Modern Couples Sharing Money, Sharing Life

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MODERN COUPLES SHARING MONEY, SHARING LIFE

Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

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Modern Couples Sharing Money, Sharing Life Edited by Janet Stocks Baldwin-Wallace College, Ohio USA

Capitolina Díaz University of Oviedo, Spain

Björn Halleröd Umeå University, Sweden


Selection and editorial matter © Janet Stocks, Capitolina Díaz and Björn Halleröd, 2007 Individual chapters © chapter authors, 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–0–230–51702–8 hardback ISBN 10: 0–230–51702–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne


Contents Acknowledgments

vi

Notes on Contributors

viii

Introduction: The Role of Money in ‘Doing Couple’ Janet Stocks

1

1 An Overview: Research on Couples and Money Charlott Nyman and Sandra Dema

7

2 Our Methods Capitolina Díaz, Charlott Nyman and Janet Stocks

30

3 Elusive Independence in a Context of Gender Equality in Sweden Charlott Nyman and Lasse Reinikainen 4 The Meaning of Breadwinning in Dual-Earner Couples Frank Wilson and Janet Stocks 5 The Intertwining of Money and Love in Couple Relationships Capitolina Díaz, Sandra Dema and Marta Ibáñez

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6 Doing Gender While Doing Couple: Concluding Remarks Björn Halleröd, Capitolina Díaz and Janet Stocks

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Appendix A Protocol for Interviewing Couples

156

Appendix B Protocol for Interviewing Individuals

166

Appendix C Standardized Demographic Survey Questionnaire

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Appendix D The Comprehensive Code List for Analysis of Interviews

179

References

185

Index

193

v Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Acknowledgments Our study would not have been possible without the generosity of the many couples who shared their time, their stories, and their thoughts and feelings with us. We would like to express our most sincere thanks to these couples who opened their houses and their souls to our inquisitive sociological questions. This book is a result of a collaboration between sociologists in Spain, Sweden and the United States. Our original collaboration also included a research team from Germany – Special Research Centre 536 B6, Research on Reflexive Modernization at the LudwigMaximilians-University of Munich under Ulrich Beck. It is this group who first brought us together and helped make the research possible through grant support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Although in the end we parted ways, we are extremely grateful for the role these colleagues played in initiating the research, and the stimulating and challenging conversations we had together about couples and individuals in contemporary Western societies. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of Jutta Allmendinger, Chantal Hoeft, Dorothee Kaesler, Wolfgang LudwigMaierhofer, Doris Prechtl, Werner Schneider and Tine Wimbauer. Each of the country teams also received support from individuals and institutions to whom we are grateful. The US research team would like to thank Barbara Lazarus and Indira Nair at Carnegie Mellon University who encouraged our involvement in the project and supported some travel expenses. Mary Lou Higgerson at BaldwinWallace College has allowed the necessary time to pull final details together. The University of Pittsburgh, through a faculty development grant, helped offset some research expenses. The Spanish research team would like to thank the Instituto Asturiano de la Mujer and the Spanish Instituto de la Mujer for their financial support. The Universidad de Oviedo provided us with the means and the infrastructure needed to carry on with the research. The Social Sciences and Law library of the Universidad de Oviedo, especially its director, Carmen Fernandez, made every effort to satisfy our greed for books and articles. vi Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Acknowledgments vii

The Swedish research team would like to thank the Swedish Council for Social Research and the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research for financing the Swedish research. We would also like to thank members of the research group Combining Family and Work – Balancing Everyday Life and Jan Pahl for helpful comments on earlier versions of the Swedish chapter. Our team, often over a good beer or two, has joked that we should write an article about the sociology of sociology, in particular the special challenges of conducting an international qualitative comparative study. Although it was not always easy, some of us are sure that we will be lifelong friends and have appreciated the opportunity to work together.


Notes on Contributors Sandra Dema has a PhD in gender studies and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She has worked on numerous research projects on the inequality of women, both in the labor market and inside the family, focusing in the last few years on the financial decision-making processes within the couple. She has published several articles and books about affirmative action policies, intra-household allocation, power relations within the family and dual-earner couples. Capitolina Díaz is an Associate Professor at the University of Oviedo, Spain and Director of the Women and Science Unit of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. She conducts crossnational studies on the role of money in couple relationship and studies on women and science and positive action. These studies include topics such as patterns of women’s access to higher education and to higher management positions in higher education; the role of money in the decision-making process within couples; the relationship between women and TICs. Björn Halleröd is Professor of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. Since the mid-1980s, he has been working extensively with issues related to income distribution, poverty and living conditions. He is currently engaged in research on the relationship between different welfare problems and longitudinal research on individual changes of living conditions. Marta Ibáñez is an Associate Professor at University of Oviedo, Spain. Her research focuses on family and gender, work and poverty and quantitative methods. She has published several articles and books about these topics. Charlott Nyman has a PhD in sociology from Umeå University, Sweden. Her dissertation investigated the sharing of resources, primarily money but also time, housework and power, in couples. Since viii Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Notes on Contributors ix

then she has continued her study of various aspects of families and couples at the Sociology Department at Umeå University. One of her current research projects is a qualitative study of the gap between gender equality in ‘theory’ and in practice in couples. Another research project investigates the ways that homosexual couples, couples ‘living apart together’ (LAT) and single people conceptualize and practice family. Lasse Reinikainen is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. His main interests concern social psychology, cultural theory and gender studies. His thesis deals with issues of dependence/independence, equality/inequality and power in the everyday lives of heterosexual couples. Janet Stocks is Director of the Center for Academic and Professional Success at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, USA. She is a sociologist with interests in education, the family, gender, religion, and qualitative methods. These days she works mostly as a college administrator with special interest in undergraduate research. Frank Wilson earned his degrees in sociology from the University of California-San Diego, San Diego State University, and the University of Pittsburgh (USA). He currently teaches undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where he also serves as the Director of the Behavioral Sciences Academic Village.


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Introduction: The Role of Money in ‘Doing Couple’ Janet Stocks

How do dual-earner couples in Western industrialized capitalist democracies negotiate their daily lives? How do they manage and make decisions about money? How do they get the housework done? Who cares for the children? How do they think about their careers? How do different state supports for families, or lack thereof, affect the intimate negotiations that occur with these couples? And where do their couple and family relationships fit into their busy lives? These are the questions with which we began our study. These questions led us to develop an extended in-depth qualitative approach to our research, and began our conversations with couples about their lives. Our study of dual-earner couples in Sweden, Spain and the US has focused on the process of couples forming themselves as couples in a time when ‘traditional’ scripts for becoming and enacting couple have lost their dominance. The working title for the book as we started to pull it together was The Role of Money in ‘Doing Couple’, a title that some of our reviewers and our publisher were not keen on, so we relented. But, as many will recognize, we borrowed the idea of ‘doing’ couple from West and Zimmerman’s (1987) article entitled ‘Doing gender’, which postulates that gender is something that is embedded in everyday interaction. Extensive interviews of couples in our three countries have given us insights into many aspects of their lives. But we found that the arena of money gave us a unique window into the interaction that takes place in these intimate relationships and a concrete way to analyse how the ‘doing’ of couple is accomplished when both partners contribute to the economic needs 1 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

2 Modern Couples Sharing Money, Sharing Life

of the household. Therefore, in the current volume, we focus on money and interactions around money as a way of understanding the construction of couple, but also the construction of individuals, and, importantly, the construction of gender, as these are all interconnected. Money is indeed a very complex phenomenon within the family. Who earns it, who manages it, how decisions about it get made, who has access to it and under what conditions, are all issues that must be faced by two individuals who want to make a life together. The distribution of money is important – how it gets spent, who has control over it – but also how it comes into the household, and what meaning different forms of money has to the individuals and the couple, are important in investigating the process of becoming and being a couple, and also of doing gender within a couple. We have taken a broad perspective in our focus on money. Money is a theme, but it is not the only thing we are concerned with. Discussing and analysing money and its meanings and flows within a household helps us to understand the dynamics of a couple. We started with a set of questions that assumed negotiation – how do dual-earner couples negotiate their daily lives? One thing we found, as we began our data analysis, is that very little explicit negotiation takes place (Benjamin and Sullivan 1996; Nyman and Evertsson 2005; Stocks and Wilson 2002). The negotiation about these issues that does take place within a couple is more similar to negotiating an obstacle course than negotiating a labor contract. In other words, many small, practical, spur-of-the-moment decisions are made without particular regard to their long-term implications. Fairness and equity are usually valued within the couple, but are not necessarily applied as a criterion when figuring out who is going to do the laundry. We asked couples a set of questions about, for instance, how the housework gets done, and they would, inevitably, describe rather complex arrangements that they had developed as a couple over time. At the end of this we would ask ‘how did you come to this arrangement?’ and they would reply ‘it just happened’, or something to that effect. But the ‘naturalization’ of these behaviors in a couple relationship, upon further analysis, often displays gendered patterns that are unexamined and largely unconscious. When a couple refers to its arrangements as something that ‘just Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Introduction: The Role of Money in ‘Doing Couple’ 3

happened’, there has frequently been a long, complex process and many small, seemingly inconsequential decisions that were made, often with the overriding concern, at each step of the way, of keeping a peaceful life. Being and enacting couple is something that comes about through interaction, through daily praxis. Explicit agreements are made, for instance, to live together, to pool income, to have children. But often these agreements, when reported by the couples, were not all that explicitly discussed. Women get pregnant; sometimes this is planned sometimes not. Income is pooled, sometimes because ‘that’s the way it’s done’, sometimes because ‘she’s a better money manager’. A myriad of small and large decisions over time and daily practice come together to create a shared life. It was this complex of decisions, practices and, if you will, negotiations – ‘doing’ couple – that we wanted to understand. We are, of course, following in the footsteps of others who have asked similar questions. Sociologists and economists who look at ‘household income’ have questioned the assumption that resources within a household are equitably shared. By opening the ‘black box’ of the household economy, researchers have demonstrated that money is allocated, distributed, managed and controlled in manifold ways (e.g. Burgoyne 1990; Edwards 1981; Fleming 1997; Hertz 1986; Nyman 2002; Roman and Vogler 1999; Singh 1997; Stamp 1985; Treas 1993; Vogler and Pahl 1994; Wilson 1987). In addition, work by Zelizer (1994) and others has revealed that the meaning of money differs crucially according to who has earned it, whether it is a gift, is inherited, saved for a particular purpose, and so on. Our work is in dialogue with these other works and contributes to discussions about modernity, changing gender roles and expectations, the meaning of money, and the complex financial reality of households through our close empirical study of couples in our three countries. Bauman’s (2000) concept of ‘liquid modernity’ has informed our approach to this research. We are aware that couples today face a situation in which many aspects of their lives, aspects that were much more taken-for-granted in their parents’ generation, are open for interpretation and for novel solutions. Many issues are being discussed in the public arena: same sex marriage, cohabitation and procreation options (e.g. fertilization rights for gay couples, surrogate Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


pregnancies, foreign adoptions). The dissolution of relationships is more of an option, both legally and normatively, than ever before. What makes a couple a couple? What are the reasons for marriage? What are the obligations and commitments of marriage or other forms of committed relationship? Will the husband and wife merge their finances or will they maintain separate economies even though married? Will women who get married change their names? Will men? These, and many others, are questions that individuals face when forming a couple today. And while the options are open, and many novel solutions appear, these individuals and couples are constructing themselves within social worlds that influence and constrain their imaginations regarding what the solutions might be. One aspect of these social worlds is the state welfare regimes within which the couples live. In Sweden, when a baby is born, both parents have the option of taking 240 days (approximately eight months) paid leave each, receiving 80 per cent of his/her salary for 195 days and a lower flat rate benefit for the additional 45 days, and are guaranteed his/her job back on return. Parents can share the leave so that they can hand over all but 60 days to their partner, which typically means that the father hands over as much as possible to the mother. In the US, family leave policies vary according to the benefits offered by the employer, and are typically very limited and usually unpaid, if there is any leave available at all. Childcare options and availability varies significantly between our three countries. Taxation schemes are very different and significantly impact economic possibilities for individuals and couples. Because of the nature of our research (qualitative and with small sample number) we were not able to do a truly comparative analysis of life as a couple within these various social welfare regimes. But it will become clear in reading the country chapters that follow how some of these policies impact decision-making at the micro level of the couple. We have chosen for the most part to focus on similarities between the countries rather than differences. Our data, the stories we have to tell about the meaning of money in ‘doing couple’, then, will be told by each of the country teams in turn. In the next chapter we review the literature on household economies and various theories that have been developed over time Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Introduction: The Role of Money in ‘Doing Couple’ 5

to understand them. We then take a chapter to explain our methods and talk a bit about some of the challenges we faced in conducting a multi-country qualitative study. The three chapters after this each focuses on a different theme regarding the meaning of money in doing couple that arose from the data of each of our three countries. Our data is rich and deep, and there are possibly several books that could be written from it. But it became clear to us as we began our data analysis that money was an important and fertile topic, and the country chapters explore themes that were clear in the data itself. In the concluding chapter, we pull out the common themes and the lessons learned from our study. The Swedish chapter examines the ways in which money is important for women in maintaining a sense of independence within a couple relationship. By looking closely at three different women’s views of their economic lives within couple we see that there are times when a woman will choose inequality of economic resources within a relationship in order to maintain a sense of independence. Money in this case is not only used as a resource or means for managing and maintaining explicit individual control, but it also has strong symbolic meanings. This becomes apparent in these cases as it is not the women’s access to money that promotes independence but their reluctance to accept their partners’ money. The US chapter examines how the role of ‘breadwinner’, once heavily gendered in ‘traditional’ relationships, still has some lingering ties to masculinity. In dual-earner couples breadwinning is a shared responsibility, but it is experienced differently to some extent by women and by men, and women and men have different expectations of each other and themselves in regard to the responsibilities of breadwinning. Turning to Spain, where the pooling of money is assumed, and is even a defining moment in the ‘doing’ of couple, we see how the fact of pooling sometimes hides unequal access to economic resources within a relationship. The meanings of money expressed by an individual are sometimes different from the meanings expressed by the couple as a unit. We show how pooled money can be the glue that reinforces the couple’s affective union or how it can serve to reinforce the vital project of one of the spouses over the other. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


What we hope to contribute through this book is an understanding of the complex ways in which the ‘doing’ of couple and the doing of gender are intertwined. Money, its meaning, management and control, is the lens through which we attempt to illustrate these processes.


1 An Overview: Research on Couples and Money Charlott Nyman and Sandra Dema

Research on couples and money can be found in several separate but related and sometimes overlapping areas of inquiry. An early and important starting point is poverty research. From the days of Rowntree’s (1902) pioneering research on poverty in turn-of-thecentury Britain, and then Young and Willmot’s (1957) study in midcentury, the family has been regarded as a single homogenous unit and has been often studied as such. The focus on the family1 unit has had as its (explicit or implicit) point of departure, as well as having helped to perpetuate, several assumptions about families in general and about money in families specifically. One such assumption is that there exists little or no variation within families regarding how they handle finances, consumption and the allocation of resources between family members. A second assumption is that resources are shared equally among family members. A third assumption that follows on the first two is that all family members enjoy (or suffer) the same standard of living. The ‘logical’ conclusions of these assumptions are that poverty and deprivation are only experienced by members of poor families, and that no members of non-poor families experience poverty (Millar and Glendinning 1989: 375). A considerable body of research during the last few decades has, however, shown that this is not always the case. The focus on the family unit is in one sense quite logical since it is one of the major institutions upon which contemporary societies are structured. However, this focus conceals the fact that income is earned and spent by individuals and ignores the inner workings and structure of families. As Delphy and Leonard have pointed out, studies on the family 7 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


still treat these units as if their only economic relationship were with the outside; as if families were economic unities, within which everyone is equal and everyone does the same sorts of things and gets the same share of resources. In other words, households are taken as the basic units from which one starts – as if they had no prior internal structures. (Delphy and Leonard 1992: 19) The family is of course an important economic unit in society; however, by treating the family/household as if it were an individual, ‘the household has become a sort of black box, within which the transfer of resources between earners and spenders has been rendered invisible’ (Pahl 1989: 4). A consequence of the focus on the family unit and an unquestioning acceptance of these assumptions has been that the actions, experiences and situations of individual family members have been concealed. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that researchers interested in poverty, consumption, money and power in families expressed an interest in that which takes place inside the ‘black box’ and turned their attention to processes that take place within families regarding money, economic matters, (economic) decision making and power. Although the study of money matters in marriage largely began with poverty research, it has also engaged many other researchers in the areas of sociology, gender studies, economics, consumer research and anthropology. This chapter will attempt to provide an overview2 of some of the research that has explored the various aspects of what Singh (1997) has called ‘marriage money’ and what Zelizer (1989) has referred to as ‘domestic monies’ over the last few decades. We hope that this research-historical context of the topic of money in families will set the stage for the research reported in the other chapters in this book. We also hope that it will be evident how the studies reported in this volume build upon and develop previous research on money in families.

