Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

Thinking about the previous post on women’s happiness in marriage and men and women’s roles, reminded me of Fay Weldon’s short story ‘Weekend’ (which can be found online as a PDF here).

Weekend is a fictional story of a normal weekend for a middle class family of five, told from the mother’s point of view as she juggles paid, domestic and emotional work along with social expectations from her husband and other adults.  It is a powerful tale which makes the reader think about contemporary gender roles and although the story was first published in 1978 it does not feel dated and in some ways is possibly more typical now than then.

If you’re a teacher then this would be a good story to use with students to introduce topics around gender or conjugal roles or to contextualise work already done and would promote some interesting discussions.  I would look at the different roles, attitudes and expectations of the characters with students, looking at viewpoints, maybe getting them to write a short piece from Martin or Katie’s point of view and comparing.  The British Arts Council website has some suggestions for questions to ask when looking at the story.

The Happiest Wives website is about a study by Nock and Wilcox published earlier this year, looking at factors that are associated with women’s happiness in marriage in the US.  A quantitative study, the findings are based on a survey carried out in 1992-4, although in answer to criticisms about the age of the data the authors argue that analysis of more recent data shows similar patterns.

The study identifies several factors that have a positive impact upon a woman’s experience of marriage, including:

• the husband’s emotional engagement in the relationship, carrying out emotional work
• the husband being the main breadwinner
• shared religious attendance
• the woman staying at home

These findings are interesting in several ways.  They suggest that the quest for Young and Wilmott’s (1974) symmetrical family may not be as beneficial to women’s lives as is commonly thought (although the study did find that women’s perceptions of the ‘fairnes’ of task division was important) and that the move towards women having careers and financial independence may be in conflict with women’s models of marriage and male-female relationships where a predictor of happiness is that the male earns the majority of the household income.

The study seems to provide support for Dencombe and Marsden’s (1994) findings about the “triple shift” carried out by contemporary women in the UK, whereby women carry out housework & childcare, paid work outside the home and emotional work, with the paid work as an additional burden rather than the liberating role it is often seen as.  Dencombe and Marsden found that women were happier in their marriages when their husbands shared some of the burden of emotional work and were emotionally involved in their marriages.

Overall Nock and Wilcox’s study found that women were more likely to be happy in their marriages where traditional domestic/breadwinner roles were maintained but where the husband was emotionally involved in the relationship.

There is of course the whole question of what is happiness? - can it be objectively defined and measured?  I would argue that happiness can be seen as largely socially constructed - it tends to be defined against what is seen in society as the ideal in life.  So does this study just tell us that, despite the social changes over the past 30 years in what is seen as socially acceptable and expected for women, that we still hold an ideal of marital relations that is largely traditional and therefore has a defining impact upon women’s judgement of their own happiness in marriage?

It’s worth having a closer look at the website and even reading the article itself as it goes deeper into the findings and how they apply to different social groups.  There is also a page looking at some of the criticisms of the study - a nice set of evaluative points.

Freedom’s Orphans: Raising youth in a changing world by Julia Margo and Mike Dixon  is a research report from the IPPR due to be published next Monday (6 November, 2006).
It is this report that was discussed extensively in yesterday’s news, with its findings that young people in the UK are more likely than those elsewhere in Europe to commit anti-social behaviour, to try drugs and to have sex at a young age.  The report links this to a dislocation of relationships between adults and young people, saying that adolescents are essentially left alone to make the transition into adulthood, relying on their peer groups rather than being helped by strong relationships with adult role-models at home and in wider society.
This raises a host of interesting issues about youth culture, crime and deviance, the family and education in the contemporary UK:

1. Is the report (and/or the media response to it) an indication of an existing moral panic in the UK surrounding youth cultures? - ie when we look for problems we tend to find evidence of them.
2. It raises once again the question of what is anti-social behaviour? and the fact that the definition and therefore the proscription of such behaviour is relative and subject to shifting norms and values in society.
3. This report could be taken as supporting evidence for the New Right view which supports traditional family structures and close family relationships, arguing that these lead to greater social order.  The report seems to suggest that the continuance of traditional family forms and significant leisure time spent within the family, as found in countries such as Italy and Spain is associated with lower levels of anti-social behaviour by young people.  Although at the same time the implication seems to be that it is the amount of time shared by adults with young people that is important and that traditional family structures tend to facilitate this.
4. The report’s evidence may well be read with interest by those involved in education, particularly the home-education movement.  Numerous advocates of home education have argued that home educated children benefit from greater interactions with adults than their conventionally educated peers, and that home education removes children from an artificial environment at school in which their socialisation is restricted to their age-mates (Dowty, 2000).  Up until now, one of the key arguments against home education is that it could negatively affect a child’s socialisation by removing that child from its peers (see for example the case of Leuffen v. Germany discussed by Monk (2003)).  The suggestion of Margo and Dixon’s report would seem to be, however, that young people benefit from interaction with adults and that assuming that a child’s main socialisation will be carried out by their peer group has negative effects on their tendency to anti-social behaviour.  (All this of course rests on the assumption that home education does give children more interaction and close relationship with adults than they would receive in school)

BBC NEWS | UK | UK youths ‘among worst in Europe’

I’m sure there are many other possible analyses of this report and the discussions surrounding it - please let me know if you have other relevant points to add (or just add a comment to the post!).