affecting family life was the reproductive revolu­tion. From birth control to in vitro fertilization, the reproductive revolution transformed the traditional relationships among marriage, sex, conception, childbirth, and parenting. Children were no longer a financial necessity or a means of providing for the family in old age. Reproductive technology, com­bined with societal changes, allowed those who married the option to remain childless. Concomitantly, those who chose to have children could do so absent marriage or a partner.

Reproductive independence combined with an individualized, rather than an institutional, approach changed the priorities of marital relationships. The shift away from societal and natal family duty to love, affection, and companionship legitimized the importance of partner satisfaction and well-being. This lay the groundwork for one of the major family conflicts of the last half century— the struggle for gender equality in marriage.

Why Gender Equality Matters: The Asymmetrical Benefits of Marriage

To the extent that partner satisfaction and well-being are legitimate relationship expectations, gender equality matters. Beginning with the early work of Jesse Bernard (1972) and continuing to the present, a long line of studies has shown that marriage is beneficial for both women and men but especially for men. Married men have better physical and psychological health than their unmar­ried counterparts. (See Steil, 2001 for a review.) Married men show lower lev­els of problem drinking, are less likely to be involved in crime, are less likely to be depressed or show serious symptoms of psychological distress, are less likely to have surgery, and have lower risks of dying from all sources at any point in their lives than their never married, widowed, or divorced counterparts.

In other studies, married men report more emotional satisfaction with their sex lives than do men who are either unmarried or cohabitating. Like men, mar­ried women report more emotional satisfaction with their sex lives than do those who are single or cohabitating; yet, married women report significantly less sat­isfaction than married men (Waite, 1995).

Others have noted women’s disproportionate vulnerability to physical and sex­ual abuse. National surveys estimate the yearly incidence of all kinds of intimate violence at around 12 percent for the married and as high as 35 percent for cohabitating couples. Findings suggest that there is “almost perfect symmetry” in the use of violence by women and men against their partners (Johnson, 1995, p. 285), but many argue that this “symmetry” must still be viewed in a gendered context. Violent relationships are widely viewed as reflective of a particular kind of power struggle in which there is an escalation of hostility and no exit strategy (Gottman and Notarius, 2000). The likelihood of violence varies with a number of factors including age, race, cohabitation, and the availability of educational and economic resources. This has led some to suggest that men who lack the material means of expressing or maintaining power may engage in violence in an attempt to reestablish a dominant position. From this perspective, husbands who have less power and lack other means of demonstrating control and authority use violence to reaffirm masculine identity with devastating results (Anderson, 1997).

Racial/Ethnic Differences in Marriage Benefits. The extent to which, and the conditions under which, the sex differences in the benefits of marriage extend across race and class are not fully known. Class, ethnicity, and race are often confounded, and many groups, including Latinos and Asians, have rarely been studied. Yet, on some dimensions, the disparity seems to be greatest among Blacks. Almost a quarter century ago, Carmen, Russo, and Miller (1981) constructed an index based on the proportional difference between the rates of illness among the married compared to the never married and found a 71-percent reduction in vulnerability to mental illness for minority-race men who married, a 63-percent reduction for White men, but only a 28-percent reduction for White women and a mere 8-percent reduction for minority race women. These findings were supported in two subsequent studies, both of which found that marriage had little if any protective effect for Black women (Taylor, Henderson, and Jackson, 1991; Waldron and Jacobs, 1989). More recently, Dillaway and Broman (2001) found that Black women reported lower levels of satisfaction with their marriages than any other group, including Black men, White men, and White women.

The Asymmetrical Costs of Marriage and Other Relationship Types. Several studies have tried to assess the extent to which the benefits of marriage are due to something unique about marriage per se, as compared to relationship factors that need not be exclusive to marriage. Ross (1995), conceptualizing relation­ships as a continuum of social attachment, examined the associations between emotional and economic support, relationship quality, and well-being among four groups—respondents who were married, respondents who were cohabi- tating but not married, respondents who were unmarried but with a partner outside the household, and those with no partner.

Other studies show that low-quality marriages are associated with significant reductions in physical and mental well-being, such that partners are more likely to have periodontal disease, dental cavities, and stomach ulcers. They suffer a 25-fold increase in the risk for depressive symptomatology, and notably a recent review reports evidence that poor marital quality affects immune functioning, hindering the body’s capacity to repair itself (Kielcolt-Glaser and Newton, 2001). These studies also show that the physiological effects of marital stress are stronger and last longer in women than they do in men, thereby suggesting that women disproportionately bear the brunt of marriage’s negative consequences (Lerner, 2002).

In sum, marriage is associated with a number of physical, psychological, emotional, and economic benefits for both women and men. The extent to which these benefits extend across other relationship types is unclear. Consis­tent with the findings by Ross (1995), some suggest that the benefits probably extend to gay couples in committed romantic partnerships and to unmarried heterosexual couples who have been together for years (Lerner, 2002). In con­trast, other studies show that cohabitants are more similar to the unmarried than they are to the married in terms of well-being (Kim and McKenry, 2002).

