Married to the Job (RLE Feminist Theory)

Wives' Incorporation in Men's Work

Janet Finch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415754200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136195310
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Married to the Job examines an important but under-researched area: the relationships of wives to their husbands' work. Janet Finch looks both at the way women's lives are directly affected by the work their husbands do and how they can get drawn into it. These she sees as the two sides of wives' 'incorporation'. Dr Finch discusses a wide range of occupations, from obvious stereotypes – services, diplomatic, clergy and political wives – to more subtle but equally valid shades of involvement – the wives of policemen, merchant seamen, prison officers, the owners of small businesses and academics. She stresses that this process is by no means confined to the wives of professional men; she argues that the nature of the work done and the way it is organised are more important pointers to the ways in which wives will be incorporated. For specific illustrations, Dr Finch draws substantially on her own original research on wives of the clergy.

Married to the Job clearly shows that marriage itself (not just child-bearing) is an important feature of women's subordination. Dr Finch points to the links between husband's work, the family and its relationship to economic structures, and suggests that wives are tied into those structures as much as anything through their vicarious involvement in their husband's work. She views any prospects for change with caution. The organisation of social and economic life makes it difficult for wives to break free from this incorporation even should they wish to; it makes economic good sense for them to continue in most cases; social life is organised so as to make compliance easy; and it provides a comprehensible way of being a wife.

As an empirically-based survey of women's subordination within marriage, Married to the Job will prove essential reading to all those concerned about the position of women, whether feminists, academics or general readers. It will also provide important background material for undergraduate courses on women's studies, the sociology of the family, the sociology of work and family policy.

1

Introduction

The Book's Focus

There is a familiar theme in our culture that marriage entails ‘taking on’ your partner, for better or worse. Marriage is not simply a limited liability contract, but each partner – the theme runs – brings to the marriage their total persona and its consequences, which the other has to respond to, handle and deal with. One feature which has to be taken on board is the spouse's job and its implications. What does it mean to marry a bus driver, a solicitor, or a bank clerk, and is that different from marrying a policeman, a clergyman, or a miner? If so, how is it different? The examples are chosen advisedly to indicate male occupations, in the belief that this, like so many other features of marriage, is different for men and women: the implications which a man's paid work has for his wife are more significant and far reaching than vice versa. The central theme of this book is that when a woman marries, she marries not only a man but also she marries his job, and from that point onwards will live out her life in the context of the job which she has married.

This theme – relatively under-explored in sociological literature (Fowlkes, 1980, p. 7) – can be seen as one facet of examining the overlap between work and family. This particular overlap has two important characteristics. First, it focuses on specific jobs rather than ‘work’ in general. In so doing, some important general issues are raised about the organisation of paid work, but the analysis concentrates on features of specific jobs and the implications which each has for the wives of male workers. Secondly, the implications of men's work are explored in relation to their wives, not ‘the family’. This means that women are seen primarily as wives, rather than the (perhaps more usual) focus of women as mothers, although clearly the two cannot be completely separated: the implications of a man's work may be somewhat different for the wife who is also a mother. It is, however, the specific consequences of marriage rather than motherhood which are explored in this study.

The concentration upon wives does not imply that no one else is affected by men's work. Children, and indeed other adult members of the household, may experience equally significant effects. A parallel study which concentrated upon them would be an interesting but a separate exercise, for the implications are unlikely to be precisely the same as for wives. This book concentrates on the latter, rather than upon all household members, on the grounds that the structural position and cultural meaning of being a wife is likely to shape the effects of men's work into particular forms, and to give them a particular character.

The relationship between a wife and her husband's work is seen in this study as a two-way one: his work both structures her life and elicits her contributions to it. These terms have been selected because they seem to best capture the processes which I wish to identify, but since there is room for misinterpretation, I will specify more precisely what I mean.

