Status and Income as Gendered Resources: The Case of Marital Power

This article examines marital power dynamics in couples in which wives earn more than their husbands, work in higher status occupations, or both to determine if wives with resource advantages are able to exercise greater power in their relationships than wives in more conventional marriages. The results do not bear out this hypothesis. This article argues that the logic of resource and exchange theories breaks down when women bring more money and status to the marital relationship. This suggests that the balance of marital power is more closely related to gender than to income or status. This article examines what Komter (1989) calls the hidden power in marriage and highlights how these couples do gender in ways that reinforce the husband's power. Traditionally, husbands have exercised greater control in marriage, and this power has been linked with the income and status that men have provided as the breadwinner. Women have moved into the paid labor force, but their contributions to income and status have not increased their power proportionately. This article examines marital power dynamics in couples in which wives exceed their husbands' income, occupational status, or both. These couples are referred to as status-reversal couples because the relative contribution of the resources of status and income by spouses is the reverse of what has been typical in two-earner couples. A few conventional status couples are used as a comparison group. In these cases, husbands equal or exceed their wives' income and occupational status. By examining these two types of couples, I explore whether wives can use greater income and status to negotiate more egalitarian power relationships with their husbands or whether these resources are gendered sufficiently so that they are less important or less powerful when contributed by wives. INSIGHTS FROM PAST RESEARCH Efforts to examine the link between women's employment and their power in marriage have been driven by the assumptions of resource and exchange theories, which reflect the idealized notion of separate spheres-breadwinning for men, domestic labor for women (Coltrane, 1996; Ferree, 1990). Men's greater power in marriage is explained by their contributing the "more important" monetary resource. As more women have moved into paid labor, research on marital power has demonstrated that these economic resources have a relatively minimal impact on women's power in terms of control over money, decision making, and the division of domestic labor (Berk, 1985; Blood & Wolfe, 1960; Blumberg, 1984; Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983, 1989; Hochschild, 1989; Pleck, 1985; Safilios-Rothschild, 1967; Scanzoni, 1978; Whyte, 1990). The failure of resource and exchange perspectives to explain marital power dynamics in two-earner couples has lead researchers to investigate alternative explanations, such as relative time demands on each spouse and stated gender attitudes or ideology. These have similarly proved to be inadequate indicators of the balance of power in two-earner marriages (Hochschild, 1989; Huber & Spitze, 1983). However, these studies examine conventional couples, in which husbands' income and status exceed that of wives. It is possible that these variables will demonstrate different effects in status-reversal couples. Recent research on marital power has examined couples who seem to have succeeded in negotiating more egalitarian relationships. Couples studied by Risman and Johnson-Sumerford (1998) and Blaisure and Allen (1995) achieved more equitable relationships because of the spouses' determination to subvert traditionally gendered divisions of labor and power. Couples studied by Schwartz (1994) developed more egalitarian relationships, not as a goal, but as part of their efforts to create more companionate, collaborative marriages. These studies emphasize somewhat different dynamics in these egalitarian relationships, but the findings are strikingly similar on one key point: Spouses in more equitable marriages see the wife's paid work as at least as important as the husband's. …