American Wives Research Articles

A Country Strange and Far: The Methodist Church in the Pacific Northwest, 1834–1918

A Country Strange and Far: The Methodist Church in the Pacific Northwest, 1834–1918

Spouses’ perceptions of network interference in the early years of marriage

In early marriage, couples are intricately tied to their social networks and are influenced by important connections, social interactions, and socialization processes within those networks. Most of the research on the links between social networks and marital processes has focused on the positive effects or support married couples receive from their friends and family. The present study examined the links between perceptions of interference from family and friends and newlyweds’ reports of marital well-being in the early years of marriage. The contexts of both gender and race were explored to gain a better understanding of how interference from family and friends might be linked to marital well-being. Data from Black American and White American couples in their early years of marriage were analyzed. The findings revealed that perceptions of interference from friends were negatively associated with marital well-being for both Black American and White American wives. Husbands’ perceptions of interference from their wives’ friends were negatively linked to marital well-being, but only for Black American husbands. We offer several explanations for the differential links between perceptions of interference and marital well-being, including the role of relationships in self-identity and the negative spillover effect of external stressors.

The Butterfly Dilemma: Asian Women, Whiteness, and Heterosexual Relationships

Critical Whiteness theory explores Whiteness as a form of power and privilege that originated in Western countries and has been dispersed globally. Its form is particular to location and its interaction with race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Two ways it has operated historically is through making the norms of Whiteness universal and the marker of reason and rationality. This article examines Whiteness through two lenses, the colonial-era opera, Madame Butterfly, and three recent therapy case studies involving White American husbands and Asian immigrant wives. Although the women in these therapy cases have emigrated from different Asian countries and cultures, the treatment toward them suggests that colonial-era images and stereotypes of Asian women still resonate in contemporary White American culture and are impervious to national or cultural boundaries. A comparison of the opera’s themes with those of the therapy cases suggest how historical and social constructions of Whiteness continue to promote inequality in heterosexual relationships comprised of White American males and Asian females. Feminist, multicultural analyses of the therapy cases are provided to highlight more egalitarian treatment of the women in therapy, in their families, and in the broader society. The intersectionality of gender with ethnicity and culture is discussed for these Asian women who experience the homogenization of their identities in spite of having immigrated to the U.S. from distinct cultures.

Control Over Work, Positive Self, and Health Among African American Husbands and Wives

Using a sample of 344 dual-earner African American married couples, this study examined the effect of control over work on depressive symptoms and physical health with a dyadic model. The mediating role of personal resources capturing positive self-evaluations (i.e., self-esteem and mastery) was also examined. The association between wives’ control over work and wives’ physical and mental health was mediated by wives’ positive self. Although husbands’ control over work was not directly associated with husbands’ physical or mental health, it was associated with their sense of positive self, which influenced their level of depressive symptoms and physical health. No cross-spouse influences were found, suggesting a lack of interdependence for African American husbands and wives. The practical implications of this research include the value of work organization policies that may increase workers’ sense of control and personal resources as these variables are important to workers’ health outcomes.

Association Between Body Mass Index and Depressive Symptoms of African American Married Couples

This study examined (a) associations between body mass index (BMI) and depressive symptoms in African American husbands and wives, (b) transactional associations between husbands and wives in this relationship, and (c) mediating and moderating role of couples’ behavioral closeness in this association. Data came from a sample of 450 African American married couples residing in a southern state. The study found that (a) husbands’ and wives’ BMI is positively associated with their own depressive symptoms, (b) only the wives’ BMI is positively associated with their partners’ depressive symptoms, (c) only the wives’ BMI is positively associated with their own and their partners’ depressive symptoms indirectly through couples’ behavioral closeness, and (d) among wives, the association between BMI and depressive symptoms is mediated and moderated by couples’ behavioral closeness. Family interventions need to increase indoor, outdoor, and intimate partner activities, thereby reducing the association between depressive symptoms and body weight for African American couples.

Mastering French Cuisine, Espousing French Identity

This paper draws from a series of comprehensive and life story interviews with twelve middle and upper class Franco-American couples (six in each country). In it we recount and analyze the narratives of two American wives (Linda and Beth) who tell, in very different ways, the story of their rencontre with France as one that profoundly changes their relationship to food and their own identity. Taken as ideal types, Linda’s narrative, like those of other women who return home, is one of reintegration, while Beth’s narrative, like those of other expatriate spouses, is one of exile. Despite the differences in their perspectives, French gastronomic discourse and American nutrition discourse delineate national boundaries and shape individual subjectivities in both narratives, allowing us, in a final analysis, to explore the interweaving of daily food practices, emotion and national identity.