Opening up the ‘black box’ of family finances One of the first studies to attempt to open up the ‘black box’ and take a look at the inner life of families was a study of marital power carried out by Blood and Wolfe (1960). This study, carried out in the Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

An Overview: Research on Couples and Money 9

late 1950s in the United States, attempted to examine the effects of spouses’ relative incomes on their decision-making power by measuring the number of decisions made by the wife and husband respectively. They found that women who had an income of their own had greater influence over economic decisions compared with their non-earning counterparts, and that wives’ influence was greater the longer they had been employed. Their findings led to the development of the Resource Theory of Marital Power which links marital power within the household to the income, status and prestige derived from carrying out paid work. It states that the level of control and influence an individual has in decision-making is positively related to the resources, primarily income, that an individual contributes to the family. During the latter half of the twentieth century, Blood and Wolfe’s study and the Resource Theory became the dominant theoretical perspective with which to study marital money matters and several other types of resources in marriage. Although several studies have found some support for Resource Theory, i.e. that women’s control over finances and power in financial decision-making increase as their economic contribution to the family increases (see Ahrne and Roman 1997; Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Cromwell and Olsson 1975; Elizabeth 2001; Fleming 1997; Holmberg 1993; Laurie and Rose 1994; Morris and Ruane 1989; Nyman 1999; Safilios-Rothschild 1976; Scanzoni 1979; Wilson 1987a, b), a number of objections have been raised against it during the last few decades.3 One such objection is that making fewer decisions is not necessarily a sign of less power. It has been pointed out, for instance, that one must take into account the importance of different kinds of decisions (Gillespie 1971). More menial (often timeconsuming and burdensome) decisions can be delegated by the partner with greater control to the partner with less control while larger and more important (yet fewer) decisions can be reserved for the former. In this respect, making fewer decisions can be regarded as a sign of greater power (England and Kilbourne 1990; SafiliosRothschild 1969, 1970). Another criticism of Resource Theory is that it examines what takes place within families without taking into account the broader social context of families. Structural aspects of gender inequality that can be found in society at large, i.e. in the labor market, also influence power relations in the family (Eichler 1981; Roman and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Vogler 1999). Instead, resources are seen as being ‘randomly distributed individual or personal characteristics rather than as the outcome of patterned inequalities in the wider society’ (Vogler 1998: 689). Many researchers have found Resource Theory to be too simplistic, taking too few variables into account when considering such a complex issue. Since only income is studied, the manner in which the organization of the domestic economy can offset, compensate for or reinforce the effects of household income are ignored (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Feree 1990; Roman and Vogler 1999). Finally, researchers have criticized Resource Theory for neglecting the importance of ideological and cultural factors, i.e. notions of masculinity/femininity, breadwinning, marriage and gender equality. The role of breadwinner is associated with men, for instance, and is in itself a source of status and power; a woman’s income, regardless of size or proportion of total family income has often been regarded as secondary, what Blumberg (1991) refers to as the ideological discount rate (see also Feree 1990; Pahl 1995; Roman and Vogler 1999; Schwartz 1994; Vogler 1998; Zelizer 1989). Several studies of women who earn more than their spouses have in fact shown that even these women find it difficult to translate their greater economic contribution to the family into greater decisionmaking power, and that they tend to play down the fact they earn more than their partner (Brines 1994; Dema 2006; Stamp 1985; Tichenor 1999). These results contradict Resource Theory and suggest that other mechanisms and factors are at work and should be taken into consideration. Other theories that have been used in the research on household money allocation have also included the effects of other factors on power in couples. Exchange Theory and the Theory of Marital Dependency for instance both take as their point of departure the assumption that greater power in decision-making is determined by the range of alternatives available to each partner outside marriage; the partner with access to more alternatives also has the greater power (England and Farkas 1986; Heer 1963). Here, alternatives include such things as public policies, social support from friends or family networks, position in the labor market, etc. These alternatives, or resources, facilitate the ability to exit the relationship, giving the partner with more alternatives more power to steer decisions in his (or her) favor. Hobson’s (1990) discussion is in line with Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


this type of theory. She has discussed how welfare state policies in the Scandinavian countries that facilitate women’s independence also increase their opportunities to exit an unsatisfactory relationship. The real possibility to exit a relationship can in turn provide women with greater power and influence in the relationship over things such as the division of housework, childcare and the allocation of money. A significant upswing in the study of money in couples took place in the 1980s in part as an effect of an increased interest in issues of gender equality and in (a post-Parsonian view of) the family in general. This increased interest in marriage money was accompanied by a shift in the theoretical approaches to the topic. Economists and sociologists interested in money in marriage increasingly began to reject the assumption of equal sharing in marriage.4 The dominance of economic ‘common preference’ models that saw the family as maximizing a single utility function were increasingly challenged by models that allow for the possibility of an unequal distribution of resources and conflicts of interest between family members (e.g. Lundberg and Pollak 1996). Within sociology two quite different yet important lines of research regarding the study of money in marriage evolved: the study of the organization of domestic finances with an emphasis on the control and management of money and the factors influencing these, and the study of the social meaning of money.

Management, control and allocation of money Women’s economic contribution to the household has historically been smaller than men’s, necessitating the sharing of resources – from those who earn to those who do not. This means that families must devise a system of resource allocation and management. A considerable amount of research on money in marriage has focused on gaining an overview and an initial understanding of the processes involved in this sharing. Australian researcher Meredith Edwards (1981) pointed out that it is important to distinguish between the daily management of money and control over it and several researchers have used this differentiation in their work on money in families. Building on earlier research, the work of British researchers Jan Pahl and Carolyn Vogler (individually as well as Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


together) has increased our insight into the black box and furthered our understanding of how couples handle money. An important aspect of this line of research has been the development of a typology of allocation and management systems in household finances that specify the socioeconomic factors that influence management and control, and what the consequences of these systems are for wives’ and husbands’ access to money and consumption. In doing so they have furthered our understanding of management and control, as well as emphasized the significance of distinguishing collective consumption from individual consumption. Management is the implementation of decisions already made (Edwards 1981; Pahl 1989). Fleming (1997: 54) defines management as ‘buying food and other consumer goods on behalf of the family and paying the regular bills’. This does not, however, necessarily mean that the manager has influenced decisions regarding what to buy or derives utility or pleasure from what is bought. In this context it is important to distinguish between purchasing and consumption. The manager of money has been found in studies to be responsible for making ends meet with restricted financial resources, a task that has often fallen on women in low-income families (Pahl 1989: 120; Payne 1991: 35). However, in high-income families, management is often associated with power (control), status and pleasure, and is often carried out by men (Pahl 1989). Control is exercised at the point at which money enters the household and is concerned with control over infrequent but important decisions such as which allocative/management system the couple uses and who has final say in (economic) decisionmaking (Vogler and Pahl 1994). Control over money has been associated with spouses’ relative incomes (Cheal 1990: 307), has been seen as reflecting spouses’ relative power positions within the family (Land 1983) and as reflecting an unequal balance of power in society in general (Wilson 1987b: 200). Björnberg (1993) found a direct connection between how resources are shared and the balance of power between spouses. Edwards (1981) has identified a number of criteria for determining where control lies that have been used by several researchers (e.g. Fleming 1997; Nyman 2002): the freedom each partner has to spend on themselves, the extent to which one partner is expected to justify spending to the other, how free each partner is to spend on items of which the other disCapitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


approves, and who has the final say regarding major purchases (Pahl 1989: 54). Walby (1986) has conceptualized power in terms of the gap between spouses’ levels of consumption. Edwards’ criteria and Walby’s conceptualization highlight the importance of taking access to consumption into account when considering power. Cheal (1990) points out that consumption can be seen as the process by which resources such as money are converted into items with personal and social value. As we shall see below, consumption can in part be a result of which allocation system is used. However, it can also be seen as an indicator of power in couple relationships; the person who can exert more influence over financial decisions, such as how finances are organized in practice (e.g. joint vs. individual bank accounts, management system) and what spending to prioritize, can more easily further his or her own interests. In theory, this analytical distinction between control and management is useful in gaining a better understanding of the workings of household financial organization. In practice, however, the separation of the two concepts is problematic. Pahl (1989: 79) for instance discovered that many of the respondents in her study did not perceive this distinction between control and management. When they did, they often did not share the same definition of them as did Pahl. Control and management are closely related to each other, but also to several other aspects of income allocation, so a great deal of overlapping occurs. Despite the difficulty in operationalizing these two concepts, they are important aspects of intra-household financial organization.

Household management systems Several studies have emphasized the importance of financial management systems for consumption patterns in families. Yet how a couple chooses to organize its finances is seldom planned or discussed; rather it is often a product of the merging of two individuals’ systems of financial management as well as of chance, tradition and gendered norms (Díaz et al. 2004; Dema 2006; Nyman and Evertsson 2005; Nyman 1999; Pahl 1989; Stocks and Wilson 2002). Three factors often discussed as important in determining which system of allocation used by a couple are the income level of the couple, the source of income and culturally defined normative Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


expectations regarding money in couples (Edwards 1981; England and Kilbourne 1990; Gray 1979; Hunt 1980; Pahl 1989). Pahl (1989) developed a typology of financial management systems that has had a considerable impact on the research on intra-household resource allocation. Her categories are based on a number of previously developed typologies (see Pahl 1989: 49–57 for an overview of these) and comprise five basic systems of money management, ‘four of which can be thought of as involving separate spheres of responsibility for household money’ (Vogler and Pahl 1994: 268, see also Pahl 1995; Vogler and Pahl 1993; Vogler 1994). In the joint pooling system, the couple’s funds are pooled and managed jointly by the man and the woman and spheres of financial responsibility are joint. Both spouses have access to all or nearly all household income and all expenditures are paid for from this pool. This system is associated with middle class households with earning wives. In the female whole wage system, the husband hands over his pay to his wife (often keeping a small amount of ‘pocket money’ for himself) and she is then responsible for managing family finances. Once the husband has handed over his pay, this system liberates the husband from economic responsibility and provides him (but not her) with a small sum earmarked as his personal spending money. In theory, this system also gives wives access to personal spending money. However, this system has been found to be common in low-income working-class households that have a strict division of labor between spouses and in which little money is left over for the wife to spend on herself. In the male whole wage system husbands alone have access to and responsibility for managing the family finances, which can mean that non-earning wives may have little or no access to money. The fourth pattern is the housekeeping allowance system, whereby generally the husband gives his wife a set allowance with which she is to pay a part of the family’s expenditures while he retains access to and control over the rest of the money. This system has traditionally been associated with middle-income single-earner families. Non-earning wives have no access to earmarked personal spending money and are responsible for making ends meet within the limits of the allowance. The last model is the independent management system, in which both spouses have an income and each retains access to his or her own income. Spheres of expenditure are kept separate and each spouse is responsible for certain expenses but Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


neither has access to all household money. Pahl’s British study (1989) found that this last group was too small to include in her analysis; however Ahrne and Roman (1997) found that 20 per cent of young couples without children and 25 per cent of older couples without children in Sweden used this system. Research has shown that systems of financial allocation in families do matter for access to money and control. Inequalities in access to personal spending money vary by type of allocative system used. The largest differences between the wife’s and the husband’s access to personal spending money was found among couples using the female pool, the female whole wage and the housekeeping allowance systems, while smallest differences were found in couples using the jointly and male-managed pools (Pahl 1989; Vogler and Pahl 1994; Vogler 1994). Patterns of allocation of money also seem to be associated with total household income. Pahl and Vogler (1994: 284) found that women were more often responsible for making ends meet in households with low incomes. However, when they compared two household types with similar income levels – those using the joint pool and those using the housekeeping allowance system – they found greater inequalities in the latter type, indicating that type of management system is more important than household income. One interpretation of these results is that the strict separation of financial responsibilities in these households has protected husbands’ access to personal spending money while also limiting wives’ access to their husband’s income (Morris 1989). A comparative study of Britain and Sweden (Roman and Vogler 1999) found that the two female-managed systems were associated with low levels of family income while the two male-managed systems and independent management were associated with higher incomes, supporting earlier qualitative studies showing that women more often have the burden of management responsibility when money is tight (e.g. Edwards 1981; Pahl 1989; Wilson 1987a, b). Many researchers have either been inspired by or adopted Pahl’s typology, and some have revised or added to it. Working with a larger data set (SCELI) Vogler and Pahl (1994) for instance found the pooling category to be quite heterogeneous in terms of management practices and found that it could (and should) be divided into three analytically different forms of pooling: wife-managed pool, husband-managed pool and jointly-managed pool, according to Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


who actually managed the joint finances. This finding may mean that ‘in practice husband and wife-managed pools are rather more similar to the male and female segregated systems than they are to the joint pool’ and that they ‘need to be analysed separately, rather than assumed to be similar or the same as each other’ (Vogler and Pahl 1994: 271). Some researchers have introduced a partial pooling system, which describes a system in which a portion of each spouse’s income was pooled while a portion remained in the hands of the earner (Ahrne and Roman 1997; Fleming 1997; Nyman 2002). In a study in New Zealand Fleming (1997) identified seven basic allocation systems based on how one or a combination of the following three principles were put into practice: the principle of a gendered division of responsibilities (gender roles), the principle of common ownership and responsibility – ‘togetherness’, and the principle of individual financial autonomy. The joint pooling system seems to be the system of choice for the majority of married couples.5 In Britain, for instance, approximately 50 per cent of couples use this system (Vogler and Pahl 1994) while the figure for Sweden is 72 per cent (Nyman 2002; Ahrne and Roman 1997 found that 59 per cent used the joint pool in Sweden). In New Zealand, Fleming (1997: 2) found that it was most common for married couples6 to regard ‘household money’7 as jointly owned and to be used for running the home. Many couples associate this system of financial organization with equality and fairness, with a belief in the longevity of the relationship and as a reflection of the ‘togetherness’ seen as vital in the couple relationship (Elizabeth 2001; Nyman 1999, 2003). However, considerable research has shown that unequal sharing also occurs in couples that pool their money (e.g. Burgoyne and Lewis 1994; Dema 2005, 2006; Fleming 1997; Morris 1990, 1993; Nyman 1999, 2003; Pahl 1989; Vogler and Pahl 1993, 1994; Vogler 1998; Wilson 1987a, b). In fact, pooling money may actually facilitate and conceal unequal sharing since equal sharing is assumed and taken for granted, thereby ‘eliminating’ the need to evaluate or discuss the system of money management used (Burgoyne 1990; Hertz 1986; Nyman 1999; Wilson 1987a, b). Independent management has been found to be used by a relatively small proportion of married couples (Pahl 1989; Vogler and Pahl 1994); however, others have found it to be more common among re-married couples (Burgoyne and Morison 1997; Lown and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Dolan 1988; Treas 1993) and cohabiting couples (Glezer and Mills 1991). This system of money management is often regarded as facilitating greater autonomy and control over money since each partner maintains ownership and control over his or her money. A key component of independent management is ‘the notion that earning confers the entitlement to dictate how (that) money is utilised’; it is often ‘implemented to undermine the traditional inequalities within marriages and create egalitarian relationships’ (Elizabeth 2001: 401–2). However, even this system can ‘operate to establish disparities in power (especially) where one partner earns much less than the other’ and especially when associated with a discourse of earner entitlement (Elizabeth 2001: 402–3). This can for instance be done through the establishment of a standard of what is legitimate or reasonable spending which can be conveyed to a partner via critical comments (ibid.: 401). Pahl (2005) has also found that independent management can provide a sense of personal autonomy and freedom, but can also lead to inequality if women’s incomes are lower than men’s (especially if women also have responsibility for paying for childcare). An important aspect of independent management that Elizabeth (2001: 399) points out is that equality in this system ‘is largely defined in terms of equality of monetary contributions and equality of control over one’s own money, rather than equality of access and equality of spending power’. Research has shown that no system of financial organization seems inherently or automatically to guarantee equal sharing and equal access to money and consumption. Several other factors, some of which will be discussed below, have been shown to be at work in influencing sharing.

