Feminist Dogma Debunked

This article is reprinted from the The World Congress on Families.

For years elite opinion has maintained that women are happier in marriages that represent a union of equals and where spouses share identical responsibilities in the workplace and at home. Even as very few couples actually live this way, a study by two noted University of Virginia sociologists debunks the feminist spin, finding that women - even those who espouse egalitarian ideals - are far happier in marriages that have a traditional division of labor.

Looking at a subsample of 5,000 couples drawn from the second wave (1992-94) of the National Survey of Families and Households, Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock measured women's marital happiness, women's satisfaction with the emotional attention they receive from their husbands, and the time husbands spend with their wives against a number of independent variables associated with various theories of marriage.

Their findings reveal that the more traditional the woman and the more traditional the marriage, the happier the woman. Women are happiest when they tend to hearth and home and their husbands bring home the bacon (earning at least 68 percent of family income). This did not surprise the researchers because they also found that men who were married to homemakers are more likely to spend "quality time" with their wives. These traditional wives also expressed greater satisfaction with their husbands' emotional interaction with them. In contrast, women who aspire to having "companionate" marriages, thinking "equality" will deliver what they really desire - the emotional engagement of their husbands - actually end up spending less time with husbands than their traditional peers. And these wives are less satisfied with the understanding they receive from their husbands.

Also contributing to women's marital happiness is a dynamic generally missing from egalitarian marriages: a shared commitment to marriage as a social and normative institution, where each spouse views matrimony as a binding commitment that "should never be ended except under extreme circumstances." Wives also reported higher satisfaction with their husbands' affection and understanding when couples share high levels of church attendance.

The consistency of these findings across their statistical models led the researchers to suggest that cultural shifts in the last generation, from declines in church attendance to acceptance of divorce and premarital sex, have taken a toll on women's happiness. Yet they point to rising expectations of women for marital equality as especially problematic: "Our findings suggest that increased departures from a male-bread winning/female-homemaking model may also account for declines in marital quality, insofar as men and women continue to tacitly value gendered patterns of behavior in marriage."

(Source: W. Bradford Wilcox and Steven L. Nock, "What's Love Got to Do With It? Equality, Equity, Commitment, and Women's Marital Equality," Social Forces 84 [March 2006]: pages forthcoming.)