The prospect of being a wife doesn’t sit well with some women, whilst others get all starry-eyed at the thought of it. Sociologist Jessie Bernard argued that the problem is with marriage itself, and how a marriage is experienced depends a lot on whether you’re the wife or the husband. According to Bernard, it’s not just monogrammed towels that are “his” and “hers”.
Bernard noted, some 50 years ago, that marriage generally benefits the husband more than the wife, but does the same hold true today? Surely in 2013, married couples have got to grips with relationship wellness, equality and mutual sexual health, right? Sociologists Karyn Loscocco and Susan Walzer argue, in Gender and the Culture of Heterosexual Marriage in the United States, that heterosexual marriage, especially among white, educated and well-off couples, is still a gendered social reality and a gendered institution.
According to Loscocco and Walzer, ‘The role expectations associated with being a husband or wife intersect with those to which men and women may more generally be accountable… people tend to be accountable to dominant gender beliefs whether or not they act on them and to treat them as shared cultural knowledge whether or not they endorse them.’ This means that there’s an incredible awareness of gender and how a wife and a husband “should” act, even within the most equal of marriages.
The sociologists cite studies which have found that women are less happy in their marriages than men, and more likely to initiate a divorce, so why are women so unhappy in marriage? Loscocco and Walzer surmise, ‘Typical studies of the household division of labour do not begin to capture all the unpaid caring work – for friends, extended family, schools, and religious and other community organisations – that women disproportionately do. Nor do they capture wives’ planning, organizing, and structuring of family life.’ In other words, women most of the caring – and it’s exhausting!
So is there a solution? Bernard didn’t seem to think so: ‘The demands that men and women make on marriage will never be fully met; they cannot be. And these demands will rise rather than decline as our standards — rightfully — go up. Men and women will continue to disappoint as well as to delight one another, regardless of the forms of their commitments to one another, or the living style they adopt, or even the nature of the relationship between them. And we will have to continue to make provision for all the inevitable — but, hopefully, decreasing — failures of these marriages to meet the rising demands made on them which we can unequivocally expect.’