Control, power, and consumption As pointed out above, an important aspect of money in families is control. The distribution of power in decision-making is crucial in determining access to money and consumption in that it influences which type of management system is used and how consumption needs, both individual and collective, are prioritized and handled. Despite the complexity of it, most researchers interested in money in families have addressed the issues of power and decision-making in couples to some degree and many have found that patterns of Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


control (and management) are important for access to money and consumption (e.g. Burgoyne 1990; Dema 2006; Nyman 1999; Pahl 1989). In order to better understand the relationship between management and control Pahl (1989) constructed a second typology of patterns of control of household income. She isolated the existence of a joint bank account as a relatively objective way of determining who had control arguing that the existence of a joint bank account offers a good measure of the ‘jointness’ of a couple’s financial arrangements since it means at least some degree of sharing (Pahl 1989: 79–87; see also Treas 1993). Wife-controlled pooling was associated with a medium income level and both partners being in paid employment. Pahl found that the more wives in couples that pooled their money contributed to the family’s income, the more likely they were to have control over household finances. Husbandcontrolled pooling was associated with higher levels of income than wife-controlled pooling. Where wives had no earnings, husbands were almost three times as likely to control finances (Pahl 1989: 109). Vogler and Pahl (1994: 274–7) measured control by measuring how much say each partner had in decision-making (both ‘big financial decisions’ and ‘most important decisions made in the household’) and found that control clearly varied with type of financial allocative system used by the couple. Couples using joint or female-managed systems were more egalitarian in that inequalities in decision-making were smallest in these couples, and greatest when male-managed systems were used. Several studies have highlighted the fact that control (and power) can be direct, but that it is just as often, or more often in the context of the family, indirect (e.g. Fleming 1997; Haavind 1984; Holmberg 1993; Nyman 1999, 2003; Pahl 1989; Thagaard 1997). Komter (1989) has adapted Lukes’ (1974) three dimensions of power to the family for use in studies on couples and found that the second and third dimensions – latent power and invisible power – are often at work in couples by, for example, removing questions of money and spending from the agenda. Dema (2006), Eriksson (2003), Nyman (1999) and Vogler (1998) are other researchers who have found this theoretical perspective fruitful. Women often opt to keep the peace in the family by not insisting on changes or by not considering unequal sharing a problem because, for example, it is seen as the man’s prerogative as man to spend and control money. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Haavind (1984) has discussed power as relational and describes the indirect working of power in couple relationships as partly a result of the strong ideology of gender equality that permeates both politics and people’s ideas of gender and couplehood in the Nordic countries. She argues that partners, both women and men, are active in trying to make inequalities in their relationship appear as something else – convenient, rational, practical – in order to avoid being regarded as gender unequal, something that is not acceptable in a society that sees itself as the opposite. Eriksson (2003), Nyman (1999, 2003) and Roman and Vogler (1999) have also discussed the ideology of gender equality in the Nordic countries and its role in concealing inequalities in couple relationships. Conflicting ideologies and their influence on notions of how couples, women and men should be and do can also contribute to tension and to inequality. Women may restrict their own personal spending because they feel less entitled to money than their partner. Differences in feelings of entitlement have been associated with the influence of ideology or norms regarding, e.g., masculinity, femininity, family/couple and breadwinning. The two powerful and competing ideologies of sharing and of earner entitlement that exist side by side in couples can result in ambivalence regarding the right to spend on oneself and in women feeling inhibited about personal spending. Burgoyne (1990) points out that while an ideology of sharing can in theory empower non-earning wives and thereby offset imbalances in economic power, this seldom is the case in reality. She found that non-earning wives who did not see money as theirs were reluctant to spend on themselves. Burgoyne attributed this reluctance to the power of the norm (or ideology) of earner entitlement to money, which can be powerful in influencing the practice of sharing even in couples that claimed to share equally. Nyman found similar results and discusses women’s reluctance to spend on themselves in terms of their responsibility for the domestic sphere, especially for the needs of children (1999), and in terms of notions of men’s ‘natural’ right to money, simply because they are men (2003). Ideological factors, then, can reinforce economic power. They can also, however, at least in theory, offset it (Burgoyne 1990; Pahl 1989; Vogler 1998). In Sweden, for instance, Nyman (1999) found that an awareness of gender equality lies behind couples’ efforts to Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


see to it that both partners had equal access to money. Roman and Vogler (1999) found in a comparative study of Britain and Sweden, for instance, that couples who were more gender equal had a more egalitarian division of control (see also Ahrne and Roman 1997). They also found that Swedish couples were more economically gender equal than their British counterparts in that levels of male control of money were lower in Sweden than in Britain. This can, of course, be discussed in terms of resource theory or exchange theory in that women in Sweden are more economically independent and contribute a larger share of the family’s total income compared with British women. However, their results can also be discussed in terms of the greater prevalence of a male breadwinner ideology in Britain compared to Sweden where it is no longer applicable (see e.g. Björnberg 2000; Ellingsæter 1998). The British study used in this comparison found that a rejection a male breadwinner ideology is a prerequisite for a gender equal way of organizing finances (Roman and Vogler 1999; Roman 2004). The importance of ideology, which was seen as lacking in Resource Theory, has increasingly been included as one of the most important aspects for the organization of couples’ everyday lives in general, and for the allocation of resources and power in particular.

The social meaning of money As all of the studies referred to above have in one way or another shown, access to money and consumption in couples is not always shared equally. The way that couples organize their household money – manage and exercise control over it – has been shown to influence equal sharing and consumption. However, another fruitful line of research that has addressed money and sharing in families focuses on the social meaning of money. Several early studies touched on this aspect of money in couples but it was not until the 1990s that it became the focus of a few important and influential studies. Viviana Zelizer’s (1989, 1994) historical research on money and its different meanings and uses was instrumental in bringing this view of money to the fore. Her work (and that of others) has investigated how money has been regarded from a utilitarian perspective that considers it as suitable for use in an impersonal and rational market economy. In this respect, it is entirely possible to Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


freely exchange one ‘type’ of money for another (McCloskey 1987). However, the phenomenon of ‘earmarking’ money from certain sources or for certain purposes illustrates that this is not always the case. Zelizer argues that money can have a variety of meanings that regulate how it is, and can be, used. In this respect it makes sense to speak of monies. At the heart of this line of research is the rejection of money as only an impersonal, homogenous and neutral medium of exchange (Blumberg and Coleman 1989; Burgoyne 1990; Gullestad 1984; Pahl 1989; Zelizer 1989, 1994). Money is instead conceptualized as personal, heterogeneous and subjective. It is ‘not only legal tender it is also emotionally tender’ (Wilson 1999: xi). It cannot be conceptualized free from external influences. It has been argued that money must be seen in its social context and that ‘values and social relations reciprocally transmute money by investing it with meaning and social positions’ (Wilson 1999: xv) and it should be seen as ‘profoundly influenced by cultural and social structures’, of which the earmarking of money for certain uses is an example (Zelizer 1989: 18). Money has also been described as carrying ‘emotional baggage that severely hampers its operation as a neutral medium of exchange’ (Wilson 1999: xv). In addition to being influenced by cultural, social and relational factors, money ‘can be seen as a medium used in giving meaning to family relationships, activities and situations’ and it ‘constructs various family acts and situations and loads them with meaning’ (Nyman 2003: 83). This line of research on money in families has as its point of departure the assumption that money in families is embedded in the social context of the family and that it is ‘shaped by, but is also a shaper of, married couples’ social relationships’ (Nyman 2003: 80). Several aspects (partly overlapping) of the social meaning of money have been discussed in the literature. We will focus here on four of these aspects: sources of money, defining money, perceptions of ownership of money and the visibility of money. One important characteristic of the social meaning of money is where money comes from. Pahl (1989), for instance, found that (men’s) overtime pay and bonuses were more likely to be regarded as belonging to the earner and therefore withheld from the joint money and from the wife, thereby increasing men’s access to a portion of the household income. Pahl also found that women’s and men’s incomes could be regarded quite differently: Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Men’s income was more likely to be seen as pertaining to the family than was women’s income. However, both men and women were more likely to see their partner’s income as belonging to the individual, while they preferred to see their own income as belonging to the family as a whole. (Pahl 1989: 126) Gullestad (1984) and Edwards (1981) found similar results in Norway and Australia respectively. These findings have been discussed in terms of the status and power that breadwinning bestows; regarding one’s own income as belonging to the family is a way of highlighting one’s role as breadwinner, thereby increasing one’s own status and power. Despite this, and despite the fact that women’s income in actuality is often necessary for maintaining or raising a family’s standard of living, men’s income is still often seen as being the family’s primary source of income, regardless of the size of the women’s economic contribution (Pahl 1989; Schwartz 1994; Vogler 1998; Zelizer 1989). These findings illustrate other important aspects of the meaning of money. The visibility of money has for instance been found to be relevant for the balance of power in decision-making, especially for women. Morris (1987) found that when women’s earnings were added to the housekeeping money, they became invisible.8 The invisibility of their economic contribution meant that they received less recognition and credit for their contribution and thereby also less power. Self-esteem and power have been found to decrease when economic contribution was invisible and therefore not recognized, and increase when it was visible (Burgoyne 1990; Hertz 1986; Pahl 1989; 1995). Gullestad (1984) also found that visibility of earnings was important, especially when women’s earnings were smaller than their husband’s. One way women in her study made their earnings visible was to keep them in a separate (own) bank account instead of adding them to the housekeeping money or the pool, while another was to use their money to pay for visible ‘extras’ that the family otherwise would be unable to afford (Gullestad 1984: 269). Nyman (2003) also found that being able to decide when and how to use one’s own money for the benefit of the family, e.g. by buying ‘extras’, was a way women could make money visible and thereby maintain a desired balance of power in the family. Blumberg and Coleman (1989) found that control over ‘extra’, and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


thereby more visible, money granted more power than that afforded by control over money necessary for meeting bare necessities. In terms of gendered differences in control, this implies that women, who more often have control over small incomes (responsibility for making ends meet), have less power than the men who are more likely to control the surplus made possible at higher incomes. Women’s financial contribution itself then is not always enough to grant them the status and power associated with breadwinning. The visibility of their contribution has proven to be one of several vital conditions for this to be the case (Burgoyne 1990; Hertz 1986). Another important social aspect of money, one that has been touched upon above, is how it is defined. Obviously, money can be defined as it comes into the household as, for instance, child allowance, a birthday gift or a Christmas bonus. However, money can be, and often is, redefined. Child allowance may be added to the joint pool of family money and used to pay regular bills. A Christmas bonus may be saved for a summer vacation while a birthday gift in the form of money may be used to pay for a new stove or car repairs. Different kinds of monies entering the household are often transformed, via a process of defining and redefining them – from belonging to the earner to belonging to the family – or for being earmarked for certain uses (Zelizer 1989). Perhaps the most important aspect of defining money is in terms of its ownership. As we saw above, the entitlement and power associated with being the earner/owner of money is strong (see e.g. Burgoyne 1990). Money can be defined as belonging to the individual who earned or received it, or as belonging to everyone in the family. To whom money belongs can, in theory, be redefined again and again. To complicate the matter further, it is important to recognize that the defining of money as ‘mine’ or ‘ours’ is also influenced by two powerful yet conflicting norms that contribute to shaping the ways money and family are perceived and organized in contemporary Western societies9 – the norm that the earner of money owns and controls money, and the norm that money (and other resources) are (to be) shared equally within families (Burgoyne 1990). The routines and rules involved in the process of defining monies – who they belong to and how they should be managed and used – often evolve over time, during the course of the relationship and may be influenced by a number of factors (Nyman and Evertsson 2005). The Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


often unspoken rules that exist for defining monies that are fairly regular and forseeable, e.g. income from paid employment and child allowance payments, may not apply or be put out of play when defining other, more sporadic or unexpected monies, e.g. bonuses, overtime compensation or lottery winnings. Pahl (1989: 126, 1995) for instance found that the latter kind of money was more often regarded as belonging to the individual who earned it, even if regular salaries were consistently defined as joint family money. In the process of defining and redefining money, spouses’ relative power will be of considerable importance since the partner with greater power in a specific situation will have greater influence over how money is defined, and thereby what it should be used for. The balance of power and the outcome in one situation is however not necessarily an indicator of what will happen the next time money needs to be defined. Having the power to define money is an important aspect of influencing how it could and should be used and, in fact, ‘Having power over how money is defined seems to be as important, if not more important, for individuals’ access to money and consumption as the system of money management used’ (Nyman 2003: 92).

Recent developments in the study of money in couples The research discussed above has provided a clearer picture of household money and a firm foundation from which to expand research on the various aspects of it. For despite the fact that we know quite a bit more about money in families now than we did 30 years ago, several questions regarding specific aspects of it still remain. One such question is how money is regarded and handled among cohabiting (i.e. not married) couples. Elizabeth’s (2001) study of cohabiting couples in New Zealand raises the question of whether independent money management, which is more common among this group of couples than among married couples, facilitates autonomy and gender equality in decision-making and access to personal spending money. Her study highlights two aspects of money in couples that are important to delve into further. The one is her focus on a group previously not afforded much attention – cohabiting couples. It has often been assumed that cohabiting couples resemble married couples when it comes to central aspects Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


of their relationship. And indeed, it can be argued that couples who have lived together for a decade or two, have several children together and see themselves as as-married can safely be regarded as similar enough to married couples to justify studying them as such (see e.g. Nyman 2002). However, cohabiting couples are not homogenous as a group and as Elizabeth (2001: 389) points out, ‘cohabitation can be strategically deployed to indicate resistance to some, but not necessarily all, of the conventions of marriage’ and her focus is on ‘a practice of money management – independent money management – that resists assumptions about women’s financial dependence and powerlessness within heterosexual relationships’. Her results indicate that independent money management, contrary to often taken-for-granted assumptions, does not necessarily or automatically lead to women’s greater financial autonomy and power in decision-making or in access to personal spending money. She found that inequalities emerged in ‘other guises’, despite the seemingly egalitarian character of the system. Personal consumption could be subject to opinions, comments and influence from a partner despite the separateness of partners’ finances. In addition, how collective and personal consumption respectively were defined was important in determining individuals’ access to personal consumption (Elizabeth 2001, Nyman 2003). Differences in partners’ incomes can open up inequalities in another respect as well. If a higher earning partner pays for the consumption of the lower earning partner, an ‘economy of gratitude’ (Hochschild 1989) can evolve, putting the lower earner in a situation of being beholden to the higher earner, opening up for the continued exercise of power in couple relationships (Elizabeth 2001; Nyman 2003). Burgoyne and Morison (1997) also focused their attention on a sub-group of couples – remarried couples in Britain. This group is interesting because they often have to deal with a complexity, related to ex-spouses and children from previous marriages, that is not present in first marriages. Also, remarried spouses have concrete experiences (good and bad) that contribute to shaping the way money is handled in their second marriage. They found that an unusually large proportion of the couples they interviewed – around half – used independent management, primarily due to a desire to retain control over their own money. They also found less distribution of resources, sometimes intentionally, than in first marriages. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Finally, they found that the same inequalities found by studies on first-married couples – that the man owned and had control over more of the household’s wealth – also applied in remarried couples. Similar results were found in a Swedish study of elderly LAT (living apart together) couples who were not married or cohabiting, but who considered themselves to be a couple. They found that women in these relationships took the initiative in keeping finances as well as residences, time and social networks separate from those of their partner in order to maintain full control over them (Ghazanfareeon Karlsson and Borell 2002, 2005). It was important for them to keep ownership clear and boundaries explicit in order to maintain their independence, financial and otherwise, in relation to their partner. Yet another interesting avenue of inquiry that has emerged from the earlier research on money in couples is the study of new forms of money and what these mean for the internal organization of money in couples. Pahl’s (1999) study of ‘invisible money’ sets out to ‘explore the ways in which individuals and couples are using new forms of money such as credit cards, smart cards, telephone and internet banking’: the ways in which these constrain or enhance the access that individuals have to money, the connection between electronic money and other factors such as income level, employment status and gender, and the implications of these new forms of money for policy (Pahl 1999: vii). Among her many findings Pahl found that the new forms of money and banking were contributing to changes in the ways in which couples control and manage money. For instance, in some ways, the use of new forms of money could be used to conceal spending from one’s partner. Men were also found to be more inclined to be knowledgeable about and use the new technologies involved in new forms of money, which she saw as contributing to changing the gender balance of power regarding money in couples. She also found clear patterns of exclusion from the electronic economy that reflected income, employment status, gender and age. Elizabeth’s study of cohabiting couples, Burgoyne and Morison’s study of remarried couples, Ghazanfareeon Karlsson and Borell’s studies of elderly non-cohabiting couples and Pahl’s study of new forms of electronic money are examples of research that takes as its point of departure the empirical and theoretical insights produced Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


in earlier research on money in families, but that take these a step further in order to answer new questions and open new areas of inquiry. Although the focus in these studies is on specific subgroups of couples or on specific aspects of money, they can shed light on, and increase our insight into the workings of families and couples in regard to a variety of aspects of couple relationships including money and finances, as well as on a more general level. They can also help to articulate new questions that arise out of new insights into well researched areas. However, new ways that couples and families are conceptualized and organized, changing circumstances in couples’ everyday lives, as well as changes on a grander scale in society in general, also give rise to questions we have not thought to ask before.

Our contribution It is clear that the link between money and couples is a very complex social phenomenon. Previous research has emphasized variables such as income differentials between members of a couple, educational background, social class, etc. There has been less work on clarifying the process through which couples make economic decisions, or the consequences of that process for the construction of the couple as such, and of the individual identity of each partner. Rather than analysing classical variables, we are interested in the processes and dynamics that govern the interaction of couples in relation to money issues. We have tried to do that in previous publications (Nyman 1999, 2003; Díaz et al. 2004; Dema 2005, 2006; Ibáñez 2006; Dema and Díaz 2004) and we also try to do it in the ensuing chapters, where we look into the strategies used by couples as they negotiate and renegotiate financial issues throughout their relationship. Similarly, we have also considered the formulae by which couples make their economic decisions as an object of analysis. We have tried to understand the significance given by couples to money issues as well as the processes of construction of their relationships through the management of financial resources. In fact, in the methodology for data collection, we have tried to gather samples of those processes by fostering the participation of the interviewed couples in real live negotiations on some occasions. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


The research methods we have used are qualitative. Because of the complexity and dynamism of the practice of household finances, we believed that our study demanded this methodology, as we have explained in detail in the methodological chapter. In addition, we have interviewed the members of the couples separately and together, as opposed to the procedure of previous qualitative studies based on an interview of only one of the partners. We have obtained information from both members of each couple, both when they constructed a common discourse as a couple and, individually, when only one of the partners was present. Another contribution of our work is its focus on multiple countries. The cultures of the three countries, though all Western democracies, are different enough to lead to some interesting speculation about trends within and across different cultures and welfare states. Most previous work on this topic has been on single countries, or on comparisons of northern European countries. We would urge further work in countries even more different in the future. And finally, as we explained in the introduction to this book, during the last several decades, important structural changes have taken place in family relationships in Western countries. The massive incorporation of women into the labor market has been a significant social trend and is considered a key element of the process of late modernity, by scholars such as Beck et al. (1994). There are many interesting empirical and theoretical questions to explore in the link between couples and money. We have already started this investigation in previous publications, analysing issues such as individualization (Díaz et al. 2004), the inequalities and power relations in dual-income couples (Dema 2005, 2006) and the nature of negotiation (Nyman and Evertsson 2005; Stocks and Wilson 2002) among others. The present volume is a continuation, and to some extent, a culmination of our work together.

