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ELEVEN. Negotiating without a Paycheck
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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139 chapter eleven Negotiating without a Paycheck The Golden Rule: He who owns the gold, makes the rules. old adage Money is power. And when women give up their paychecks, the power balance in their relationships necessarily changes. This chapter explores how women navigate the potential and real changes in their power relationships with their spouses after leaving the workforce . Recognizing that a new at-home status can affect many different relationships, this chapter also analyzes how women renegotiate their relationships with their children, their siblings, their parents, and even their community. Bargaining power is anything that allows a person to have influence over a decision. In the context of a marriage, we think of bargaining power as being a measure of the influence over household decisions that one spouse has relative to the other. Some people are uneasy with using the term with respect to married couples, thinking that bargaining belongs in labor disputes, not in marriages. Conjuring up images of winners and losers, this view of bargaining does not fit well with the notion that married couples love each other and share common interests. We don’t like to think of ourselves as trying to get a bigger share, and thus leaving our partner with less. Yet bargaining does not have to be a zero-sum game in which one person’s loss equals the other’s gain. Bargaining may in fact lead to an outcome where both partners benefit.1 Couples bargain over decisions all the time, and that’s because 140 Chapter Eleven while they share common interests, they also hold individual desires . It’s easy to imagine how competing individual desires lead to negotiation. It’s Saturday morning, and she wants to work out while he wants to golf, but someone has to be home with the baby. This couple will negotiate to meet their individual desires. Maybe he’ll get to golf this weekend, but she can look forward to exercising plus a lunch out the following Saturday. The negotiation to meet individual needs is fairly obvious, but even common desires can necessitate negotiation. A couple may each want what’s best for the family, but at the same time they may have different opinions on which outcome is best. They may both want their kids to be physically active, for example. He wants them to play hockey, but she’s worried they’ll get hurt, so she prefers soccer. Even common interests may yield negotiable outcomes. In some cases, the couples themselves don’t realize they are negotiating. One of the women told us, “I don’t know who it was who said every time you make a major change in life you have to renegotiate the contract. And I never realized that that’s what we were doing. But in a sense that’s what we’ve done, with every big change we’ve sat down and had multiple discussions, not just one, about how you see the role changing, and what can each of us do to help the other person.” Sometimes the decisions are major. What school should we send the kids to? What house should we buy? What city should we live in? These types of decisions are typically decided over long periods of time. Other times the decisions may be more mundane and have to be made on a daily basis. Who will take the dog to the vet? Who will stay home to let the plumber in? Sometimes the bargaining is explicit, where the couple discusses the options and makes a decision . As we discussed in chapter 10, some couples go so far as to put some of their negotiated agreements in writing, such as in preor postnuptial agreements. Other times, the bargaining may be implicit . It may be that one spouse always does the grocery shopping, and that decision, once made, is not renegotiated each week.2 Many women related that they negotiated their roles very early in their relationships. One formerly divorced, and now remarried, mom described how the lessons she learned in her first marriage led [54.208.168.232] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:41 GMT) Negotiating without a Paycheck 141 her to be more purposeful in negotiating with her second husband. “My husband and I negotiated our marriage plans and family expectations and individual responsibilities for two years before we were married. We had every discussion I had failed to have in my first marriage. We have had...