Wives’ Relative Income Production and Household Male Dominance: Examining Violence Among Asian American Enduring Couples*

Abstract: This study integrates relative resource theory and cultural perspectives on husband‐to‐wife authority to examine male‐to‐female physical violence reported by Asian American wives in the National Latino and Asian American Survey. Findings indicated that the association between marital violence and male household dominance is complicated by women’s income relative to husbands’. We speculate that when husbands face threats on multiple levels to culturally determined masculine spheres of dominance, they are more likely to aggress against the perceived source of their status decline—thereby reaffirming one mode of dominance (physical). Practical implications of the findings are discussed.

From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women's Lives and Work (review)

Reviewed by: From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women's Lives and Work Sandra L. Albrecht From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women's Lives and Work. By Susan Thistle. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2006. This work focuses on the latter half of the 20th century and what Thistle argues persuasively were the profound changes in American women's relationship to marriage, motherhood, and the marketplace. As women were moving into paid employment in record numbers during this period, Thistle draws our attention back into the home to better understand the connections between the domestic economy and women's growing market experiences. With rich detail, and a special emphasis on tracking the different experiences of African American and white women, she shows how familial and institutional arrangements that had supported women's domestic role collapsed in the last half of the 20th century. Post war expansion and greater opportunity, as well as the economic difficulties and economic necessity of the 1970s and 1980s, led to a dismantling of the domestic economy. Not only did women move increasingly to paid employment, but much of the economic prosperity of the period was garnered by the profits made from former domestic labor and goods production. The changes that have occurred for women are dramatic and often invisible; they also help to explain the increased struggles for women, especially those caring for children and dependents. An example of how dramatic these changes have been comes from Thistle's data collection on women's sources of economic support. In 1960, wives relied for the majority of their support on the incomes of their husbands; by 2000, however, this trend was completely reversed and wives relied on their own earnings for the majority of their [End Page 175] support. In 1960, African American women relied on income from husbands for 63% of their economic support while white wives relied on income from husbands for 73% of their economic support. By 2000, African American wives relied on their own earnings for 66% of their economic support, and white wives relied on their own earnings for 53% of their economic support. As Thistle points out, "Today, less than one-third of white women and barely over one-tenth of black women rely mainly on men's income for support. Instead, the livelihood of the great majority rests primarily on their own earnings." (171). Women's reliance on paid employment for earnings has not meant a complete diminishment of domestic labor nor an increase in extra time for the majority of women, but rather increased financial need and overwork with little social policy support. Even though American economic prosperity was significantly helped by moving earlier domestic jobs and homemade products into the marketplace, the profits of such a transferal to the market have not fallen to women and their families. As Thistle argues, ". . . the potential created by market takeover of women's household work has gone primarily to other groups." (172). This book is a significant contribution in understanding the complex links between home and work. It shows how the domestic economy influenced both paid employment and market conditions, and raises important questions about social policy and economic inequality in the 21st century. Sandra L. Albrecht University of Kansas Copyright © 2009 Mid-America American Studies Association

Social Values and Self-Disclosure: A Comparison of Chinese Native, Chinese Resident (in U.S.) and North American Spouses

Guided by the individualism-collectivism model, the present study examined the relationship between cultural values and marital processes among Chinese native, Chinese residents in America, and North American spouses. Respondents completed a questionnaire which assessed individualism, collectivism and self-disclosure. The results were mixed in their support of the model. As expected, we found that (a) Chinese resident wives were more individualistic than Chinese native wives, (b) Chinese resident husbands were more collectivistic than their North American counterparts, and (c) across gender, Chinese natives disclosed less than both Chinese residents and North Americans. Contrary to individualism-collectivism, however, we found that (a) Chinese resident husbands were more collectivistic than Chinese native husbands, and (b) Chinese native wives were less collectivistic than Chinese resident and North American wives. The empirical and conceptual factors which might have contributed to this pattern of findings are discussed.