Notes 1 In the literature, several terms are used to discuss money in couples and in the strictest use of them they are naturally not entirely interchangeable. However, for the sake of simplicity we will in this chapter as well as in the other chapters in the book discuss money in: the household, the couple, the family and in marriage (the latter even used to refer to as-married cohabitants). These terms will be used synonymously to refer Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


2

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

to money in the couples studied by the authors of the chapters of this book as well as to discuss previous research. We cannot here provide a complete summary of all previous and current research on the topic. We will, however, review some of the more ‘classical’ and influential studies in the field that have inspired the research in this book and also refer to some of the newer studies on the topic. The emphasis in this overview will be on sociological research on various aspects of money in marriage. See, for example, Morris 1990, Vogler 1998 and Roman and Vogler 1999 for overviews of a critique of resource theory. The importance of the women’s movement and the growth of a feminist perspective in research that developed in the 1960s and 1970s should not be underestimated as factors that were instrumental in the development of an increased interest in the family, money in marriage as well as the shift in theoretical orientation. Blumberg (1991: 122) and Singh (1997: 51) point out that money is more often separate than joint in marriage. However, Singh warns against making generalizations based on studies and constructs of money with a ‘Western’ bias. Fleming’s study included the three main population groups in New Zealand – the indigenous M–aori, P–akeh–a, those of British and European descent and those who have immigrated from various Pacific Island countries. The majority of New Zealand’s population, 79.5 per cent consist of P–akeh–a. She found considerable differences between these three groups. However, P–akeh–a traditions and values are reflected in legal and administrative systems of New Zealand. The examples given here are for the study of P–akeh–a. Singh (1997: 1) distinguishes between household money and family money. Household money is ‘available for day-to-day requirements of the people living in a particular household’ while family money refers to ‘money available to a particular family group who may or not may all live in the same household’. For the P–akeh–a, a household usually consists of parents and their dependent children. The term invisible money has been used in different ways by other researchers. Coria refers to smaller sums used to cover small daily expenses, usually by the woman, as invisible money, because its management leaves no traces and because the type of decisions associated with it allow little freedom of choice. The satisfaction generated by the management of these amounts is quite limited, since it tends to be hardly valued at all (Coria 1991: 84). Also, Pahl refers to money that exists within the electronic economy as invisible, in contrast to cash which is ‘real money’ and visible. Fleming (1997) points out that Western societies can include several different groups, e.g. different ethnic groups in New Zealand, that can have very different ways of regarding and handling money.


2 Our Methods Capitolina Díaz, Charlott Nyman and Janet Stocks

We began our study with an interest in understanding the praxis of dual-earner couples as they manage the many and various aspects of their daily lives. Because we are interested in processes, and the meanings of these processes and practices to the individuals and couples involved, we wanted to take advantage of the possibilities that a qualitative design would offer (Ibáñez 1979; Jayaratne and Steward 1991). People and institutions (social subjects) are open systems. To analyse open systems – in this case couples – with the aim of understanding their complex interactions, changes, self-perceptions, etc. requires qualitative methods. For our purposes, we decided that the best method was the use of interviews. In general, the use of qualitative methods allows us to unveil social emergence (the appearance of new traits), whereas quantitative methods are best to establish the statistical distribution of a given set of social features. Once the multifaceted characteristics of a social phenomenon are understood and the bases for theorization established, statistical analysis can be used in order to quantify the distribution of the aforementioned characteristics in a given population. The effectiveness of statistical analysis implies a sort of conceptual closure, and this is the price to pay for knowledge acquired through quantitative methods. In a way, qualitative methods provide the heuristic drive that sets forth the set of distinctions upon which quantitative methods can be applied. We chose a qualitative in-depth interview approach in order to give couples the opportunity to speak for themselves. In doing so, they could provide us, the researchers, with a broad and deep view of their everyday lives that would reveal some of the complexity 30 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Our Methods 31

and ambiguity that characterize the lives of individuals and couples. Our hope was that, by covering a broad array of topics that are inherent in couples’ everyday lives, we could gain a greater understanding of how the various aspects of their lives are perceived and organized, as well as of the relationships between them. In addition, the open and narrative character of the interviews would allow insight into some larger and more abstract issues that play a role in the lives of men, women and couples today, e.g. power, intimacy and gender equality. Our aim was to understand how couples proceed to establish the practices of daily life, why they make the decisions that they do, and through this, how gender is constructed in interaction with the process of constructing or ‘doing’ couple. In our interviews we learned a great deal about many aspects of the lives of our couples. In this book we focus on the ways in which money – earning it, managing it, making decisions about it, and most importantly imbuing meaning in it – interacts with doing gender and doing couple. Through the analysis of the interviews, we have attempted to capture the couples’ ‘meanings in motion’ about their own relationships (Diaz 2002: 253). The project Couples, money and the process of individualization was from the start an international one. It was initiated by the special research project on Reflexive Modernization under Ulrich Beck at the University of Munich and initially funded by the German National Science Foundation (SFB 536, Project B6). This volume represents three of the countries that took part in the international collaboration – Sweden, Spain and the US. There were two reasons for an international approach, one substantive and the other methodological. The first reason for the inclusion of each country was to represent a variety of social welfare regimes and cultural/legal contexts. The aim was not to do a comparison of the impacts of these regimes on the couples we interviewed, but to include a range of contexts in which dual-earner couples in Western countries, during late modernity, do couple (among other things). Couple relationships do not happen in a vacuum. The inheritance systems, religious beliefs, political regimes, social and family network structures, gender expectations, and so on, create a background that influences the process of doing couple and of individualization within the couple. The methodological reason for an international approach was that the investigation of social meaning has a particular danger Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


of including – unconsciously – the assumptions of the researcher derived from her or his knowledge of her or his own country and experiences (Duncan 1999: 3). We are not arguing here that neutrality can be achieved with an international research team. We are not so naïve. We accept that human beings as human subjects – not objects – can only be subjective, but we also understand that the laden and unconscious assumptions of researchers from one country can be challenged by researchers from another country and further insights can be gained. As Simon Duncan also indicates (ibid.: 5), ‘comparative research allows a check on generalization, sometimes by subverting the taken for granted, and politically exposes “how things can be different.”’

A common point of departure: the sample and the interview protocol We met as an international team for the first time in the autumn of 1999 and began conducting interviews, in a pilot round in 2000.1 We met once or twice a year between 1999 and 2005 in order to construct an interview protocol, discuss our data, debate data analysis approaches, and finally, write this book. In between our meetings we exchanged email, working papers and summaries of couples. Comparability was a central issue in our initial discussions. The first item we discussed was the population from which we would find couples to interview. We decided that we would focus on urban couples in industrialized areas: Munich (Germany), Pittsburgh (USA), Oviedo (Spain) and Umeå (Sweden). All of our couples would be, roughly speaking, from the ‘middle class’ and they would all be dual-earner couples. It did not matter for our sample whether or not the couples were married, just that they considered themselves to be a couple. We developed a draft interview protocol and in each country interviewed three or four couples in a pilot round. Taking into consideration what we learned both from the pilot interviews and from our initial analysis of the data, we constructed a final interview protocol.2 Once we had agreed on a common protocol, each country interviewed eight dual-earner couples that shared the same characteristics. In each group of eight couples in each country, Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Our Methods 33

• four of the couples had children and four did not • four of the couples were between the ages of 20 and 40, four between 40 and 60 • four of the couples had been together for less than five years, four for more than 10 years. Couples were recruited to the study in a variety of ways. In the US and Sweden, couples fitting the common criteria were sought via flyers posted in public places, paid advertisements in local newspapers and circulars. Snowball sampling was used in all countries – friends, acquaintances and/or previously interviewed couples were asked if they could recommend couples meeting our sample criteria who might be willing to participate in our study. None of the couples interviewed were friends or acquaintances of the interviewers. Each couple was first interviewed in their home together, as a couple, by a team of researchers that included one male and one female sociologist. Several weeks after the couple was interviewed we returned to interview the couple again separately as individuals. The reason for the time lag between the couple interview and the individual interviews was so that the researchers could review the couple interview (by listening to the tape or reading the transcript) and develop questions for the individuals that would elaborate on (from the individual’s perspective) and/or clarify issues that came up in the couple interviews. The purpose of the couple interview was primarily to allow the couple to express themselves as a couple; the couple perspective was the main focus. In addition, extra insight into the couple relationship was made possible because researchers were also able to observe the interaction that took place between the woman and the man during the course of each interview. The individual interview focused instead on the individual’s perspective, perceptions and experiences regarding the areas that were discussed. Once the requirements of similarity and comparability were met and each country interviewed eight couples to fulfill the established criteria, there was some additional research in some of the countries. For example, the Spanish team in addition to interviewing the specified eight couples, also interviewed four single-earner couples that were based on the breadwinner/housewife model. The US team revisited their couples three years after the initial interview and conducted a follow-up interview with each couple (no individual Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


interviews were done during the second round). In addition, one of the pilot couples in the US was a same-sex couple. The complete sample for the US, Spain and Sweden is as follows: Spain • • • •

pilot: 4 couple and 8 individual interviews main sample: 8 couple and 16 individual interviews housewife: 4 couple and 8 individual interviews 16 couples, 48 interviews all together.

US • • • •

pilot: 4 couple and 8 individual interviews main sample: 8 couple and 16 individual interviews follow-up: 8 couple interviews 12 couples, 44 interviews all together.

Sweden • pilot: 3 couple and 5 individual interviews (one of the men declined an individual interview) • main sample: 8 couple and 16 individual interviews • 11 couples, 32 interviews all together. The couples analysed in this book are those included in the main sample. In the case of the US, the follow-up interviews are also included. We were interested in exploring a variety of issues in the lives of couples interviewed. One reason for such a broad approach was that we believed that all of these areas are central to the couple’s everyday lives, and for their lives together as couples. Also, we found that it was difficult to focus on only a few of these areas since they tend to bleed into and influence one another. The main areas of discussion included in the couple and individual interviews were: • Money • Careers/education • Couple relationship and its meaning Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Our Methods 35

• • • •

Housework Children Leisure time and relationships with family and friends Sex and intimacy.

The interview protocol (see Appendices A, B) that was developed was used as a guide for the researchers. Initial questions in each area were meant to open discussion on each topic so that a narrative could unwind, largely directed by the couple (or the individual in the case of individual interviews). We were especially interested in the story of how each couple became a couple and considerable space was given to this narrative at the beginning of each couple interview. A number of prompting questions appear on the protocol simply as a reminder to the interviewers of topics that we were interested in exploring. Often the couple’s answers to our initial questions would cover many of the prompts, so these questions were not asked explicitly. Minor adjustments were made to the interview protocol as it was translated into the language of each of our countries to suit the particular circumstances of that country. After the narrative interview, each individual was asked to complete a demographic survey in order to provide us with basic information regarding our research participants. This survey included questions about age, income, family of origin, savings, debt, etc. The demographic survey can be found in Appendix C. The couple interviews took on average three to four hours to conduct, with a range of just over one hour to about just over four hours. Individual interviews tended to be shorter, averaging two hours each, with a range of one to about three hours. Follow-up interviews conducted by the US team lasted on average 11/2 hours. In most cases, interviews took place in the homes of the respondents. This gave us a view into the life of the couple – we could see something about their economic status, their interests, and so on. In a few cases, interviews were done in other places, e.g. at the university or the interviewee’s place of work. All interviews were transcribed in their entirety and verbatim, using a common format that indicated pauses and other utterances (such as laughs and ums) and it was these texts that were then analysed by the country teams. Because we could observe, during the interview, and capture, during the transcription process, the Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


ways in which the couple interacted – who spoke first, who deferred to whom, how stories were told, and how individual interviews contrasted with the couple interviews – we could also gain insight into the couple interaction. The interviews were long and detailed enough that we were able to see the couple interaction in real time, unscripted and unrehearsed. It was obvious to us that at least some couples wanted to present themselves in a particular way (e.g. as a happy couple, as always agreeing on important issues, as gender equal), but in working out, together and separately, answers to our inquiries, we were able to glimpse a more complex story. The major advantage of the couple interviews was that each couple could construct themselves as a couple during the interview. The couple interview provided the possibility of a basis of analysis not only of how couples do gender and do couple on the narrative content of the interviews, but also on the interactional content. The interaction during the couple interview helped us form a more nuanced view of the couple and helped us to better understand the narrative. When the couple were presented with a hypothetical dilemma, as part of the interview, to which both partners were asked to agree, we could observe and register the couple interaction. It provided the researchers with another way to understand the narrative and showed in real time how the couple ‘does couple’, that is, how each partner accepts or challenges the other’s point of view, argues his/her own point of view, and negotiates to form a common understanding. Couples typically responded very positively to the interviews. We asked couples, as we finished up the interviews, if they would be willing to be interviewed again in approximately three years and all couples responded that they would indeed be willing to be interviewed again. We found that our research participants enjoyed talking about themselves. We as interviewers sometimes felt that we were intruding in the lives of these couples as we initiated discussions that the couples, at least sometimes, had never explicitly had with each other and this became a fairly extended topic of discussion in our international meetings. Because we prompted respondents to discuss areas of their everyday lives together that they previously had not discussed explicitly, we were interfering in a very concrete way in the lives of the couples. Several of the interviewers can recount experiences from the interviews in which perceptions Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Our Methods 37

were articulated and problems aired for the first time. In some cases this was experienced somewhat uncomfortably by respondents and interviewers. By contributing to bringing issues out into the open interviewers also contributed to respondents’ increased awareness. Although we were all in agreement about the fact that this kind of interviewer effect is problematic in several respects, we also agreed that it is also impossible to completely avoid. In order to protect the integrity of the respondents, we made it very clear to them (before, during and after the interviews) that they were under no obligation to answer questions that made them uncomfortable. All of the couples were informed in advance of the aim of our study and of their rights as participants in it. They were also informed3 that although we would do everything in our power to protect their identities and their integrity during the various stages of the research project, the risk that partners would be able to identify each other in published material existed. In addition, they were also told that they could contact the interviewers at a later date to clarify a response or to request that information not be used by us, and given the relevant telephone numbers and email addresses. All in all respondents however did not seem to find their participation in the interviews to be a problem. In fact, they seemed to find the topics interesting and in some cases even regarded it as positive that they had the opportunity to discuss the topics. Overall, the end result (for interviewers as well as for respondents) was mainly a positive experience affording valuable information about several aspects of couples’ lives.

Analysis of the interviews During the initial stages of the international collaboration, and for the sake of comparability, the aim was that all four countries would use the same method of analysis. The German sociologists who participated in the project following the German tradition of Objective Hermeneutics (Wernet 2000) suggested that Sequential Analysis would be an appropriate analytic method. After a seminar on this method during one of our project meetings (Autumn 2000), led by Monica Wohrab-Sahr, the other three country teams agreed to work with the method during the subsequent months. The result was a report on a case study from each country, as well as lengthy discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the method. In the end, it was clear Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


that not all of the country teams believed that this method of analysis was a viable one, partly for practical reasons, but also for reasons having more to do with the method itself. The method seemed to some of the researchers to lead to a very psychoanalytic interpretation of the couple, an interpretation that we, as sociologists, did not feel adequately trained to carry out. We also developed a common set of codes (see Appendix D) for analysing the interviews and agreed that we would all use the qualitative analysis software program Atlas.ti as our coding software. These codes were developed in reference to the themes in our interview protocol and to themes that we saw emerging as we started to work with our data. In the end we did not use the codes extensively, but they did help us identify portions of the interviews on which we would focus in our analysis of intriguing themes that were emerging from the data. The analysis of our data, then, proceeded with each country team looking at their own interviews in roughly the following way. Several of the themes that emerged from our work with Sequential Analysis and also with our initial forays into coding the interviews were interesting. With these themes in mind, several readings of the couple interviews were done in order to determine whether these themes were present in more than one couple interview. Passages of the interviews that seemed particularly relevant to one theme or another were then marked so that the team could focus on these passages in understanding the emerging themes. In one respect these themes emerged from the interviews themselves. In another respect however, they can be seen as theoretical since the topics/ themes independence, individualization, gender equality, and money were all included in our theoretical framework as well as in the interview protocol. Subsequent readings of the couple and individual interviews were aimed at identifying different aspects and examples of how themes (e.g. money and independence) were related to one another. The passages that each team identified eventually became the subject of discussions and further analysis. The interpretation process aimed at letting the respondents’ words and stories take center stage, at letting their own understandings of them take precedence. During this part of the analysis we also paid attention to interactional elements such as who tended to take the lead in answering questions, who interrupted whom, and so on. In this phase the team members discussed and debated how the passages could be Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Our Methods 39

interpreted, what themes were emerging across different couples, and what issues and themes were worthy of sharing and discussing with our international colleagues and developing in our written work. Attempts at understanding these words and actions however also meant that interpretation was theoretical, i.e. various theoretical perspectives were used to help the researchers interpret and understand what the respondents told us. In each country chapter examples and passages are included that were seen as most effectively illustrating the main points of the theme discussed in the chapter. We call our approach ‘team analysis’ because its novelty consists of the interpretation of the interview narrative by a team, working together, rather than individual coders working independently and aiming for inter-coder reliability, as is more typically the case with the analysis of qualitative data. And because we included not only the transcribed narrative in our analysis, but also the interactional elements of the interview, we felt that we arrived at a more nuanced interpretation of couple interaction and the creation of meaning than could be accomplished using other analytical approaches. Although this approach was influenced by our exposure to Objective Hermeneutics, it was not faithful enough to some of the important underlying principles of that technique to claim that we had used that procedure in the analysis of our interviews. Team analysis is in the tradition of interpretive sociology, based on the collective and interactive processes through which a team of researchers interprets the discourse produced in the artificial social context of the interview. A positive aspect of using team analysis in the interpretation of this type of qualitative data is that to reconstruct the couples’ lives through their narratives ‘requires a different way of seeing, in the light of which common-sense knowledge is reconstructed as a form of bias’ (Oakley 2000: 22). Using team analysis, the bias of one analyst’s ‘common sense’ can be challenged by other analysts present.

