Earning More and Getting Less

Chapter 5: Calling the Shots: Why Wives Have Limited Decision-Making Power

Chapter 5 Calling the Shots Why Wives Have Limited Decision-Making Power Earning substantially more money has not helped women bargain successfully for greater equity in the division of domestic labor, or given them greater control over the family’s finances. In fact, the results of the previous chapters speak forcefully for the ability of conventional gendered expectations to disrupt the link between money and power as couples divide household chores and negotiate control over the family purse.This chapter examines the third standard indicator of marital power by exploring whether these wives’ income advantage translates into more influence in decision making within their relationships. Assessing Power in Decision Making Decision making has been the most obvious and oft-used indicator of the balance of power in marriages. Most typically, research (beginning with Blood and Wolfe 1960) has asked spouses about a wide array of decisions, ranging from where the family should live, to what kind of car to buy, to which doctor to see when someone is ill. The object is to determine which spouse has more “say” in each of these areas, or who makes the “final” decisions on these issues in the relationship. As evidenced by the literature on this topic, men typically exercise more control over a wide variety of decisions in their marriages (see Blumberg 1984; Blumberg and Coleman 1989; Blumstein and Schwartz 1983, 1991; Fox and Murry 2000; Hertz 1989; Hochschild 1989;Whyte 1990). This blanket control or authority is legitimated at the institutional level of the gender structure. Men have had more power in marriage because history and culture support men’s dominance in general. Men’s authority within marriage can be seen as an extension of the power they 90 exercise in the economic and political realms of the larger society. However , within marriage, men’s decision-making power has been further legitimated by their usually greater earnings; of all the resources spouses contribute, the man’s income has been the most highly valued, and this has been used to justify men’s position as “head of the household” and final authority (Bernard 1981). Feminists and scholars assumed that women’s moving into the workforce and becoming important co-breadwinners would increase their power in the family—especially in terms of control over money management and decision making. However, the marital power literature over the last several decades has not borne this assumption out. Women’s power in decision making has increased somewhat, but not to a degree commensurate with the level of income many of them have been earning . In short, their income does not seem to buy them the same right to decision-making power that men have typically enjoyed. Exploring the relationship between income and decision-making power in couples with higher-earning wives requires that we move beyond a simple examination of decision-making outcomes among these couples.The customary focus on outcomes obscures the more subtle, and often more revealing, power dynamics of the decision-making process.At the interactional level, we can see that decision-making processes are gendered—men and women approach them differently.“Doing gender” typically requires men to be dominant and women to be submissive or deferential (Berk 1985). This may sound overstated, and many would argue that this is no longer the primary dynamic of heterosexual love relationships. However, the results presented in this chapter demonstrate that the cultural residue of these conservative gender imperatives lingers and continues to influence marital dynamics. Further, the gender structure organizes the resources, both cultural and practical, on which men and women can draw in their efforts to influence decision making in their relationships. For example, since men are invested with greater authority in the home, it is easier for men than for women to issue orders to a spouse; women need to rely on more subtle means of influencing the decision-making process to avoid the appearance of trying to dominate their husbands (England and Kilbourne 1990; Gottman and Notarius 2000; Zronkovic, Schmiege, and Hall 1994). Calling the Shots 91 (Potential) Power in Organizing the Household As we have seen,that women are generally responsible for the household means that, even when they do not perform the labor themselves, it is their job to make sure tasks are completed. Wives are therefore in charge of coordinating a wide range of household activities,which include overseeing (and performing) chores and errands, keeping track of...