Through Black Eyes

This research explores Black women's experiences with intimate male partner violence through interview data from nine former physically, emotionally, and sexually abused African American wives. It urges a womanist analysis of Black women's abuse experiences and, thus, considers how systems of inequalities, especially gender and race, help foster less-explored constructions of and reactions to intimate male partner violence. Findings suggest that participants' observations on Black men's social marginalization, educational and economic disparities between Black partners, Black women's role in safeguarding Black men, and gendered scripts on traditions of resistance influenced their perspectives on the causes of and responses to abuse.

Creating Mr. Right and Ms. Right: Interpersonal ideals and personal change in newlyweds

AbstractBased on research on exchanging information during conflict (e.g., Levinger, 1983) and the energizing effects of negative feelings (e.g., Lewin, 1951; Gottman & Krokoff, 1989), this study explores circumstances in which individuals change, over the years, in fulfillment of their spouses’unmet ideals for them. In a longitudinal study of over 200 African American newlywed couples and White newlywed couples, respondents’ratings were combined to form an index of individuals’change in fulfillment of their partners’initially unmet ideals for them. Predictions were that individuals would change more when they listen and try to understand their partners’feelings during conflict or when they have negative feelings about the functioning of the relationship. Results were that high openness to information exchange during conflict predicted high change for White husbands, White wives, and African American wives, and negative feelings about relationship functioning predicted high change for White wives, African American wives, and African American husbands.

The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies

THE KING OF THE WORLD IN THE LAND OF THE PYGMIES /Joan Mark Introduction "...on the whole, I think I am glad that I have remained a dilettante," wrote Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam shortly after World War II. On the surface it seems like an odd statement for a Harvard-trained anthropologist, who at the time was the world's greatest authority on African pygmies. But Putnam was only being truthful. He was a dilettante, who had chosen to dabble in anthropology because it aUowed him to flee America and live by his own rules in Africa. While he learned volumes about the pygmies, it was the kind of knowledge that comes from life, not scholarship. He recorded data sporadically, and was careless with the notes he did take. A charismatic individual, who inspired others to write about the pygmies, he lacked the discipline to do it himself. His twentyfour years in Africa were to yield just one published essay. Putnam was a failure by academic standards, yet his life was anything but unproductive, as Joan Mark shows in the following excerpt from her biography, The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in March 1995). The numerous accounts of Putnam describe a magnetic personality, energetic, intensely interested in everyone and everything. Temperamentally he was too restless to be an academic. Instead he became what Mark calls "a middleman in the production and distribution of anthropological knowledge." It was chance that took Putnam to the Ituri Forest in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), and determination to live as he wanted, outside the constraints of white society, that kept him there. A descendant of the Massachusetts Lowells, he entered Harvard as a chemistry major in 1921, and switched to anthropology the following year. Of the three professors in his department, the best known was Earnest Hooton, an exponent of eugenics. When Hooton sent an expedition to Africa to take physical measurements of the natives, he chose Putnam, by then a Harvard graduate, as one of its three members. The group set out in 1927 for French West Africa and the Niger River, but an outbreak of yellow fever caused them to change their route and study an alternate group of tribes, among them the pygmies (Mbuti), of the Ituri Forest. The hunting and gathering pygmies intrigued Putnam because of their unique cooperative relationship with the village-dwelling tribes in the vicinity. He returned to Harvard without the pygmy blood samples and physical measurements he was supposed to obtain, but with the conviction that their culture should be studied before it was wiped out by colonialism. 48 · The Missouri Review In practical terms, Putnam had done nothing but waste grant money. He had gathered no publishable data; he could hardly expect Harvard to sponsor him again. Finding a way back to the Congo looked difficult, until he hit on the idea of becoming an agent sanitaire for the Congo Red Cross. He returned to Africa in 1930, married a MboU chiefs daughter, Abanzima, with whom he had faUen in love on his first trip, and ran a hospital, until he was fired, partly for neglecting his census-taking duties, and partly for polygamy (along with Abanzima he had taken several more African wives). He had no intention of leaving Africa, though. He'd gotten the notion of starting a tourist hotel, a sort of African dude ranch, in the Ituri Forest, near StanleyviUe, on the Epulu River. With the income from paying guests—scientists and big-game hunters—he could support his own continuing studies in anthropology and natural history. In 1933 he married the American landscape architect, Mary Linder, and with her help he established Camp Putnam, on the Epulu. Staffed by twenty to forty Africans, it became famous for its "pygmy shows" and its okapis—shy forest giraffes. Putnam lived there for the rest of his life, with a series of three American wives, and various native ones whom he maintained concurrently. He died in 1953, at age forty-nine, following a prolonged struggle with emphysema, and intermittent bouts of madness. The excerpt pubUshed here covers the period from 1945...

