Cross-class families: Assessing the relative importance of the gender, status and income structures in the realm of marital power.

Research on marital power has been largely driven by resource, exchange, and New Home Economics perspectives. This project tests the usefulness of these theories by examining the "deviant case" of marriages: cross-class families. Married couples where wives' income and/or occupational status exceeds their husbands' were compared to couples with relatively equal status and income, and to couples where husbands' incomes and statuses were higher than their wives', in order to determine whether income, occupational status, or gender itself seemed to explain differences in the marital power dynamics across the various types of couples. Marital power dynamics were assumed to be expressed in the division of domestic labor, decision-making processes, and conflict resolution. Both spouses participated (30 couples in all), first by completing a brief self-administered questionnaire, modeled on Blood and Wolfe's fixed-choice format, and by participating in an in-depth interview. The results demonstrate clearly that gender is most strongly linked to marital power. Wives with 50% larger incomes than their husbands were not able to systematically exercise greater power in their relationships. The results for wives' status superiority were similar. Women were able to exercise power within a relationship if they had control over the family's surplus money; this was accomplished through a variety of financial arrangements. Similarly, if a couple seemed to agree (or if the husband alone thought) that the wife's work was "more important" on some level, she received more relief from the burden of domestic labor, though not a proportionate amount of relief, given her greater economic and status contributions. Couples went to great lengths to cover up the ways in which their marriages deviated from the traditional marital contract, largely by redefining what it meant to be "providing" for one's family, or what it meant to be a "good mother". These results support previous research that argues that women's resources are not worth as much culturally as are men's. The results also support previous research that suggests that marital power is more strongly related to the "idiosyncrasies" of individual marriages than to standard socio-economic variables, such as income and status.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105039/1/9624747.pdfDescription of 9624747.pdf : Restricted to UM users only