[Mb-civic] Op-Ed Columnist The Happiest Wives By JOHN TIERNEY

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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February 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Happiest Wives
By JOHN TIERNEY

Freud confessed that his "thirty years of research into the feminine soul"
left him unable to answer one great question: "What does a woman want?"
Modern feminists have been arguing for decades over a variation of it: What
should a woman want?

This week two sociologists from the University of Virginia are publishing
the answer to a more manageable variation. Drawing on one of the most
thorough surveys ever done of married couples, they've crunched the numbers
and asked: What makes a woman happy with her marriage?

Their answer doesn't quite jibe with current conventional wisdom. Three
decades ago, two-thirds of Americans surveyed said it was better for wives
to focus on homemaking and husbands to focus on breadwinning, but by the
1990's, only a third embraced the traditional division of labor. The new
ideal ‹ in theory, not in practice ‹ became a partnership of equals who
split duties inside and outside the home.

This new egalitarian marriage was hailed by academics and relationship gurus
as a recipe for a happier union. As wives went off to work and husbands took
on new jobs at home, couples would supposedly have more in common and more
to talk about. Husbands would do more "emotion work," as sociologists call
it, and wives would be more fulfilled.

That was the theory tested by the Virginia sociologists, Bradford Wilcox and
Steven Nock, who analyzed a survey of more than 5,000 couples. Sure enough,
they found that husbands' "emotion work" was crucial to wives' happiness.
Having an affectionate and understanding husband was by far the most
important predictor of a woman's satisfaction with her marriage.

But it turns out that an equal division of labor didn't make husbands more
affectionate or wives more fulfilled. The wives working outside the home
reported less satisfaction with their husbands and their marriages than did
the stay-at-home wives. And among those with outside jobs, the happiest
wives, regardless of the family's overall income, were the ones whose
husbands brought in at least two-thirds of the money.

These male providers-in-chief were regarded fondly by even the most
feminist-minded women ‹ the ones who said they believed in dividing duties
equally. In theory these wives were egalitarians, but in their own lives
they preferred more traditional arrangements.

"Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement
from their husbands," Wilcox says. "But they still want their husbands to be
providers who give them financial security and freedom."

These results, of course, are just averages. Plenty of people are happy with
different arrangements ‹ including Nock, who makes less than his wife and
does the cooking at home. He says that nontraditional marriages may be a
strain on many women simply because they've been forced to be social
pioneers. "As society adjusts to women's new roles," he says, "women may
become happier in egalitarian marriages."

But I'd bet there's a limit to egalitarianism. Consider what's happened with
housework, that perpetual sore point. From the 1960's through the 80's,
wives cut back on housework as husbands did more. In the 1990's, though, the
equalizing trend leveled off, leaving wives still doing nearly twice as much
of the work at home.

That seems terribly unfair unless you look at how men and women behave when
they're living by themselves: the women do twice as much housework as the
men do. Single men do less cooking and cleaning, because those jobs don't
seem as important to them. They can live with unmade beds and frozen
dinners.

Similarly, there's a gender gap in enthusiasm for some outside jobs. Men are
much more willing to take a job that pays a premium in exchange for long
hours away from home or the risk of being killed. The extra money doesn't
seem as important to women.

In a more egalitarian world, there would be more wives mining coal and
driving trucks, and more husbands cooking dinners and taking children to
doctor's appointments. But that wouldn't be a fairer world, as Nock and
Wilcox found.

The happiest wives in their study were the ones who said that housework was
divided fairly between them and their husbands. But those same happy wives
also did more of the work at home while their husbands did more work outside
home. Nock doesn't claim to have divined the feminine soul, but he does have
one answer to Freud's question.

"A woman wants equity," he says. "That's not necessarily the same as
equality."

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