Consumer-Related Marital Role Orientations Among Hispanic, Irish and Italian-American Wives:

The objective of the current research was to demonstrate hypothesized differences in the manner in which Hispanic-Cuban, Latin American, Puerto Rican, Irish, and Italian-American wives perceive consumer-related marital roles in the process of automobile purchase decision-making. Supporting two of the three hypotheses, the findings suggest that in Latin American, Irish and Italian households, husbands are the major influence in making specific purchase decisions. In contrast, Cuban and Puerto Rican American husbands and wives share equally in making most decisions. These findings present interesting and potentially valuable implications for marketers wishing to optimize their performance in an increasingly heterogeneous marketplace.

The adequacy of life insurance purchases

This paper examines whether middle age American households purchase adequate amounts of life insurance. The analysis is based on SRI International's 1980, 1982, and 1984 surveys of the financial positions of American households. Our findings indicate that a significant minority of American wives are highly underinsured with respect to the possible deaths of their husbands. We find that 25 to 30% of wives are inadequately insured, by which we mean that they would suffer a loss in their rate of sustainable consumption of at least 30% in the event of being widowed. These findings on inadequate life insurance are even more striking if one focuses on those households in which over half of the couple's present expected value of resources is dependent on the husband's survival. The results of this paper together with those of the related literature strongly suggest that raising the share of social security benefits that are paid to surviving spouses as well as increasing employer-provided group life insurance could have a very considerable impact on the alleviation of poverty among widows, especially elderly widows.

Misperceptions of reproductive ideals among American husbands and wives

In this paper data from the Michigan Time Use Survey are used to document the extent of misperceptions of reproductive ideals among couples. Perceptual errors of spouses are found to be common and also nonrandom. The errors are influenced by a variety of socioeconomic variables. The paper concludes that research on fertility intentions and contraceptive use-effectiveness, which uses wife-only data, may be flawed. The paper also speculates on the extent and quality of marital communication.

Acculturation and Perceived Family Decision-Making Input among Mexican American Wives

This investigation assesses the perceived decision-making roles of Mexican American wives in the purchase of 10 different goods and services and their relation to the acculturation process. Acculturation was operationalized in three different ways. One employed role-relevant attitudinal measures; the others used reading language preference and television language preference. Perceived decision dominance was shown to be related to all three.

Wives' Orientation Toward Breadwinning

In both Sweden and the United States, married women have the right to seek employment outside the home. American wives, however, are regarded as having the option of employment, while Swedish wives are urged to see themselves as obligated to bring in family income. The purpose of this article is to report research findings on the breadwinning orientation of Swedish and American working wives. Comparisons are made to see if Swedish wives have in fact adopted the breadwinning role more than their American counterparts. Factors associated with variations in employed wives' breadwinning orientation are also explored.

For Better or for Worse . . .