The first part of the two-way relationship is that a man's work imposes a set of structures upon his wife's life, which consequently constrain her choices about the living of her own life, and set limits upon what is possible for her. Those structures are, of course – both analytically and in experience – part of the more general structure into which, characteristically in our culture, a woman enters when she marries. As Gillespie has put it, ‘to fit the master-plan of the other becomes her life's work’ (Gillespie, 1972, p. 132). The character and shape of that master-plan varies in different marriages, and, it will be argued, an important part of that variation is accounted for by the jobs which men do. In selecting the word ‘structure’ for this, there is perhaps a danger of implying a much more deterministic model of explanation than I intend. Certainly I do not wish to suggest that such structures are unchanging or unchangeable, nor that wives merely slot into some pre-ordained role. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere (Spedding, 1975, pp. 470–82) that such interpretations are inadequate even in instances where wives apparently are acting out a conventional stereotype. The problem here is one fundamental to all sociological accounts of social life: how to steer a course between individualistic and deterministic explanations without finally saying nothing at all. The use of the concept of ‘structuring’ is intended to underline the externality of constraints as wives experience them. That is, largely they are ‘givens’ (or at least are accepted as givens) to be accommodated and worked around, and the patterns which they impose form fundamental organising themes for wives’ lives.

The other side of the two-way relationship is that wives contribute to the work which men do. Again the character and the scale of these contributions varies significantly with particular jobs. The word ‘contributions’, which perhaps has a somewhat insipid ring to it, has been selected as a general way of describing this process, because it leaves open certain key questions, especially: How far are wives’ contributions enforced or chosen? How far should those contributions be seen as labour which is extracted by husbands, or by capitalist employers, or by both? These are important issues which need to be explored further after the evidence about the character of those contributions has been reviewed.

A wife's relationship to her husband's work is seen therefore as a two-sided coin, whose shape and size varies in relation to men's jobs. The implications for one side cannot simply be read off from the other: those jobs which impose the most rigid structures may not be the same ones which elicit the most direct contributions from wives, and vice versa. The word ‘incorporation’ is used in this study as a shorthand term to denote both sides of the coin. So a wife's incorporation in her husband's work consists both in her incorporation into the structures around which that work is organised, and the incorporation of her labour into the work done.

Conceptual Starting-Points

This discussion of conceptual starting-points is not intended to provide a comprehensive literature review; rather to specify key sources which I have found useful in raising some initial questions which this study pursues. Those sources are discussed here primarily in relation to the questions which they raise, although they also provide reference points to which the discussion returns later.

The sources are of three types: sociological and related writings on work and family; two specific articles which address wives’ incorporation; and several other articles which have raised issues about parts of, rather than the whole, analysis.

The Sociology of Work and Family

This notion of a wife contributing to her husband's work has not been absent entirely from the literature of the sociology of marriage and the family, but it has never been a central interest. For example, Blood's textbook on marriage does mention that wives may be able to advance or hold back their husband's career, but only five sentences are devoted to this issue (Blood, 1969, pp. 222–3). In British sociology, well-known textbooks on the family such as those by Harris (1969) and Farmer (1970) give it no specific mention. In a review of sociological work on a related issue – the relationship between a husband's occupation and his wife's employment – Mortimer, Hall and Hill (1978) identify sociologists’ relative neglect of the whole area of wives’ involvement in the ‘central role elements’ of their husbands’ work. In more general terms Bott, in her pioneering study of aspects of the relationship between husbands and wives, did raise the issue of how far different forms of conjugal relationships could be related to male occupations, although she does not pursue these links in sufficient detail to make her empirical material useful in this study (Bott, 1957, especially ch. III).

Looking more generally at literature on the family and productive work in capitalist societies, it is clear that work and the family mostly are treated as analytically separate spheres. This observation goes some way to explaining why the issue of wives’ incorporation often has been neglected: sociologists of many different theoretical persuasions have rather readily accepted the view that one consequence of industrialisation was the separation of work from the home, creating the public sphere of work, and the private domestic sphere (for example, Farmer, 1970, pp. 12–15; Moss and Fonda, 1980, pp. 8–10; Secombe, 1974, pp. 6–7). Thus, it is assumed, paid work became associated with activities taking place outside the home in separate locations and at specific times. These activities are largely undertaken by men, leaving women to be assigned to the domestic sphere as their particular realm. If one accepts this as the basic analysis, the relationship of wives to men's work does not emerge as an obvious issue, since it traverses the supposedly separate spheres.

The separate ‘spheres’ view of work and family can be, and has been, challenged on a number of grounds, most importantly from the point of view of this study: that it is empirically insupportable; that it is theoretically naïve; and that, not merely is it not useful as an analytical tool, but it serves actually to obscure certain important features of social life. Davidoff's (1979) interesting article on landladies and lodgers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provides one clear challenge on empirical grounds, since the economic and domestic relations displayed by this example do not fit neatly into either the productive or the domestic sphere. Davidoff argues that her examination of the recent past ‘should be a reminder that there is no natural or fixed separation between a public and a private sphere’ (ibid., p. 93). That view would be shared by Lasch, who calls the presumed isolation of the family from work ‘a sham’. ‘In reality, the modern world intrudes at every point and obliterates its privacy. The sanctity of the home is a sham in a world dominated by giant corporations and by the apparatus of mass promotion’ (Lasch, 1977, p. xvii).