Notes 1 As we developed the interview protocol, we took into consideration the debate on qualitative methods and feminist literature on interviewing, particularly that of Ann Oakley (1981, 2000) and Marjorie L. DeVault (1999) Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


2 Both in the design of the interview protocol and in the analysis of the interviews we attempted to avoid the seven problems of sexism identified by Margrit Eicheler (1987), namely: androcentricity, overgeneralization, gender insensitivity, double standards, sex appropriateness, familism and sexual dichotomism. 3 In all countries respondents were informed in writing and orally.


3 Elusive Independence in a Context of Gender Equality in Sweden Charlott Nyman and Lasse Reinikainen

Introduction An economically independent woman refers to a woman who is employed and can support herself; she is economically independent of a man. An economically independent man does not refer to a man who is economically independent of a woman, but to a man who is wealthy enough that he can live off of his wealth. (SOU 1998: 6, p.15; authors’ translation) This quote from the final report from the Swedish Commission on Women’s Power1 underlines the different meanings and implications that economic independence can have for women and men. For centuries ideas about individual freedom, independence, the right to vote and to participate in public and economic life have been associated with men.2 It was not until the early twentieth century that these came to be associated with and granted to women in most countries in the West; in Sweden women gained national suffrage in 1921. Economic independence has been a concept reserved for men while women’s economic dependence has been taken for granted. As a result of increased industrialization and urbanization, an ideology (and ideal) that included complementary roles for women and men, and women’s economic dependence on a breadwinner husband, spread during the 1930s and reached its peak in the 1950s. An increased demand for women in the workforce, rising wages for women (in relation to men’s) and ideas of women’s liberation contributed to a significant increase in women’s labor market activity in many European countries and in North America. 41 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


For many women earning an income of their own and having their own money (perhaps for the first time) meant at least a certain degree of economic freedom and independence. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, women’s employment is commonplace.3 In Sweden, for instance, in 2003 73 per cent of women between the ages of 20 and 64 were gainfully employed4 and economic independence for women and men is stated as an explicit political goal as part of efforts to achieve gender equality (SCB 2004: 7). In light of this historical development it is not surprising that money and economic independence can mean different things for women and men. The main focus of this chapter is to investigate how women use money and family finances as a tool through which to create or maintain economic independence. We have chosen to focus on women because the analysis revealed that men do not seem to use money and finances in this way. Our second aim is to discuss how the respondents can also use money and family finances as a means by which to ‘do’ couple. Whether the results we find can be said to be specific to Sweden is difficult to say; perhaps the same tendency can be found in other countries as well. However, it is likely that the Swedish context, with its strong emphasis on economic independence and the widespread acceptance of the ideal of gender equality, plays a role in forming the expectations and actions of women and men. In the following section, we will discuss a few general contexts that we feel are relevant for understanding the different meanings and uses of money in establishing economic independence and doing couple.

Important contexts for understanding economic independence Economic independence is often regarded as one important aspect of adulthood. In Sweden, it is also regarded as a central aspect of gender equality. The focus on the importance of establishing oneself as economically independent can also be seen as one aspect of independence in a more general sense, as a part of the process of individualization that has been taking place in the West over the last few decades as well as part of the move towards an ongoing transformation of intimacy (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Beck et al. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Elusive Independence in a Context of Gender Equality in Sweden 43

1994; Giddens 1991, 1992). Giddens depicts the transformation of intimacy as a movement towards what he calls the ‘pure relationship’, which he describes as freed from ‘external criteria’ and as existing ‘solely for whatever rewards that the relationship can deliver’ (Giddens 1991: 89–98). Reflection on the form and nature of intimate relationships becomes necessary when women and men are freed from the bonds of traditional gendered norms, responsibilities and obligations. In modern couple relationships, active choices become imperatives and love and intimacy are expressed through communication as opposed to via gendered acts (Bauman 2003; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1991, 1992; Struening 2002). Equality between partners and a democratization of intimacy is seen as prerequisites for the pure relationship to evolve. These developments require that both women and men have the individual resources necessary to make individual choices and that structural factors also facilitate this. Individual economic independence is important for individuals’ possibilities to choose freely and in this respect it is also vital for the continued transformation of intimacy (Giddens 1992).5 The notion of economic independence is however somewhat problematic when considered in the context of couple relationships. In couple relationships individuals will often voluntarily sacrifice a part of their independence, economic and otherwise, in exchange for the benefits a couple relationship can offer. In fact, for many, sharing the good and the bad is at the very heart of what it means to be a couple. Women and men accept and, to varying degrees, expect that their partner will take their wishes and needs into account. In fact, that married partners should arrange their life together so that both have the same economic standard is stipulated in the Swedish marriage legislation (Insulander-Lindh and Thunberg 1996). For the majority of heterosexual (as well as many non-heterosexual) couples establishing a family, whatever form it may take, is still considered to be a joint project that requires joint effort, sharing and compromise (Bäck-Wiklund and Bergsten 1997; Björnberg and Kollind 2003; Nyman 1999; Syltevik 2000; Weeks et al. 2001). In this process a certain degree of individual control over several areas of life, including money and family finances, may have to be relinquished. However, a large body of research has shown that women and men can have very different expectations and experiences regarding this aspect of heterosexual couple relationships. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Notions of man and woman, male and female, are important aspects of individuals’ identity formation. However these are also central to how couplehood is constructed. Marriage6 has been described as one of the most gendered social institutions in that its very essence and point of departure is that a man and a woman live together as gendered individuals (Haavind 1984; Holmberg 1993; Thagaard 1997). Norms regarding heterosexual couple relationships, marriage and family are central to how couples organize and interpret their everyday lives, but also to how individuals interpret each other. They can also conflict with and constitute an obstacle to the transformation of intimacy. Despite increased gender equality and increased freedom to write one’s own biography (Beck and BeckGernsheim 2002), normative and taken-for-granted images of couple relationships and marriage still influence men’s and women’s expectations, roles, and how they organize intimacy and their everyday lives. Although individuals can choose a partner, they are not as free to choose the nature of marriage or heterosexual relationships: ‘the family as a system in space and in time is a social institution which pre-exists them and sets parameters to their choices’ (Delphy and Leonard 1992: 265–6). Marriage as an institution defines men’s and women’s obligations and entitlements in marriage. Women and men learn appropriate gendered behavior, and understandings of this behavior have profound consequences for how marriage is conceptualized and organized, and on how individuals in couples understand each other and themselves (DeVault 1991, Struening 2002). A large body of research has shown that money, time, housework and care responsibilities for children and kin, as well as for emotional aspects of relationships are still organized in quite (gender) traditional ways and are still the main responsibility of women in marriage (Ahrne and Roman 1997; Brannen and Moss 1991; Duncombe and Marsden 1993; Hochschild 1989; Nyman 1999; Pahl 1989; Roman 1999). It can also be argued that couples still express and interpret love in terms of gendered acts and behaviour. Women’s contributions of care and domestic work, and men’s economic contributions and emotional support are still to a large extent used to express, and are understood as, love, intimacy and caring (Brannen and Moss 1991; Duncombe and Marsden 1993; Holmberg 1993; Jamieson 1999; Jónasdottír 1991; Nyman and Evertsson 2005; Pahl 1989). It is important to point out that traditional Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


forms of coupledom can come into conflict with the strong norm of gender equality in the West and especially in the Nordic countries. Here, it is important for women and men to appear gender equal, as individuals as well as in their couple relationships (Eriksson 2003; Haavind 1984; Holmberg 1993). Despite considerable advances regarding gender equality in these countries, however, a gap still remains between attitudes that are in favor of gender equality and practices in couple relationships. A result can be that couples construct complex and intricate ways of presenting themselves as gender equal (Haavind 1984; Eriksson 2003; Nordenmark and Nyman 2003). Money is a central aspect of modern society and unavoidably also in families. Money bestows status and power and grants the owner of it greater freedom to act. In this respect, perceptions of who owns money are important. In modern society the individual who earns or receives money is seen as being the owner of it and, as such, is also seen as having control over it. In the process of becoming and staying a couple money may not be the central focus, but it is certainly an ever-present aspect that plays a role in the couple relationship. The norm of ownership over money does not cease to exist simply because one enters into a couple relationship, but it can be questioned and challenged in this context. Regarding money in couples, an important aspect is the distinction between my money, your money and our money. Another is the balance between economic dependence and independence. Yet a third is the different meanings of money and the different ways that money can be used to give meaning to actions and situations. All three of these aspects are influenced by norms and understandings of the ownership of money. They are also influenced by norms and expectations about what it means to be a couple. For the majority of couples seeing money as owned by one or the other conflicts with ideals that prescribe sharing and togetherness in couples (Burgoyne 1990; Nyman 2002). In this chapter, these aspects of money in couples will be investigated and discussed. More specifically, we will focus the spotlight on what economic independence means primarily for women, how money and economic matters are used in creating it, and also, how money can be a means by which women and men ‘do’ couple. In the following section we provide information about Swedish society that can be helpful in understanding the ways that the Swedish couples understand and use money in the ways they do. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Gender equality and ownership of money from a Swedish perspective Gender equality has been a central goal of Swedish governments for over three decades. The official government definition of gender equality states that women and men should have the same rights, obligations and possibilities in all important areas of life. Women and men should have the same opportunity to achieve economic independence, and to participate in the various aspects of family, political, social and working life.7 Central to this is every individual’s right to economic independence via paid employment. Encouraging and facilitating women’s and men’s participation and equal opportunities and pay in the labor market have been seen as a means by which individuals can attain economic independence and by which gender equality can be achieved. As a result, Swedish women’s income from work is 92 per cent of men’s (SCB 2004: 72). However, even the family has been the target of measures to promote gender equality. Swedish marriage legislation states very clearly that two people who are married are by law required to contribute to the common household according to her/his capacity so that the common joint and personal needs of both are met. Two married individuals have a legal right to the same standard of living and are required to reach agreement on how to best provide for their family (Insulander-Lindh and Thunberg, 1996: 21–4). Exactly how this is to be done is left up to the couple. Measures aimed at facilitating the combination of family and work life have played an important role. The cornerstones of these date back to the 1970s; they are a parental insurance scheme and high quality and subsidized day care.8 One result of these efforts towards gender equality is greater economic independence for Swedish women than for women in many other countries (Roman and Vogler 1999). Another is that men’s active participation in the domestic sphere is expected and taken for granted by a majority of both women and men.9 In Sweden, 78 and 83 per cent of men and women respectively feel both partners should share the responsibility for breadwinning, and 77 and 86 per cent respectively feel that housework should be shared equally (Roman and Vogler 1999). In part as a result of the Swedish state’s active support of the dual-earner model and emphasis on gender Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


equality in all areas of life and society, Sweden has been moving towards a co-provider or dual breadwinner model for the past several decades, both in the actual division of labor as well as in terms of norms and values (Björnberg 1997; Ellingsäter 1998; Lewis 1992). This has meant that women in dual-earner couples have come to be seen (and see themselves) as equals (or near equals) in terms of providing for the family to a larger extent than in many other countries where men in dual-earner couples are still very much seen as, and expected to be, primary earners (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Brannen and Moss 1991; Hakim 1996). It has also meant that an ideology of equality between women and men and an acceptance of every individual’s right to economic independence has become rooted in the official discourse, as well as in the minds of most Swedes; surveys show that the majority of Swedish women and men regard themselves as equal (Ahrne and Roman 1997; Nordenmark and Nyman 2003).

The role of money in creating economic independence and in ‘doing’ couple Although eight (11 counting pilot) couples were interviewed between 2000 and 2001 we will present only three of them below. The different meanings and uses of money that we discuss in this section could also be found to varying degrees in the other couples as well. We have chosen however to limit our analysis here to three couples because we feel that they clearly illustrate the patterns we discuss. Focusing on only three couples allows us to present a richer description and analysis of the ways in which money is used in creating economic independence and coupledom. At an early stage of the analysis of the interviews, several somewhat unexpected (and unsolicited) themes emerged. One such theme was economic independence. In the interviews several of the women brought up economic independence as an issue. That is, they introduced the topic and talked about it in ways that suggest that it is something they think about. The fact that several of the women, but none of their partners, raised the topic during the interviews led us to suspect that women and men may have different relationships to, and perceptions of, their economic situations and economic independence. We discovered that the women had Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


different ways of more or less actively trying to attain or maintain a degree of economic independence. Although their specific circumstances differed considerably, several of the women who raised the topic of economic independence recounted similar stories. One common aspect was their somewhat complex and ambivalent attitude towards accepting economic help from their partners. A second aspect that was present in their stories was the various and dynamic meanings of money. Different monies could be (and were) regarded differently and the way that money could be used was dependent on these different meanings. In addition, money could be used to convey different meanings. In this chapter these themes come together. The stories from the couples presented below show that economic independence, in varying forms and degrees, is a very real concern for these women. They also reveal some of the ways that women use money and finances in an attempt to find an acceptable balance between economic independence and the connectedness that is sought in couple relationships. Finally, they also show how money can be used as a means by which women and men construct themselves as a couple. Below each of the three couples and their situations will briefly be presented. We then go on to discuss some of the aspects we have presented above. Dagny and David Dagny, 32, had lived with her partner David, 33, for about six years when we met them in the summer of 2000. She had just graduated from university and was waiting to start her new job at the end of the summer. They lived in a two-bedroom rented apartment in a nice area, but were looking forward to moving into a house they had recently bought. A few facts about this couple are important to know in order to understand the context that Dagny acts within. One such fact is that for several years she had been living on a federal guaranteed student aid package10 and whatever extra income she could earn by filling in at the job she had before she started her university studies. She also worked at this job during summers. David worked full time and had had a relatively good salary during the five years Dagny was a student. He also had considerable savings, which meant that he had quite a bit more money at his disposal than Dagny did. Also important to know is the fact that Dagny and David kept separate purses, no pooling of income took Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


place. This meant that for several years Dagny has had to pinch pennies to make ends meet while David had very few economic worries. However, the situation was about to change, at least somewhat, shortly after the interviews. David had changed jobs shortly before being interviewed to a job that paid less but that offered more opportunity for personal and professional growth. Dagny would start working soon and would have a salary almost in parity with David’s. Earlier research shows that established couples, whether married or not, consider pooling of income, and sharing in general, to be a ‘natural’ and self-evident aspect of being a couple, and the very foundation upon which the relationship rests (Burgoyne 1990; Nyman 1999). Pooling is in fact the most common form of money allocation among couples in Sweden; two Swedish studies, found that a majority of couples (59 and 72 per cent respectively) pool all their income and an additional 17/19 per cent pool a portion of their respective incomes (Ahrne and Roman 1997; Nyman 2002). Dagny and David deviate from this norm in that they have separate purses. From the interview, it is clear that this is according to the wishes of Dagny and not David: Dagny: We’ve discussed money, a lot in general – about how to solve it… during all the years we’ve lived together we’ve had separate finances. We’ve always shared bills that are common regardless of whether I’ve had five times as little money as you [to David], we’ve divided them up anyway. You [to David] shouldn’t have to sponsor my education because I’m a student. I don’t have much money, but that’s my problem. (C)11 Dagny makes it clear here that she is not prepared to accept that David pays her share of the regular living expenses. Paying her ‘fair share’ of the bills (50 per cent in her case) is important to her even if money is tight, and she does not want David to pay her way, which is made clear below: Dagny: No, but I haven’t wanted to enjoy, or so to speak, live on your assets [to David]. It’s money you’ve received and it’s yours, you know. I just can’t feel joy over mooching off of your money. (C) Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