For Better or for Worse . . . Bea Knodel (bio) Sinclair Lewis, in the Novels of his most satisfactorily productive decade, the 1920s, looks critically but often with incisive clarity at American life. In portraying the vulgarity and stultifying narrowness of the small town as exemplified by Gopher Prairie, the essential emptiness of the life of George F. Babbitt, or the yearnings and self-searchings of Sam Dodsworth as he measures the American experience against the European, Lewis was also portraying marriages—occasionally happy marriages, many humdrum marriages, and some utterly wretched marriages—and in the process he made some telling comments about what marriage meant to American wives in the first quarter of the twentieth century. If it is true, as Daniel Aaron has said, that Main Street is "a work of historical importance . . . not merely as a reflection partly unconscious, of American tastes and assumptions, but also because it helped Americans to understand themselves" (177); if The New York Times saw the central character in Babbitt as "real, alive and [End Page 555] recognizable as a known, familiar, and abundant type" (Schorer 345); and if in Dodsworth Lewis presented once again a representative type of American, "the American boy-man, the 'mythical' archetype" (Moore 160), it then seems fair to use these three novels as a means of seeing into a time now gone and of examining the lives of women in that vanished time. Happy wives are not much seen in Main Street, Babbitt, and Dodsworth. Occasionally, there are wives who at least appear to enjoy their lives and their marriages; and there are two, Vida Sherwin Wutherspoon and Bea Sorenson Bjornstam (both in Main Street), who are most definitely, most radiantly married. It may be, of course, that some of the wives who appear to be happy are simply not unhappy, an entirely different thing; but there is a quality of enjoyment of life in women such as Juanita Haydock (Main Street) and Matey Pearson (Dodsworth) that seems to argue that they find their days, their husbands, and their own roles satisfactory enough. Juanita is described as "acidulous and shrewd and cackling" (242). Her home, carefully detailed by Lewis, is new, an over-heated concrete bungalow furnished to a pitch of Gopher Prairie fashion, and she herself is "highly advanced in the matters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath mats" (90). That she sees herself as having achieved distinction as the leading light of the Young Married Set, Lewis assures us; that she sees any reason to question the absolute significance of that achievement, we are nowhere led to believe. She accepts the limitations of Gopher Prairie because she does not recognize it as having limitations. She enjoys the summers at the lake, the squabbles with the grocer, and the social eminence of the Jolly Seventeen. She is, in short, satisfied. Matey Pearson, the wife of Sam Dodsworth's longtime friend Tub, is, in almost every particular, vastly different from Juanita Haydock; but Matey, like Juanita, has apparently found happiness in an acceptance of things as they are. Fran Dodsworth may dismiss Matey as "dreadfully uninteresting. And fat!" (257), but Matey plays "a rare shrewd game of poker" (263), dances lightly, grows Zenith's most admirable dahlias, and shows herself cheerfully affectionate toward her husband, whom she says, with apparent truth, she adores. Lewis does not show us many details in the lives of Juanita and Matey or of other women who appear to find their lives and their marriages satisfactory, but the glimpses [End Page 556] he does reveal are of pleasures enjoyed, not of dull boredom or lonely pain. Lewis goes much further, however, in showing the possibilities for wives' finding happiness when, in Main Street, he describes the marriages of Vida Sherwin and Bea Sorenson. And because, Tolstoy's remark to the contrary, all happy families are not alike, it is worthwhile to explore in some detail the reasons why Vida and Bea are so happily married. Vida is thirty-nine years old when she marries Raymie Wutherspoon, and she has behind her long years of struggling with sexual "fears, longing, and guilt" (244), of knowing she is perceived as plain, the stereotypical old maid...

Feminism and the History of Marital Law: Basch and Stetson on the Rights of Wives

From the time of the Norman conquest to the mid-nineteenth century, English marital law was based on the jurisprudential concept of baron et feme. This concept, which American state courts also continued to recognize into the nineteenth century, assumed that a married couple should be treated legally as a single unit. The power to act for that unit, as well as the unit's rights of inheritance and property, was vested in the husband. The wife was considered afeme covert, under the cover or protection of her husband. While courts of equity could and did recognize special exceptions, they were expensive to obtain and almost invariably were granted in response to concerns of wealthy families. The overwhelming majority of English and American wives continued to exist in the eyes of the law under what was called coverture, which entitled them to certain limited rights within marriage and provided some security in the event they were widowed. But as far as the state was concerned, coverture also rendered them the legal dependents of their husbands and deprived them of the exercise of a number of rights to which a single woman, or feme sole, was entitled (e.g., the right to make a binding contract and the right to take court action on her own). Exactly how the legal concept of coverture affected the lives of most English and American wives is difficult to determine, though work is beginning to be done on issues related to that question. What is easy to determine is the strong opposition of English and American feminists to a doctrine that relegated their married sisters to a category of legal responsibility roughly equivalent to that afforded infants and idiots. Two recent books have taken as their grand theme this historic confrontation between feminism and the

Changes in childbearing plans of American wives: 1971–1974

Using three matched samples from the June Current Population Survey, we examine stability and change over a 1-year period in the lifetime births expected by currently married women. These samples are 1971–1972, 1972–1973, and 1973–1974. We identify the factors associated with change in expected family size and, using hierarchical log-linear models, we explore the interactions present. We found that three “demographic” variables affect the likelihood of change in expected family size. These variables are the woman's age, parity, and the occurrence of a birth between the two surveys. None of the social or economic factors examined here have any significant impact on the probability of change in birth expectations.