Earning More and Getting Less

Chapter 8: Floating Along for the Ride: Higher-Earning Wives and the Prospects for Gender Change

Chapter 8 Floating Along for the Ride? Higher-Earning Wives and the Prospects for Gender Change While couples with higher-earning wives seem to be moving against the cultural tide, they are not making waves.Though these wives hold tremendous resource advantages over their husbands, they are unable or unwilling to use their incomes to negotiate more egalitarian power relationships in their marriages and therefore do not seem to present a serious challenge to the gender structure. In this final chapter , I highlight the central findings of this study and explore what these couples can tell us about gender and the power dynamics within marriage . I also consider what these results can tell us about the prospects for gender change. I recognize that these findings will be disconcerting to many. In an age where women have come a long way and have the greatest range of options in history, it is disturbing to see that wives with such tremendous resources at their disposal largely conform to conventional expectations that limit their power. However, while the results presented in this book may seem regressive, couples with higher-earning wives can teach us something about the possibilities for reconstructing gender. That is, even as they conform to conventional expectations, these couples demonstrate that new gendered understandings and constructions are possible. Gender Trumps Money in the Marital Power Equation Higher-earning wives represent an important case for understanding marital dynamics because they pit gender and income against each other as potential sources of power within marriage.They give us the opportunity 178 to assess whether a woman’s bringing in the greater income can disrupt the cultural expectation for men’s dominance within marriage. However, we have seen that these wives have not used their substantial income advantages to negotiate an equally substantial reduction in their domestic labor load, or more equal control over financial or other decisions. This means that gender trumps money in the marital power equation . Men retain their right to domestic services from their wives and continue to exercise a great deal of control over money and decision making within these marriages.They continue to benefit as men from the privileges they have enjoyed under the conventional marital contract, even when they are no longer the primary breadwinners in their families .The power dynamics between the spouses in these couples have little to do with income and everything to do with gender. Women are disadvantaged in the marital power game.That they cannot trade their incomes for the privileges men have historically enjoyed means that women’s money is “worth less” culturally than men’s (Blumberg and Coleman 1989; Hochschild 1989).The resources spouses bring to their relationships are gendered: Their value is based on who contributes them.Women get less credit for being the major earners in their families, and couples find ways to attach greater value to men’s contributions . However, it is not just that women’s resources are worth less than men’s would be under similar circumstances.Women’s greater resources actually become liabilities for them in these marriages. Instead of trading their incomes for more help at home, wives take on more work to prove that they are appropriately feminine and to avoid further emasculating their husbands by pressuring them to do “woman’s work.” Instead of using their income advantage to negotiate more egalitarian power relationships with their husbands, wives try to compensate for it by deferring to their husbands and maintaining men’s position of authority in the home. Overcoming the potentially damaging effects of their greater incomes adds to the tremendous burden that these wives already carry. These results demonstrate that earning an income is not the ticket to equality that feminism thought it would be.Working and earning even a substantial income does not necessarily put wives on equal footing with their husbands.As we have seen, women’s incomes do not automatically buy them the privileges that men have enjoyed. Their incomes do not Floating Along for the Ride? 179 entitle them to relief from domestic labor, or even the right to equal access to the family surplus. Having money of one’s own may be a necessary condition for constructing a more egalitarian relationship, but it is not sufficient. The Conventional Marital Contract: Reproducing Gender and (Hidden) Power These results highlight the stability of the gender structure.Though these couples may represent one of the...