Husbands and Wives. Dynamics of Married Living

Husbands and Wives. Dynamics of Married Living. R. O. Blood & D. M. Wolfe. New York: The Free Press. 1960. The bright red paperback copy of Blood and Wolfe's Husbands and Wives has been with me since my graduate student days. Unlike many other volumes from the 1960s, it did not end up in donations to libraries or book sales but remained on my shelves and, I am confident, on the shelves of most of my colleagues. What contribution did this book make to ensure its stance as a classic work in the family literature? The contribution of Husbands and Wives was theoretical, methodological, and empirical. From a purely empirical perspective, it is probably accurate to say that Blood and Wolfe brought representative survey research to the family field. This was surely an accomplishment in an era dominated by Parsons' mostly theoretical treatises on the family. It was also a necessary contribution in a public opinion and scientific context characterized by doubts about the family's functions and survival. Indeed, a thorough characterization of the "changing family" was one major goal of the book: "Regardless of the causes, the fact remains that families are different today from what they once were-except nobody seems to know exactly how they are different" (p. 3). What follows is a description of marriages, based on a representative sample of 909 wives in Detroit and southeastern Michigan. The study addresses a wide range of topics: power, the division of labor, employment and occupational mobility, childbearing and childrearing, companionship, love, and stresses and strengths of marriages. It also addresses variations in these dimensions (mostly in cross-tabular form) by major demographic and other characteristics such as urban-rural background, education, wife's employment status, the husband's occupation, or family life-cycle stage. Because large-scale survey research can rarely achieve the same in-depth information as qualitative studies, Husbands and Wives perhaps lacks the detail shown in other classical works of the era, such as Cuber and Harroff's The Significant Americans, but there was and continues to be a need for such representative and broad studies as documented by the current popularity of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). With its emphasis on a representative and broad approach to the field, Husbands and Wives may very well constitute the first forerunner of the NSFH. The major theoretical contribution of the volume is the "resource theory of family power," and it is perhaps this theory that has kept Husbands and Wives in the reference lists even of current publications. Resource theory contends that spouses' power is contingent on the resources they bring to the marriage and provide to their partner. Even though it has undergone many extensions and modifications, practically since its inception (SafiliosRothschild, 1970; Szinovacz, 1987), resource theory remains one of the cornerstones of theorizing on marital power relations (Sabatelli & Shehan, 1993). It could well be said that with this theory, Blood and Wolfe anticipated (remember that the survey was conceived in the mid-1950s) the more general exchange theory that developed during the late 1950s and 1960s in the sociological and sociopsychological literature (e.g., Blau, 1964; Homans, 1958; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). …