The theoretical challenge to the ‘separate spheres’ view arises from the implied functionalism which effectively cannot be avoided if one sees that separation as a direct consequence of industrialisation. The implication is that the separation occurred because industrialisation somehow required it, and therefore that it is functional for ‘society’ to keep the family as a separate, privatised sphere, whose main link with the productive world is through the male breadwinner (Safilios-Rothschild, 1976). The arguments against this classic functionalist view have been well rehearsed (Morgan, 1975, ch. 1), and it is a view no more convincing when it comes in a Marxist version, even with feminist overtones. This, to put it at its crudest, is the argument that the nuclear family with one male wage labourer and one female domestic worker is necessary to serve the needs of capital. Women's unpaid domestic labour is thus exploited by keeping them in the home, to service men and to reproduce the next generation of wage labourers. As Barrett has cogently argued, the problems with this kind of account are of functionalism and of reductionism. Women's oppression cannot be simply explained as functional for capital, because in so doing ‘gender relations are reduced to an effect of the operation of capital’ and thus ‘phenomena of an ideological kind are reduced to their supposed economic determinants’ (Barrett, 1980, p. 24). The criticism that the ideological dimension is ignored would apply equally to functionalist explanations of a non-Marxist kind. These often, whether intentionally or not, have the effect of justifying rather than analysing the status quo. As Leonard Barker has put it, ‘Sociologists have generally accepted the phenomenal view and commonsense functionalist explanations of the family and of the society they were supposed to be analysing. They have … often staunchly defended the separation of the home from the rude, commercial world, stressing domestic affection and consensus’ (Barker, 1977, p. 240).

The argument, that the supposed separation of the productive and domestic spheres serves to obscure other issues, can be illustrated in a number of ways. On the one hand, it directs attention towards analysing the position of women in certain ways, but away from other modes of analysis. As Edholm, Harris and Young have put it, ‘the concepts we employ to think about women are part of a whole ideological apparatus which in the past has discouraged us from analysing women's work, women's spheres, as an integrated part of social production’ (Edholm, Harris and Young, 1977, p. 127). But it is not only the analysis of women's position which is obscured by the concept of separate spheres. As Stacey (1981) has argued in her important paper on reconceptualising the division of labour, the analytical separation of the private domain of women and the public domain of men (with no way of reconciling accounts of the two) serves ‘not only to hide women from sociology, but to leave sociologists of the eighties with inadeuqate conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools to analyse or explain the shifts in activities between the domestic and the public arenas’ (Stacey, 1981, p. 173). There is a sense, then, in which the belief that the productive (male) sphere is separate and distinct from the domestic (female) sphere, itself is an ideologically constructed view, which sociologists reinforce whenever they take it for granted.

What are the particular implications of these debates for the analysis of wives’ incorporation in men's work? Clearly it is an analysis which needs to cross the boundaries (if boundaries they be) between the spheres, as Mortimer et al. recognise when they describe wives’ contributions to men's work as ‘this pattern of assistance which has traditionally mitigated the formal separation of work and family’ (Mortimer, Hall and Hill, 1978, p. 289). Rather than simply arguing that it ‘mitigates’ the separation of the spheres, it makes more sense to argue that this is another instance, like Davidoff's landladies, which challenges the whole basis of the assumed separation by providing instances which do not fit the analysis. Viewing it as a challenge rather than a modification clears the ground for looking at the empirical material with two particular questions in mind, to which the discussion returns later. These are: How far would it be true to argue that wives are actually part of the process of social and economic production through their incorporation in their husband's work? How far is their participation obscured by the ideological construction of work and home as two separate spheres?

In summary, the view that the productive sphere of men is quite separate from the domestic sphere of women would imply that wives as wives are peripheral to economic production, although they do service male wage labourers. Capital may be interested in wives as potential wage labourers themselves, especially if this means that they can be kept as a reserve army of labour, to be drawn in and out of the labour force as needs dictate (Beechey, 1977, 1978), but as wives they are consigned to the apparently non-productive domestic sphere. Examining wives’ incorporation in men's work challenges that view by suggesting, to anticipate the argument somewhat, that the relationship of wives per se to production is actually much more central, because they are routinely incorporated in the productive process via their husbands’ work.

