A Bed of Roses? Women, Marriage and Inequality in Later Life

Abstract

Many commentators have demonstrated that inequality within marriage, in terms of the social and economic dependence of wives on their husbands, is part of the condition of gender inequality in our society, and that marriage is thus a structurally unequal relationship. For example, women’s relative structural disadvantage in education, the labour market and social welfare provision help to ensure that they will be responsible for domestic labour and childcare within family-households; this in turn reinforces their structural disadvantage and makes it all seem reasonable and inevitable. Gender inequality, and with it an ideology of familism, are thus constantly developing and being negotiated through a dialectical process: constraints in the apparently separate spheres of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are used to legitimate practice in each other, and practice then in turn reinforces the constraints (Allan, 1985; Barrett, 1980; Collins, 1985; Hunt, 1980; Land, 1981).