David however explains that he would prefer to pool income and share his money with Dagny: David: And I haven’t paid many of her bills for her, because of her too, let’s make that clear… she won’t let me pay, that’s for sure. It would have to be an extreme case in that case, because she wants to pay her part. When I gave her money she got really angry you know, because it’s a matter of pride to make it on your own. And that’s also something I’ve had to adjust to. (C) As is evident in the quotes above, Dagny regards David’s money as his and nothing that she has a right to. In fact, accepting money from David is something that Dagny explicitly rejects as an option. David on the other hand has tried to get Dagny to accept his money and economic help many times during their years together. For the majority of couples, this arrangement and Dagny’s seemingly inflexible position on this matter, might seem somewhat odd in light of the duration and form of their couple relationship. However, she is clear on the reason for her position: Dagny: I think it’s really important, money for me is the same as freedom in some way, to be able to take care of myself and have money, it allows you to do a lot, so that’s very important. (W) Being able to pay her own way, manage financially on her own income and not have to rely on someone else is for Dagny a symbol of freedom, of being able to take care of herself. Dagny’s responses indicate that she highly values her economic independence and is something that she puts great effort into maintaining. A central means by which she does this is to turn down David’s offers of economic help, despite the fact that it would alleviate her tight financial situation and allow her a higher standard of living. Dagny’s responses reveal an element of complexity and ambiguity about her perceptions of money and what it symbolizes. Although she talks about money in general in the quote above, it is apparent that when it comes to granting her feelings of freedom and economic independence, not any money will do. She is actually talking about her own money, however little that might be. A contradiction becomes evident if we compare the quote (above) in which she Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


equates money with freedom because it allows her to ‘do a lot’ with her earlier emphasis on economic independence – from David. According to her logic in the above quote, accepting David’s financial help would increase her access to more money thereby increasing her freedom to ‘do a lot’. Turning down David’s offers of economic help leads therefore to less freedom to do more. The fact that she turns her back on this possibility for greater freedom suggests that she does this in order to gain something that she values even more – economic independence. Money for Dagny then symbolized freedom to do more, but also (and it seems, even more so) freedom from dependence. For Dagny there is no contradiction in her actions. Her position is self-evident and logical; taking money from David is just not an option: Dagny: I think it’s the pride that I feel. I learned growing up, to take care of myself … as long as I have money left there’s no reason to take [David’s] money. I actually have a little savings I can use. I think that it’s crazy somehow to accept money [from David] when I have money. I don’t see the logic in it. (W) Dagny regards and defines her own money differently from David’s money. Her money can offer freedom to consume, which at the same time contributes to her economic independence in relation to David. Using David’s money does not seem to have this function for her. His money is instead seen as his, something that she has no given right to simply because they are a couple, and she sees no reason for taking money from him when she has money of her own. While her own money symbolizes and can offer her a sense of independence, David’s money instead signifies dependence. The fact that there seems to exist only my money and your money, no our money, has here clear and visible (negative) consequences for Dagny’s standard of living in relation to David’s but seems to have positive consequences for her experience of being economically independent. An aspect that may enhance the ability of her own money to provide her with economic independence, in her own eyes as well as in David’s and others’ eyes, is the visible and somewhat obstinate way that she stands her ground in refusing (in principle and in practice) to accept money from David (see e.g. Gullestad 1984). When acquaintances assumed that she accepted Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


financial help e.g. to pay for travel and clothes, she became upset. One reason for this could be that she sees it as a questioning of her ability to pay her own way. By openly and in a visible way refusing David’s money, her sense of economic independence can be accentuated. However, Dagny’s refusal to accept David’s money and the importance she places on making this clear to others can also be interpreted in light of the role of economic independence in the way that gender equality is understood in Sweden. Both in the official definition of, and in people’s understandings of, gender equality, economic independence is central. In this respect, her economic independence can be seen as an important aspect of the construction of herself as a modern, gender equal woman, in her own eyes as well as in others’. In addition, it may also contribute to a picture of her relationship with David as a gender equal one. In the Scandinavian countries where gender equality is normative and is professed by the majority of Swedes, it is important for (especially) women to present their relationship as gender equal to outsiders (Haavind 1984). Another way of understanding her seemingly contradictory ways of regarding her own and David’s money is in terms of competing norms regarding on the one hand increased individualization, the importance of autonomy and notions of ownership of money and, on the other hand, norms regarding how couples should organize their lives together, that is, that couples should prioritize togetherness, share money and have access to similar levels of consumption. In their couple relationship, David more clearly expresses a desire for more sharing, while Dagny places more importance on autonomy and a clear separation of ownership of money. These different expressions of how Dagny and David regard money can then in part be a reflection of more general values regarding couple relationships on a scale ranging from traditional to modern. David is more traditional than Dagny in how he regards and prefers to organize their couple relationship. For David, sharing his money with Dagny and the pooling of their incomes is ‘natural’ because they are a couple, live together and are planning their future together. Dagny however has a more modern view of their couple relationship in which autonomy and economic independence come before merging and economic togetherness. The excerpt below illustrates an awareness of their different views and points of departure: Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


David: I am a little traditional or romantic, [I want to] get married and engaged. We’ve discussed it on and off a lot. (C) Dagny: …you’re very traditional, raised in a secure environment, while I’ve seen a bit more of life. (C) David emphasizes the equal sharing of money and consumption in his depiction of coupledom (here above and throughout the interview). Dagny however emphasizes the importance of space for individual autonomy within the couple relationship. In their descriptions and stories about their ongoing ‘battle’ between sharing vs. notsharing, traditional vs. modern, discrepancies in their ideals and constructions of coupledom also become visible. However, the picture that both of them, but especially Dagny, present of themselves and that was presented above, is not the whole picture. An aspect of their interaction regarding money matters that highlights the complexity of this area is the fact that Dagny does indeed ‘let’ David help her out financially and that subsequently, their purses are not quite as separate as they seemed to be at first. However, there seems to be a difference in the kinds of expenses that Dagny accepts David’s help for. As we saw above, Dagny is determined to manage the costs associated with daily living – bills, rent, etc. Dagny has also insisted on paying her way when they’ve taken both shorter and longer vacations, often using savings from her summer job. At other times David has paid for Dagny when they’ve gone on vacation. However, it turns out that David has paid for most of the consumer durables in their home e.g. furniture, television, appliances. They also explained that he will pay for most of the costs associated with renovating and furnishing their new house. In addition, he seems to pay for the costs associated with Dagny’s car. Dagny had earlier sold her car because she could not afford to keep it. Though she had (limited) access to David’s car (when he did not need it for work) she felt wing-clipped. They both explained that the sale of her car had serious repercussions for their relationship. Both explained that it led to ‘chaos’ in their relationship, due primarily to Dagny’s experience of an acute loss of freedom. Since Dagny could not afford to buy and maintain a car, the solution was that David bought a car for Dagny. By accepting David’s economic help to buy and maintain her car, she regained the freedom she lost when she sold the car, but she also became indebted to Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


and, in one respect, dependent on David for this freedom. In this case then, Dagny seems to prioritize the tangible freedom to do and buy things that David’s money can provide over the more symbolic and abstract freedom that abstaining from them provide in the form of greater economic independence. A pattern that emerges here, though not entirely consistent, is that Dagny will not accept David’s help in paying for the basic costs associated with living her daily life, but accepts it (sometimes reluctantly, sometimes not, it seems) for ‘extras’, things she could live without (consumer durables, travel) if his economic help should for some reason be withdrawn. The car would however seem to constitute an exception since she clearly considers it a necessity. The examples above certainly make clear the complexity inherent in matters of money in general in couples, but they also highlight the ambivalent and subjective ways that money can be defined (mine/ yours/ours) and used. They also show the complexity involved in how different money can have different meanings and be used in different ways. In Dagny’s case, she uses her money to maintain a sense of economic independence and David’s money to increase her consumption freedom. In doing so she goes against popular (and common) notions of how a couple should be, but also acts in accordance with general (as well as her own) notions about women’s economic independence and gender equality. For both David and Dagny the sharing of (his) money is used in constructing their couple relationship as well. For David the emphasis on sharing his money and wanting to take care of Dagny can be seen as an expression of togetherness and love that are associated with a (traditional) couple relationship. This puts him in a breadwinner role, a role that (still) provides a degree of status and power. At the same time it puts Dagny in a dependent and thereby subordinate position. For Dagny the emphasis on separate purses, economic independence and individual ownership of money and consumption expresses the more modern ideals associated with individualization and gender equality. Eva and Erik It was somewhat unclear how long Eva, 42, and Erik, 54, had been a couple when we interviewed them in November 2000; the process was drawn out and complicated partly because Erik was married when they met in 1995. His move into Eva’s apartment was increCapitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


mental over a period of years. Their relationship became ‘official’ the previous summer and culminated in them getting married two months before we met them. (It is interesting to note that they have very different perceptions of when they started living together. Erik feels that they have lived together several years while Eva insists that it was only a few months!) So in one respect they had had time to establish themselves as a couple, yet in another they were very new to each other and their relationship. Both have children from earlier relationships. Eva has two children in their pre-teenage years, Erik has two teenage children who live with their mother nearby and with whom he has frequent contact. Eva and Erik come from very different backgrounds. Erik is university educated, has a relatively high-status career and has an income that has allowed him to live comfortably though not extravagantly. Eva has a university degree in the fine arts and a creative occupation that provides sporadic (and little) income. She has also had low-paying unskilled jobs in order to make ends meet. At the time of the interview she was on medical leave12 for back problems and was not sure she would be able to find suitable work. The merging of these two individuals meant the merging of two very different sets of experiences, expectations and ways of regarding and handling money. Eva had always lived frugally, pinched pennies and made ends meet by living in an inexpensive rental apartment in a less attractive area, shopping at second-hand stores, mending clothes and not allowing herself many extras. This was nothing she complained about however. She described money as a necessary evil that only complicated things; she liked living simply. She had become very good at managing on what she had without having to deny her children too much, something she was quite proud of. Erik on the other hand had lived in a single family home in a nice area, was used to eating and drinking well and vacationing abroad. Since his divorce a large portion of his pay check goes to support his children and to help with the mortgage payments for the house that his ex-wife and children still live in.13 The merging of two individuals into one household usually means that both have to accept changes to the way they are used to living. New routines and ways of organizing daily life need to be agreed on or arrived at. Also, decisions must be made about how to organize finances in the new relationship. One may think that these Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


decisions and new ways of organizing everyday life are the subject of many discussions. However, this does not seem to be the case. Research shows that how such decisions and ways of organizing everyday life are arrived at is not always clear even to the individuals themselves, and that these are often seen as ‘just happening’ (Nyman and Evertsson 2005; Nyman 1999). In the case of Eva and Erik, how they were to organize the economic aspects of their life together was not something they had discussed before or after Erik moved in. Eva however had a very clear idea of how she wanted things to be when Erik moved in, and she took the initiative in establishing a praxis. Put simply, she wanted her economic situation to remain unchanged: Eva: I mean, I’ll do like I’ve always done and you can do what you’ve always done [to Erik]. And I think that you should help me since my housing allowance14 was withdrawn, so you can pay half the rent, and then I’ll just keep on doing like I’ve always done. (C) Eva’s only financial demand on Erik was that he compensate her for the decrease in housing allowance that she receives after he moved in, which he was more than happy to do. Having lived as a single mother with sole responsibility for her two school-aged children for many years, she had established routines and an organization of money that has worked for her and her family. During these years she also had sole control over money matters, something she clearly intended to protect. One of her main concerns regarding Erik’s entry into their everyday lives was that she would lose a degree of control over financial matters, which she feared would threaten her economic independence. Eva was very explicit about her need to maintain economic independence in relation to Erik, which is one reason she gave for wanting to maintain separate purses: Eva: Well, I guess it’s because of this feeling of independence….He didn’t live here officially, we weren’t married, I have the ultimate responsibility for there being enough for us three, me and the children. (W) As can be seen in this quote, her desire and need for maintaining her independence is tied to her responsibility for her children. If she Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


has complete control she can make sure that they have what they need. At the time of the interviews she was not quite ready to merge their two separate economies and relinquish control over finances. Erik was aware of her reluctance and explained what he felt was the driving force behind Eva’s need to maintain financial autonomy and control: Erik: Eva has the whole time built up her own, or the children’s economy so that they’ve always managed and I think that even now, that’s important. (C) Erik: I think it’s important that she has control over [money] and it’s got a lot to do with the children. (M) The practical benefits of having control over money, such as having insight into every aspect of their financial situation, and not having to consult with anyone else (besides her children, which she sometimes does) regarding financial decisions, are important to Eva. However, in relation to Erik, money and financial matters in the household are also a means by which she can maintain the sense of independence that she spoke of above. It became evident later in the interview process however that she was beginning to re-evaluate her position regarding money and the practical aspects of it. While still holding on to her original stance of maintaining separate ownership of money, her responses eventually came to express a less rigid view of the separation of their money and an opening for the possibility of a greater degree of merging: Eva: Yes well, it’s always my [money], and Erik has no insight into that. And I don’t have any insight into his. So I have no idea how much he has. The other day he said that he was out of money, Well, no problem, I said. How much do you want? Then I give him of what I have because it’s his money, just like his money is my money, it’s getting to be that way….(W) This ambivalence in her view on their money may seem in one respect contradictory. However, the softening of her position can be better understood in light of several important factors. One practical factor is that she may experience his financial presence as somewhat of a relief after having shouldered the responsibility of supporting Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


two children by herself for many years. When money is as tight as it has been for Eva, this sole control and responsibility is in reality more of a burden than a source of power (Pahl 1989; Wilson 1987a, b). She had lived on a shoestring budget for a long time and seemed to welcome the economic safety net that Erik’s income offered; she had even allowed him to take over responsibility for a few of the regular bills. Another factor is that his income had positive consequences for their material standard and lifestyle. Although reluctant at first, she seemed to have come to accept and even to appreciate the ‘extras’ his money could provide. She seemed to enjoy the television he brought with him so much that she bought a VCR to go with it. She also spoke positively of having access to a car, and having more and more luxurious food in the house. However, she also spoke of a more symbolic factor that played a role in her increasing willingness to accept his financial help. Accepting his money had for Eva become associated with the couple relationship itself. The fact that they were more of a real (i.e. married) couple now was important for the change in how she regards money in the family (see e.g. Nyman 2003). However, accepting Erik’s money can also be seen as a part of a process of granting Erik greater emotional involvement in their (Eva’s and her children’s) lives, thereby also serving to bond them together as a family. In this respect, the change she was going through – from insisting on a strict separation of purses to an acceptance of a merging of them – can also be seen as a way of constructing their couple relationship according to normative notions in which sharing is a central component: Eva: … I give him of what I have because it’s his money, just like his money is my money, it’s getting to be that way, it’s a process. But in the beginning I was very much against anyone else paying my share but I guess that you have to accept at least a little bit, if we’re going to live together. Then it has to be like this. (W) In addition to using money to maintain her economic independence then, Eva also seemed to be using money and financial matters as a means by which to do couple as well as to do economic independence. The fact they are now a couple, married and living together (i.e. level of ‘officialness’ and commitment) matters for the meaning of money. During the years that they were a couple but Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


not living together, she was not willing to let Erik have anything to do with her finances. Now that they were married and ‘going to live together’ however, this became acceptable; more than acceptable in fact. Getting involved in each other’s money matters, blurring the line between her money and his money so that their money emerged, was for Eva a part of coming together and establishing themselves as a couple: Eva: Now he’s come here and said that he intends to share this responsibility. And I’ve promised to share responsibility for his life, that’s what we’ve promised, and then things start to change, in how I think. (W) The promises Eva refers to here are the ones included in the wedding vows they took a few months before. Sharing responsibility, but also money, seems to be an important aspect of marriage for Eva. In this respect her need to maintain individual economic independence seems to be decreasing, or at least receiving lower priority, than her need to act on her (and a general) idea of what it means to be a married couple. By allowing the merging and mixing of her money and economic organization with Erik’s, she uses money to do couple, togetherness and marriage and to tell Erik that she is willing to relinquish at least some economic control and independence. By welcoming his money into her family she is also welcoming him and thereby recognizing the importance of their relationship. In doing so she allows herself more economic and material leeway than previously, but she also opens up possibilities for Erik’s increased influence over money matters, which by necessity will partly be at the expense of her own control over money and how it is organized and used. While in one respect enjoying the changes that were taking place – a better standard of living and relief from having sole financial responsibility – she also saw them as somewhat problematic. She had previously been quite satisfied with their standard of living and saw her rejection of a high-consumption lifestyle as somewhat of a ‘statement’. She also saw the very real risk that it could limit her freedom of action in economic activities. An example she gave was that she sometimes loaned money to friends who had even less than she did, not always getting it back. She expressed concern she would be less able to do Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