Moving on this terrain, one is clearly coming close to a central issue which has engaged feminist theorists of women's oppression, namely, how far that oppression can be attributed solely to capitalism, or whether one introduces a whole different conceptual basis, in recognition that women's oppression is not confined to capitalist societies – namely, the concept of patriarchy in its various forms (Beechey, 1979). This study does not seek to address and evaluate those debates directly, although clearly the material discussed is relevant to aspects of them. Rather, it is hoped that it will make some contribution to the analysis of women's oppression by documenting the variety of forms which that oppression can take, especially in relation to male work. In that way, it is a contribution to the task identified by Barrett when she argues (in relation to cross-cultural analysis), ‘What we need to analyse are precisely the mechanisms by which women's oppression is secured in different contexts, since only then can we confront the problem of how to change it’ (Barrett, 1980, p. 250).

Conceptualising Wives’ Incorporation: Papanek and Delphy

Moving to literature which is more specifically related to wives’ incorporation, two writers in particular have been important in directly informing the analysis presented in this study.

Hannah Papanek's (1973) article represents the only real attempt in existing sociological literature specifically to conceptualise the relationship of a wife to her husband's work. This she does by developing the concept of the ‘two-person career’. Her particular interest is in ‘some of the aspects of American women's “vicarious achievement” through their husbands’ jobs in a special combination of roles which I call the “two-person single career”’ (ibid., p. 852). Papanek's main focus of interest is the participation of a wife in her husband's career both in very concrete ways, and also by becoming identified with it: she quite literally becomes part of that career. The central theme which Papanek identifies in that participation is vicariousness: a wife participates in a career which is not hers, and thereby lives through her husband in the occupational world. If he is successful, she also succeeds, again vicariously. There are therefore very apparent benefits for women in the two-person career, but such benefits are mitigated by other losses. There is, Papanek argues, ‘structured ambivalence’ towards a wife's participation in her husband's career on the part of all three parties involved – herself, her husband and his employer. On the one hand, wives are subject to various expectations about supporting their husbands, acting suitably in various settings, and so on, but their activities are defined as essentially outside the real world of work. Thus women's participation is simultaneously required and devalued, and consequently ‘this ambivalence is particularly destructive to the self-esteem of many participants’ (ibid., p. 860). The long-term consequences also entail material losses. Papanek regards the two-person career as contributing to the maintenance of women's own unequal access to occupational opportunities, despite the fact that they formally have equal access to education, because it has the effect of ‘de-railing’ a wife from pursuing her own career and diverts her energies into her husband's (ibid., p. 852). As a result, wives relate to the public domain of work through a peculiar relationship – they are ‘gainfully unemployed’: ‘she is “gainfully unemployed” – that is, not considered “employed” in the economists’ or census-takers’ sense but nevertheless “gainfully” occupied in the context of a two-person career’ (ibid., p. 863).

Papanek has made a very significant contribution in opening up this whole area and has provided some useful conceptual tools with which to think about the processes of wives’ incorporation. The analysis which she offers rightly emphasises that it is concerned with ‘transactions which occur at the boundary between public and private spheres’ (ibid., p. 855). Moreover, she is very clear that participation in the two-person career is not a matter of ‘choice, accident or conflict’ but is structurally generated: ‘a structural part of the middle-class wife's role’ (ibid., p. 857). It is also quite consistent with prevailing cultural definitions of women's roles in marriage: ‘The “two-person career” pattern is fully congruent with the stereotype of the wife as supporter, comforter, back-stage manager, home maintainer and main rearer of children’ (ibid., p. 853). She directs our attention therefore to the interplay between the public and the private, and between the structural and the cultural, in developing the analysis of wives’ incorporation in men's work.

The main problem with Papanek's analysis, and the main point at which mine diverges from hers, is on the issue of whether this is a middle class phenomenon. Papanek is actually not too clear on this point. Early in the paper, she argues that the two-person career is characteristic of, but not confined to, the American middle classes. But all her examples are in fact taken from this group; and more importantly, her analysis rests significantly upon seeing the two-pe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One Hedging Her In: How Men’s Work Structures their Wives’ Lives
• Part Two Drawing Her In: Wives’ Contributions to their Husbands’ Work
• Part Three Married to the Job: the Foundations of Wives’ Incorporation
• Bibliography
• Index