Women's experience of power within marriage: an inexplicable phenomenon?

Relatively little attention has been paid within mainstream sociology to the examination of marital power, although there is considerable disenchantment with measures of it based on replies to questions about who makes a range of decisions. Marxists and feminists have stressed the importance of economic dependence as an element in understanding power relationship within marriage, although there has been little empirical work to support/undermine their views. This paper draws on material from 60 in-depth interviews with predominantly white married women aged 20–42 years old whose oldest child was at most 15 years and who were randomly selected from general practice medical registers in North London. The paper looks at three aspects of their marital power position: first, their experience of powerfulness/powerlessness; second, their level and pattern of emotional dependence on their husband (in the context of Waller's and Hill's (1951)‘principle of least interest’); and, third, their absolute and relative levels of structural power resources (such as education, occupation, etc.) It shows that although the overwhelming majority of the respondents were partially if not totally financially dependent on their husband, only roughly one third felt powerless within their marriage. The importance of relational and structural sources of power in influencing these feelings is explored, the paper arguing that such feelings are less influenced by the respondents’ own structural resources than by factors associated with the husband's economic position and his role within the family. Hence, paradoxically, although the respondents feel less powerless than they ‘should’ in terms of their level of economic dependence, the factors associated with variation in feelings of powerlessness highlight the constrained nature of their situation.