Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

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.