this, partly because it could be defined as a situation that Erik should have a say in since the money she was loaning was also his money. In this respect Erik’s money could change the relationship between Eva and her friends. She seemed to be very aware that it was a trade-off – less control over money and how it was used in return for greater access to money and consumption, and a closer relationship with Erik. Eva had not had a chance to settle in to this new situation, but she seemed if not eager, then at least willing, to let Erik into her economic sphere. While still valuing the norm that lends importance to individual independence and grants individuals the right of ownership (and control) over money earned (Burgoyne 1990), the norm of sharing in families was gaining importance and legitimacy for Eva, something that Erik welcomed. Gunilla and Gunnar Gunilla and Gunnar were interviewed in late summer 2001 and at the time were 27 and 31 years old respectively. They had been a couple for five years, been married just over a year when we met them and had a daughter who was about one-and-a-half years old. Gunnar had been on parental leave the previous year and would be starting a four-year program at the university a few weeks after the interview. Gunilla would be resuming her university studies after a six month parental leave. Gunilla and Gunnar come from very different backgrounds when it comes to money. Gunnar grew up in a middle class environment. As an adult he worked at fairly wellpaying jobs and always had money to spend on himself, partly because he worked, but also because he could always count on economic help from his parents if necessary. Gunilla’s parents divorced when she was a child and she grew up in a household where money was tight. As an adult she was unemployed during several long periods. These were interspersed with periods of university studies. During one period of unemployment she lived with a man who supported her and seriously restricted her access to and use of his money. Gunilla had always had to pinch pennies and could very rarely treat herself to non-necessities. In addition, her parents also had strained finances and could offer her little if any financial assistance. It was evident in the way she referred to these different experiences that they had influenced her views on money and her own economic independence. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Their different experiences regarding money while growing up were reflected in their different views about money and perceptions of their own economic situation at the time of the interview. Gunnar and Gunilla pooled what little income they had. Up until the time of the interview Gunnar had been receiving parental benefit and Gunilla had had a federal student loan package. They had recently decided that they would only take the grant part of the federal student loan package for the next few years in order to avoid new and less favorable repayment terms, thus avoiding having a large student loan to repay later. This option was made possible mainly because of an inheritance Gunnar had recently received, which was enough to cover their rent costs for about two years. Other important supplementary income came from Gunilla’s part time job, child benefit and housing benefit. Gunilla brought up the topic of economic independence in various ways during the interviews. Gunilla had been supporting herself from the time she was a teenager. In the way she talked about this and related topics it became clear that she equates economic independence with being able to make it on her own: Gunilla: For me, being economically independent means security in case everything goes to hell. Plus, I’ve inherited this [work ethic], that you should work, not be a burden on society or anybody else. I get that from my mother mostly, that you can actually change your situation through your own efforts. I mean, not having to stand with cap in hand and beg. Even if I’d do just as well without having to work it would feel better to work – this is what I’ve earned, I deserve this. Then it feels better to treat yourself to something. (W) Gunilla attributes her need to be able to manage on her own to the way she was raised. However, she also associates it with her class background. The strong work ethic she talks about involves not being a burden to society and others and supporting oneself financially and is traditionally associated with the working class in Sweden. Gunilla makes it clear that not making it on her own is quite problematic. She explained that several years earlier she had been in a real economic bind and since at the time she was not on very good terms with her parents, she did not feel that she could ask Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


them for any help. This is one reason that she turned to the social welfare office for the short-term help she needed: Gunilla: [I] went there and begged, goodness, do you hear my choice of words?! I didn’t like it though. And Gunnar says that he’s proud about never having to go to the social services for help. But I mean, of course he hasn’t had to do that when he has a family that can back him up, that has lots of money. Her choice of words in the quote above reflect the distress she felt in going to the social services to ask for money. Despite this, she chose to do this over asking parents, relatives or friends for financial help. Even if accepting assistance from the social services also was difficult for her, it was to her the lesser of two evils. Her views about indebtedness to and accepting money from family are illustrated in her comments regarding Gunnar’s habit of relying on his parents to bale him/them out of financial tight spots: Gunilla: I don’t like it. But if they’re stupid enough to lend us money then be my guest. I’ll, we’ll naturally pay it back but, no [I don’t like borrowing] from parents. You get so damned stuck in a debt of gratitude, and it means debt and I don’t like debt of any kind. I think that’s why I didn’t go to mom and dad when I had trouble before. (W) Gunilla’s main problem with accepting money from family is that it entails ‘a debt of gratitude’. Such a debt is on a more personal and emotional level than help from the state. It involves a greater and more personal element of dependency, affects personal relationships and carries with it (often) unspoken obligations (Hochschild 2003). Her response implies an awareness that this form of economic dependence is qualitatively different from (and worse than) dependence on the state (Lister 1997). Assistance from the Swedish welfare system includes several different kinds of help and a large portion of the population receives some form of assistance.15 For this reason, accepting help from the state is not associated with a debt of gratitude for Gunilla and would thereby not infringe on her sense of economic independence. Gunilla’s thoughts and concerns regarding the consequences of economic independence are more clearly and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


explicitly formulated than those of the two women above. In response to a question about how important it is to be able to stand on her own two feet her response is clear and without hesitation: Gunilla: [It’s] important, it’s everything! Whatever happens with the relationship, I’m not going to stand there with only the clothes on my back. It feels so wrong to become so dependent on someone. A lot of it is self esteem – I want to manage on my own. I don’t want to feel that I’ll go under if I’m on my own. (W) However, their economic situation poses a problem for Gunilla and her sense of economic independence. The fact that Gunnar’s family can and does help them out financially while hers does not enhances her feelings of inadequacy: Gunilla: I feel like a burden every Christmas when Gunnar and his sister get an envelope each. His sister’s single and a student and she can live the high life while poor Gunnar has gone and gotten married and has a kid, and I don’t contribute anything…. I feel like a moocher. I still find it hard, and feel a little guilty because I can’t contribute as much. (C) The perceived imbalance between what Gunilla (and her family) can contribute to their financial situation in relation to what Gunnar (and his family) can contribute is accentuated by the fact that his family’s contribution is made in an obvious and visible way (e.g. Christmas gifts). The financial help from Gunnar’s parents in the form of monetary gifts and loans inadvertently make him more of a provider than Gunilla. One way many couples handle a situation in which one partner has more money than the other is to merge incomes into a common pool. Such a system provides each partner with equal access to joint money regardless of individual contribution. Although we cannot say for sure what are all of the reasons for doing so, we do know that Gunnar was the one who insisted that they should pool their finances and eventually Gunilla agreed: Gunnar: We discussed it a little but it was no big discussion that led to us having joint finances. We, or I thought we should have done it [pooled their money] earlier. But it was Gunilla who… Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Gunilla: …who stubbornly and bull-headedly refused(!) Gunnar: But she could also see that keeping our money separate wouldn’t work in the long run when you have kids. (C) In addition to Gunnar’s contributions discussed above, he has also been able to contribute an inheritance large enough to cover the cost of rent for their apartment for about two years. After a course in family law he understood that Gunilla would be economically more secure if they were married since she then would be legally entitled to their common assets. In order to ensure that Gunilla would inherit from him if something were to happen to him, Gunnar insisted that they get married, which they did. By securing Gunilla’s financial status and legal right to his inheritance, and in looking out for and ensuring that Gunilla is financially secure, Gunnar is more obviously placed in the role of breadwinner. If Gunnar can be seen as the (main) breadwinner then Gunilla can be seen as being supported by him and thereby as financially dependent on him. In light of Gunilla’s need for economic independence, the situation described above challenges and perhaps even threatens Gunilla’s sense of economic independence. Not surprisingly, it is important for Gunilla to try to find ways to counter the effects of the financial help they get from Gunnar’s parents on her self esteem and her desire to be economically independent. Gunilla employs several strategies by which she can increase her own economic contribution. One strategy is to spend almost no money on herself. Another is to look for sales on food, clothes for the baby and other necessities and to try to keep Gunnar’s unnecessary expenditures to a minimum. Since she is seen by them both as being ‘better’ at managing money she also contributes by taking on the responsibility of trying to make ends meet. Another way she contributes is by working as many hours as she can part time. Working part time on top of going to school is rough on Gunilla in that it is a physically heavy job (made even more so by a medical condition she suffers from). It also infringes on the time she has to study as well as on her time together with her daughter and Gunnar. As we saw in the earlier quote however, having a job and paying her way are essential for Gunilla’s sense of worth and economic independence. However, it is not just the money as such that a job provides that is important for her, having a job in itself is important: Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Gunilla: It’s not just, now I’m going to make some money. That’s important too. For me having a job, working, is important for my self esteem, and for feeling economically free standing. (W) The meaning of the money she earns is more than what it can buy for her family. It also proves to herself and others that she can and does contribute to supporting her family. Even the money she saves by being frugal and pinching pennies has this meaning for her. The extra income she earns is also visible in the same way that the extra money Gunnar gets is visible. This visibility of extra money, and how it can be used, is an important aspect of the meaning of money; money that is visibly contributed by an individual means that the individual can receive credit for it, thereby providing a certain degree of status and power (Gullestad 1984). In this respect, going off to her part-time job is also a visible act and means that she too can enjoy some of the status and power associated with contributing financially to the family, while at the same time strengthening her sense of economic independence. This is however also an important aspect of doing couple for Gunilla. Although she cannot contribute as much as Gunnar to the family’s finances, she contributes as much as she can, given the circumstances. This contributes to making her a co-breadwinner and to her construction of the couple relationship as gender equal.

Concluding discussion The situations and stories of the women above illustrate that economic independence is an issue that they grapple with. They also show that money and finances can be used as a means to try to maintain or increase their sense of economic independence. We could see that the definition of money’s ownership – mine, yours or ours – was one way to bestow different money with different meanings; the meaning of money was in turn important for how it could be used. Money defined as the women’s own money, no matter how little, was an important source of a sense of economic independence and thereby also important for their sense of independence in general. For Dagny, paying her share of the costs of living and for most of her own personal spending with her student loan was an important symbol of being able to make it on her own. Eva’s finely Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


honed ability to provide for herself and her two children on her low and unsteady income was a matter of pride. This allowed her to instill certain values in her children while also giving her control over money and her (economic) relationships with friends. Gunilla’s income from sporadic work and her efforts to keep the family’s expenditures low provided her with the sense of contributing to the family’s survival and paying her way in the world. Their partners’ money however could not provide this sense of independence. It could however provide a higher economic and material standard. Men’s money could offer greater economic freedom and peace of mind by freeing the women of some of the burden of making ends meet as in the case of Eva. It could also allow for increased access to personal consumption, as in the case of Dagny, or provide the basis for a more secure economic situation for the family as in Gunilla’s case. This distinction between the women’s money and their partners’ money, and between what these different monies can be used for, also allows a distinction to be made between the different valued outcomes that money can provide for the women. One is the sense of being economically independent. In a country such as Sweden, where economic independence is an important political goal and constitutes the core of an ideal of gender equality that many strive towards, it is important for many women to feel economically independent. For the women in this study this outcome is achieved with the money they themselves can contribute. Another valued outcome that money can offer is greater access to consumption and an equal standard of living, something that the women’s partners could provide. Both of these outcomes however were in conflict since the one could only be achieved at the expense of the other. Having access to their partners’ money increased their economic freedom regarding access to money and consumption. However, this freedom conflicts with and could undermine their sense of economic independence as well as conflict with their image of themselves as modern, independent and gender equal women. These two valued outcomes are also central aspects of gender equality; however, as they are discussed by the women in the study, they are incompatible. This raises the question of what gender equality is and whether it is an attainable goal. The experiences of the women in our study suggest that as long as women and men enter relationships as (economic) unequals they will have to choose between equal access to money and the depenCapitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


dence that this can create, and the economic independence derived from not accepting money from a partner. Another (related) conflict that became visible was between the norm regarding owning money one earned/received and maintaining individual control over it, and the norm of sharing in marriage. This conflict exists on a theoretical level as discussed in the introductory section of this chapter. However, its existence in our couples, though not always explicitly discussed, was also evident. Although one may be given more precedence over the other, both were present in the stories of the three women. For Dagny, individual ownership of money weighed more heavily than did norms of sharing. Eva was in the process of adapting her priorities to her new marriage and was allowing norms of sharing to squeeze out the need for individual control over money. Gunilla was struggling to find a satisfactory balance between the norm of sharing, which she accepted, and her need to make her own individual contribution to the family economy. These women have had to find ways of handling this conflict as we have seen above. However, it is also conceivable that the men have had to find ways of relating to the choices made by their partners regarding these norms, though this was beyond the scope of our analysis. This raises the question however of what consequences these choices have for the couples here and for notions of what coupledom is and should be. By demanding independence within the relationship these women challenged traditional ideas of sharing and togetherness. Yet another important aspect to consider in the examples above is the fact that the men in all three cases earned more and/or had access to other assets. David for instance had built up considerable savings from money gifts he had received from parents and relatives over many years. Dagny’s new job meant that she would start earning nearly as much as David and soon be on the same level financially; however, David would still have considerable savings and investments. Erik had a job with a relatively high salary in comparison with Eva’s sporadic and low income. Gunnar was on the same level as Gunilla in that they were both students. However, his inheritance would be paying their rent for two years, and money gifts and the possibility of financial help from his parents constituted an economic safety net. This imbalance in the women’s and men’s economic resources can of course be seen as reflecting the Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


imbalance in women’s and men’s power resources in society in general and thereby part of a larger societal pattern. Men’s stronger position in the labor market, i.e. that they more often have full-time employment and earn more, often positions them in a breadwinner role, whether they desire this role or not. Despite the almost obsolete status of a breadwinner ideology in the Swedish context, men still seem more easily to be conceptualized in terms of breadwinner, which in turn is underscored and perpetuated by their greater access to economic resources. The breadwinner role that the men in this study find themselves in constitutes a situation to which the women must relate and react. One way they do this is through their struggle for economic independence. Although not the topic for this chapter, it is telling that the men in our study did not mention their own economic independence as an issue. The fact that women engage in this struggle highlights the elusiveness of gender equality, despite explicit goals and measures on both a policy level and on the level of couples’ relationships. This in turn highlights the fact that the transformation of intimacy that Giddens and others discuss is far from complete. The discussion above has shown that couple relationships are not freed from external factors or from traditional gendered norms, responsibilities and acts. We saw for instance that love and commitment can still be expressed through sharing money as David and Gunnar do, by being frugal as in the case of Gunilla, or by giving up a degree of economic independence for the sake of the couple relationship as Eva does. In light of this, the men’s economic help could be understood as undermining women’s (economic) independence, and the women’s reluctance to accept financial help from their partners can indeed be seen as a way of protecting their economic independence. In this respect it is also understandable that financial help from the welfare state is preferred by the women to help from their partner. Eva and Gunilla both recounted situations in which they had received help from the Swedish state in the form of housing allowance and social assistance. Although they expressed dissatisfaction in the fact that they needed help at all, neither of them felt a strong aversion towards turning to the state for help. In Gunilla’s case she preferred this solution to asking her parents for help. This kind of help in Sweden seems to be less shrouded in shame and stigmatization than it is in many other countries, perhaps because this safety net function is seen as a Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


basic raison d’être and function of the Swedish welfare state. Accepting assistance from the state means that any debt incurred is an impersonal debt to the state as opposed to the more personal debt of both money and gratitude that is owed to a man or relatives as a result of the acceptance of assistance from them. The latter, but not the former can, as we have seen, conflict with and undermine Swedish women’s efforts towards gender equality and economic independence. Regarding these women’s efforts to maintain their economic independence in light of norms of gender equality, money and marriage, as well as in relation to their partners in terms of gendered aspects of power, their reluctance to accept their economic help is quite understandable. This is not to say that men’s money automatically grants them power. However, considering the historical self-evident association between men, money and power, it is easy to see why money would grant power to men even today. While the fact that the men did not see their own economic independence as an issue can be seen as a reflection of a taken-for-granted access and right to power, women’s concern with and fragile sense of economic independence can be seen as a reflection of their historical lack of power and their relatively recent attainment of independence. In this respect it is not surprising that women see their economic independence as a symbol for independence on a more general level and as something worth working for and protecting. These three women’s efforts towards economic independence can be seen as a revolt against a traditional (im)balance of power between women and men in society in general, but also against a traditional understanding of marriage that takes men’s power over money and how it is used, and takes women’s subordination and lack of power, very much for granted. By using their money and their ideologically, politically and legally sanctioned right to control it, Dagny, Eva and Gunilla can be seen as being in the process of redefining and renegotiating the nature of marriage and women’s and men’s rights and roles within it.

Notes 1

This research commission was appointed by the Social Democratic government in 1995 to provide a comprehensive picture of the allocation of economic power between women and men. The study focused on power on three levels: the welfare stare, working life and family, resulting in 13 volumes.