Understanding the Source of Asymmetrical Benefits and Costs

Attempts to explain the source of the gender differences in well-being have a long history. Early studies focused on three primary explanations: gender dif­ferences in help-seeking behavior, gender differences in mate selection, and sex differences in biological vulnerability. None of these was able to fully explain the gender differences in well-being among the married. (See Steil, 1997 for a review.) By the 1980s, investigators increasingly began to examine the extent to which gender differences in the benefits of marriage might be, at least partially, explained by the inequalities of heterosexual relationships. Studies of the rela­tionship between inequality and well-being focused primarily on the way that say in decision making is shared, the extent to which domestic work and child­care are shared, the extent to which wives’ careers are equally valued relative to their husbands’, and, more recently, the extent to which husbands partici­pate in the emotion work of relationships. Here, we will focus on two of these factors, decision-making say and emotion work, returning to the other points of conflict at a later point.

Decision-Making Say. Studies of the outcomes associated with differential say in decision making are extensive and the findings are consistent. Wife domi­nance is reported least often and is associated with the lowest levels of rela­tionship satisfaction for men and women alike. Some studies found that husbands are equally satisfied either when they have greater say or when deci­sion making say is equal. Most studies, however, show that husbands and, par­ticularly, wives are most satisfied when decision making say is equal. Compared to relationships in which one partner is dominant, those in which decision making is described as equal are characterized by more mutually sup­portive communication, less manipulative forms of influence, more affirma­tion and affection, more constructive interaction and intimacy, greater sexual and marital satisfaction, greater marital happiness, less divorce proneness for both partners, and less dysphoria for wives (Amato, Johnson, Booth, and Rogers, 2003; also see Steil 2001 for a review). Clearly, the way in which decision-making say is shared matters in terms of the well-being of husbands, wives, and relationships.

Emotion Work. The research on husband participation in emotion work is less extensive and has a shorter history. Emotion work has been defined both as the efforts partners make to understand each other and to empathize with the other’s situations and feelings (England and Farkas, 1986) and as emotional sup­port aimed at the enhancement of the other’s emotional well-being (Erickson, 1993). Historically, emotion work was viewed as a natural outcome of marital intimacy and as something that women were naturally good at. Such construc­tions masked the fact that successful interaction does not just happen but depends on the work of the participants. Although empirical work in this area is limited, it seems that wives do vastly more of the emotion and interaction work that relationships require than do husbands. Fishman (1983), in a detailed analysis of the conversations of White, professional couples at home, effectively illustrated the gender differences in the work of relationships. An analysis of fifty-two hours of taped conversations concluded that wives were three times more likely than husbands to ask questions as a means of initiating and main­taining interaction. Wives used minimal responses such as “yeah” and “umm” to demonstrate interest, whereas husbands more often used these same mini­mal responses to display a lack of interest. Wives tried more often to initiate conversation, but were less successful due to husbands’ failure to respond. Hus­bands tried less often, but seldom failed because wives were generally more attentive and responsive to their husbands’ efforts to establish a conversation topic (Fishman, 1983).

Research findings suggest that gender differences in emotion work result in wives providing better emotional support for husbands than husbands provide for wives. More men than women say they receive affirmation and support from their spouse (VanFossen, 1981). Moreover, when asked to focus on the person closest to them (excluding parents and siblings) wives were twice as likely as husbands (22 percent versus 12 percent) to describe a relationship with a same­sex best friend rather than their husband (Fischer and Narus, 1981). Indeed, 64 percent of a sample of married heterosexual women reported being more emotionally intimate with other women, compared to 11 percent who said they were more emotionally intimate with men (Rosenbluth, 1997). The gender dif­ference in nurturance holds true for Blacks as well as Whites. Among married Black women, 43 percent named a family member (exclusive of spouse) as the person “to whom they felt closest,” 33 percent named a family friend, and only 19.6 percent named their spouse (Brown and Gary, 1985).

Yet, data from a number of studies confirm the importance of emotional sup­port to partner well-being. Women who had a confiding relationship with a spouse or boyfriend were less likely to become depressed. Additionally, both men and women in relationships rated high in intimacy were less likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety than those in relationships rated low in intimacy.

In one of the few explicit studies of emotion work, Erickson (1993) assessed wives’ perceptions of the frequency with which their husbands engaged in fif­teen behaviors, including confiding innermost thoughts and feelings, initiating talking things over, offering encouragement, expressing concern for well-being, and respecting their points of view. Higher wives’ ratings of their husbands’ involvement in emotion work were associated with higher ratings of the qual­ity of their marriage and lower ratings of marital burnout. Indeed, although hus­bands’ higher levels of involvement in childcare and housework were also associated with higher marital quality and lower marital burnout, husbands’ involvement in emotion work was a better predictor of marital well-being than either of the other two (Erickson, 1993).

In sum, a growing body of research suggests that the inequality of hetero­sexual relationships is a factor in partner well-being. This helps to explain why marriage is more beneficial for men than it is for women. We chose two areas on which to report in that regard, but studies in a number of areas show simi­lar findings. For example, some studies have compared relationships in which men and women regard themselves as equally financially responsible, as com­pared to relationships in which the husband is viewed as responsible for pro­viding for the family. These studies showed that husbands and wives in the equal sharing couples were more satisfied with their relationships, reported a greater likelihood of confiding and showing affection, and the wives were less likely to be depressed (Aida and Falbo, 1991; Perry-Jenkins, Seery, and Crouter, 1992). Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when empirical interest in rela­tionships emerged, there has been significant change. Women have increased their say in relationships and men have increased their participation in family work. Yet, despite the change, relationships remain asymmetrical. Why has change been so slow?