2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Although all men’s independence, freedom and right to vote were not self-evident, women’s right and access to these was in fact not even considered. The breadwinner ideology, though short lived as both an ideal and as praxis (perhaps more short lived in Sweden than in several other countries), has had (and still has) considerable influence on common notions of women’s and men’s roles and responsibilities. The man of the family is still (implicitly) regarded as the main breadwinner, regardless of women’s relative economic contribution to the family (Ahrne and Roman 1997; Nyman 2002; Roman and Vogler 1999; Schwartz 1994; Struening 2002). Of all women aged 20–64 79 per cent were employed: about 50 per cent were employed full-time (≥35 hours/week) and an additional 20 per cent were employed at least 20 hours per week in 2003 (SCB 2004: 44). The information (and more) can be found in the pamphlet Women and Men in Sweden. Facts and Figures, found at www.scb.se. Giddens’s (1992) analysis of the transformation of intimacy can be criticized on several points (see e.g. Jamieson 1999); however it is important to point out that his analysis allows for new understandings of the nature of couple relationships. The terms marriage and couple relationship will be used synonymously in this text and refer to couples who are married or live as-married. In Sweden, cohabitation is a common and accepted family form. The couples in the Swedish study are either married or cohabiting and resemble as-married couples in terms of level of commitment, duration of the relationship, its form and individuals’ perceptions and expectations of the relationship. Women and men are still not fully equal in Sweden. Swedish women do more housework, earn less and have poorer access to money and consumption than do men (Ahrne and Roman 1997; Nyman 1999, 2002; Roman and Vogler 1999). Currently parents have the right to a total of 450 days parental leave, which they can share as they wish, with 80 per cent of their income in child allowance for the first 365 days. Individuals with permanent jobs are guaranteed job security; they retain their position and have the right to return to their jobs after parental leave’s termination. Municipalities are by law required to provide quality day care for all children. Up until the child’s eighth birthday parents have the right to reduce their working hours to 75 per cent, as well as the right to stay at home with sick children with 80 per cent of their income. Information in English is available at www.fk.se. Although men have also increased their contribution in the domestic sphere, this is not at all in parity with women’s increased labor market activity (Bäck-Wiklund 1996; Holter and Aarseth 1994; Statistics Sweden 2000). All full time students are eligible for a federal student aid package. Approximately two-thirds of this is a loan and one-third a grant.



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13 14 15

The letters at the end of citations indicate whether the quote came from the couple interview (C), the interview with the man (M) or with the woman (W). Medical leave provides taxable compensation in relation to one’s salary. At the time of the interview medical benefits were 80 per cent of Eva’s previous salary. Given her low earnings however, her compensation was quite low. Sweden has no-fault divorce laws and alimony does not exist. Housing allowance in Sweden is income tested and is based on the household’s total income, number of inhabitants and rent. Child allowance is the most common form of assistance: the birth of all children in Sweden qualifies the parents automatically for child allowance. Another common form of assistance is housing allowance, which is needs tested.


4 The Meaning of Breadwinning in Dual-Earner Couples Frank Wilson and Janet Stocks

One of the core elements in theoretical considerations of late (second, reflexive, liquid, post) modernity and the process of individualization is a claim that people are establishing, organizing, constructing and doing relationships-in-couple during a historical moment when presumed ‘traditional’ and/or ‘normative’ models have been, in varying degrees, ‘breaking down’. This includes, of course, the male breadwinner/female housewife family or household type, which we will focus on in this chapter. This two-part label is notable for its essential equating of a fundamental foodstuff of life with money. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term breadwinner first entered the English language during the early decades of the nineteenth century through the works of the Scottish novelists Sir Walter Scott (in 1818 referring to something used to earn money) and John Galt (in 1821 referring to one whose earnings supported that individual and his dependants.) It came to represent a particular model of household organization wherein men’s labor market participation was deemed primary in contrast with dependent women’s unpaid reproductive labor (Janssens 1998). In the US this family form began to emerge in the 1840s, coinciding with the rise of industrialization. By the end of the century it had become the most common household type, at least among the middle and upper classes, and by the middle of the twentieth century was generally understood to be the ‘traditional’ family that has been declining since the 1960s (Gornick and Meyers 2003). Scholars have demonstrated, however, that it is a historically problematic interpretation to claim that this household form was 72 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

The Meaning of Breadwinning in Dual-Earner Couples 73

either a consequence of industrialization everywhere, that it was adopted and practiced by most of the working and lower classes, or that it was anything more than a short-lived household type – exceptional rather than traditional (Coontz 2004; Crompton 1999; Gornick and Meyers 2003; Janssens 1998; Lewis 2001; Pfau-Effinger 1999, 2004) Nonetheless, as an ideal- and idealized- type, this form profoundly influenced US household organization, intimate relationships, and taken-for-granted assumptions about money, labor, and gender roles. During the Second World War, of course, women in large numbers worked in occupations that had previously been understood as exclusively men’s jobs. After the war, a rather intentional effort was made to re-establish the male breadwinner married family as not only the most common household type, but as the goal for both men and women to strive for. This was briefly achieved during the 1950s as a result of continued direct governmental intervention in the economy (especially through the GI Bill package of education benefits and no-down-payment low-interest home loans), major concessions granted to unionized workers in major industries, and the expansion of consumer credit. In effect this made the notion of a ‘family wage’ based on a single income (typically that of men) a plausible and attainable ‘middle-class’ reality for a large segment of the population. The gender roles associated with that model were reinforced and legitimized in large measure through the theorizing and research of functionalist social scientists (especially sociologists such as Talcott Parsons). Perhaps most significantly it was the popular media translation of the theory and policy promoting the breadwinner/housewife family form that deeply embedded it in the collective American imagination. Shortly after the introduction and widespread acceptance of the new visual technology of television, a series of ‘situation comedies’ became its essential substantive content. Programs such as Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, and Ozzie and Harriet portrayed families in which the husband was the sole wage earner and the wife the caring guardian of the household. These husbands sometimes pitched in by taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn, or doing some cooking (if it involved the barbeque grill), while the wives sometimes engaged in volunteer work outside the home, or toyed with the idea of taking a part-time job in the labor market, Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


but generally the public sphere was clearly the domain of the husband and the private sphere just as clearly that of the wife. In fact, one way to get laughs on these shows was to portray a mix-up or blurring of these distinct gender roles. These programs are still part of the US media, being shown regularly on cable television networks. The 1998 film Pleasantville was a recent satirical fable that used those programs as the basis for offering a critical re-evaluation of our romanticized historical views about the normal, functional, middle-class household in the US and the nature of that breadwinner/housewife model itself. The eight couples in our study all interpreted their relationships in reference to their families of origin, friends, and attesting to the lasting power of the image, those fictional post-war television households. Three couples made specific mention of them. One, Gerald (39), who had been married to Gail (46, a professional musician and main income earner) for five years when we interviewed them in 2001 (they subsequently divorced), referred to the ‘Leave it to Beaver model’ as a contrast to their own situation as well as to his own parents, both of whom were full-time professionals during that era. Similarly Ian (38) who, with his partner Irene (30), had considered themselves to be a couple for 11 years before they began to share a household in the two years preceding our first meeting with them in 2001 (they were married by the time we interviewed them a second time in 2004), specifically rejected the ‘Leave it to Beaver paradigm’. Despite this, in 2004 he observed that it ‘bothered him’ that Irene was having to act as the ‘primary breadwinner’ – a role reversal that had occurred between our visits. Fred (29) and Francie (21), the youngest of the couples in our sample, gave a short, impromptu performance for us in our first interview based on Pleasantville. He observed that while it may have been the standard ‘back in the day’, the male breadwinner family was, by now, much less than typical. In Fred’s case, like Gerald’s (and some of the other individuals in these couples), that model had never been applicable to the household in which he was raised. By the mid-1960s, however, the unwillingness of the state to expand and maintain the policies that supported this family model, the ‘discovery’ of substantial pockets of poverty in the country, growing inequality, and the rise of a feminist movement challenging the male dominant gender order inherent in the model, Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


revealed the empirical limits of assuming that it was anything more than a temporary norm. These were among the factors that began the process of its decline, enabling alternative household configurations to be recognized and to emerge and grow. Interestingly, despite the fact that the same popular media began to offer fictional portrayals of these alternate household types (single moms, single dads, step-families, same-sex couples, and so on), none of these was noted by the couples we interviewed. In the course of the sustained analysis and critique of the breadwinner/housewife household model over the past 40 years, more appropriate typologies have emerged from social science research. It makes more empirical sense today (as it also does for earlier historical periods) to talk about earners (paid for work in the labor market) and carers (unpaid labor within the household) in a larger constellation of ideal-types, rather than the simplistic bread-based dichotomy. Rosemary Crompton (1999), modifying a typology offered by Birgit Pfau-Effinger (1999), places the male breadwinner/female carer at the ‘more traditional’ end of a ‘gender relations’ continuum, with a dual earner/dual carer model at the ‘less traditional’ end.1 Neither of the extremes on this continuum currently exists to any significant extent in the US. The breadwinner/housewife model is decreasing in number and the dual earner/carer model is an as yet to be attained goal of gender equality (although seen to a certain extent in the Scandinavian countries). Also included, from more to less traditional in terms of gender relations, are the dual earner/female parttime carer model (the kind of British households that figure prominently in Pahl and Vogler’s work), the dual earner/state carer model (exemplified by former socialist countries and also in Scandinavia), and the dual earner/marketized carer model (most clearly seen in contemporary Britain and the United States). Jane Lewis (2001) draws another line of potentially significant distinction between dual earner couples and a subset of that category, dual career couples. The eight couples in our sample represent, by design, dual earners. Five of them are also examples of dual career couples. All of them were born after the war, and while exposed to the television versions of the male breadwinner family, not all grew up in families that represented that ideal-type. All of our couples began their relationships well after the ‘traditional’ model had begun its decline. Most Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


of the women in our study clearly rejected the breadwinner/ housewife model, not being willing to play the role of the housewife. They were happy to help with the family breadwinning, and expected that their partners would share in the responsibilities of the home. But even so we detected an expectation on the part of these women that their partners had, to some extent, more responsibility for breadwinning, and that masculinity was somehow constructed through the carrying out of this responsibility. Most of the men also rejected the model, in its purest sense, or at least saw it as a non-viable option for them even if they would have liked to receive some of the advantages. Yet, as we shall see, even as what Beck and Gernsheim called a ‘zombie category’ (2002), the male breadwinner model maintains a presence in the interactional and relational landscape. Money, and breadwinning, have a number of different meanings for individuals. These meanings are derived from a variety of influences and, in various ways, translated into action, not often in intentional, self-conscious ways. These personal and sometimes conflicting meanings are brought into couple relationships, where the ability to synchronize them, or inability to do so, is often at the heart of whether the achievement of couple is understood as a matter of trust, satisfaction, stability, and growth, or instead becomes the source of tension, conflict, resentment and dissolution. The effects of this process on gender relations are not only real and important, but also more complex and subtle than one might expect, especially in the context of the bulk of the theoretical and research literature. For us this produces a more nuanced understanding of individuals doing gender, situated within another ongoing process of interactive accomplishment, doing couple. How financial arrangements are made and practiced through pooling or separation of funds, who ‘controls’ resources, who ‘manages’ them, the levels of individual financial contributions to the couple, and how this all reveals gender dynamics and power relations has been the concern of Pahl, Vogler, and Burgoyne’s pioneering research. We take much from their work, but will not presume to seriously challenge or support their very strong and continuing claims based on this project, but will, however, offer our interpretations of the couples with whom we interacted as further insight into the roles of money, as it is understood and utilized, shaping everyday life. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


In our chapter, then, we will investigate the various meanings of breadwinning for the couples we interviewed. We will not look in depth at all eight couples, but have chosen examples that best exemplify some of the subtle processes within our couples in hopes that this will illuminate some of the larger processes of change taking place in our culture at this point in history.

‘In a perfect world’: Fred and Francie Couples, as they form, are faced with negotiating – consciously or not – the kinds of roles they will play as they ‘do couple’, against the backdrop of their parents’ generation, and continuing media images of the breadwinner/housewife family. Sometimes young men are intimidated by the thought of having to provide solely for a family, so are happy to share that responsibility with their mate. But sometimes these same men would like some of the benefits that being a breadwinner might bestow upon them – less responsibility for the housework and childcare for example. It is hard for these men, though, to find a young woman who is willing to work full time and do more than her share of the housework, at least not without complaint. Fred (29) and Francie (21), the youngest of our participants, had been a couple for a little over a year when we first interviewed them in the fall of 2000. Fred ran a business of his own. Francie had briefly been a college student, but had dropped out and was working a variety of low-wage jobs. Fred had grown up in what he referred to as a dysfunctional family that included divorces, remarriages, blood siblings and step-family relationships. He had been living on his own working regular jobs. He understood work, and the money it produced, to be a sign of maturity and responsibility. Francie came from a stable single-earner working-class family. For her, more than anything else, money meant that she was an independent adult. At the time we first met him Fred had established his own business with a lawsuit settlement from an accident he was involved in as an employee of a bike messenger service. His $40 000 annual income was approximately equal to the median for a year-round, full-time, male worker in Allegheny County. Having only spent a little over half of his settlement money (mostly for business start-up expenses), Fred had about $40 000 left in a savings account and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


stock-market investments. The income he earned from self-employment meant success, and the asset money gave him a sense of confidence and security. He was renting a house and paying his bills. Much younger Francie had just begun working full time at $8.50/hour. The extrapolated annual income of $17 600 would have placed her at about 60 per cent of the median for a year-round, fulltime female worker in this area. She owned a car and had student loan and credit card debt, which she paid from her earnings. Francie’s needs were modest and her income was enough to cover these needs and to allow her to be independent. This depended, though, on the fact that Fred paid the rent and most of the major utility bills. Fred had been in his apartment when they met and Francie figured that Fred would be paying the rent if she lived there or not. He was making more money and could afford the rent more easily than she could, so she felt that this was fair. Fred, though, had mixed feelings about whether or not this was really fair. On the one hand he believed that, in a ‘perfect world’, his financial contributions to their living expenses would allow him to get out of at least some of the housework. In other words, his contribution should be acknowledged as breadwinning, and could be exchanged for housekeeping from Francie. But Francie strenuously objected to the suggestion that she take over most of the housework and Fred acknowledged that there were valid arguments against the breadwinner/housewife model. Fred: I make so much more money than she does. I can’t really say that, I mean, to me, I don’t think that would be a bad deal. Hey, I pay the rent you should clean the house. But, I mean, that’s not right. I don’t believe that. But in a perfect world that’s what would happen. (C) But Francie was having none of that: Francie: I’d rather move out and live by myself than to be a housewife. I’m VERY strong on that. I’m more than a maid. (C) Fred accepted, somewhat grudgingly, that Francie would not agree to be a housewife, and knew he would never accomplish the Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


‘perfect’ exchange relationship that he described. He also believed that there were other ways to measure fairness. For instance, Francie worked at least as many hours each week as Fred did. She made less money per hour, and therefore had less money to contribute to their joint finances, but she was as tired at the end of the day as he was, and as uninterested in doing housework. Fred also saw Francie as a unique individual, one whom he wanted to be with and whom he valued and so was willing to settle for a situation that was less than the ‘perfect world’ exchange that he imagined. Fred: I’m just saying, I bitch about the dishes. It’s a tough decision there. Should I bitch or not? If it was anybody else I probably would bitch. I don’t know. We just get along so well, that kind of thing, you know, I don’t really need for her to pay the rent. Now, if we would move into another place, find a bigger place or something more expensive or something a little nicer, I think we might have to come to terms about something, lay something down a little bit different. (C) They both talked about moving to a bigger place, one with more room, that would require more upkeep and that would be ‘theirs’. Even though Francie had lived in the apartment with Fred for over a year there was still a feeling that it was ‘his’ place. If it were ‘their’ place Francie thought that she would be more motivated to contribute. And Fred felt that he would expect it of her. Partly because he wanted her to have more money to contribute to joint expenses and partly because of his vision of what it would take to be equal partners, Fred wanted to see Francie develop career aspirations that could take advantage of her interests and her unique talents. Though she enjoyed her current employment well enough she did not see the job as having any real potential for the future. But she was not sure what she wanted to do. Fred was somewhat frustrated with this uncertainty. His view of Francie as a special person was less than complete until she developed a vision of a career and the type of person she wanted to become. This seemed to have less to do with the potential financial contribution that she would make to their relationship and more to do with the construction of her uniquely individual identity. And Fred did not Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


imagine that that identity would be built around being a housewife. He wanted more than this for his partner and believed that Francie was capable of more than that. Francie, also, wanted to figure out what she wanted to do in the longer term, but wasn’t feeling that this was an urgent issue. When we talked with them three eventful years later Fred and Francie were still a cohabiting couple, employing an independent management system as their financial arrangement, paying their personal bills and contributing jointly to paying other expenses on a case-by-case, funds-available, basis. They had relocated to an adjoining county (included in the Pittsburgh MSA) in a house previously owned by one of Fred’s recently deceased relatives. Rent was especially low (they were only paying the property taxes). Since we saw them last, Fred had formed a partnership to open a retail store that amounted to an expansion of his successful maintenance business. This ultimately resulted in a dramatic failure, with Fred losing his savings and reducing his income from the original business by about 25 per cent. The negative impact on Fred during the depths of that experience produced serious tension in the couple’s relationship (including a short separation), that was not based on any differences about the meaning of money or the financial practice between them, but rather because he, in his own words, ‘became a real ass-hole’ as a result of the financial setback and the ongoing dispute with his business partner. Francie, it became clear, probably never earned $17 000 in any given year. Between 2001 and 2004 she repeatedly changed jobs, perhaps as many as six to eight times (they could not remember how many), some full-time but short-term and some part-time, with periods of community college coursework mixed in. His $32 000 and her $8000 annual incomes placed their combined household total near the estimated median for the region. They reported that their housework arrangements had changed slightly since we talked with them last. Fred told us that our visit for the second interview had prompted Francie to perform a thorough cleaning of the whole house, and he was pleased with the way it looked. She confirmed that she was doing more of the housework these days, and that it wasn’t such a big deal any more to her. She was still irritated at the way he left his clothes all over the floor, but mostly the housework was not a frequent topic of conversation in Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


their relationship. Her view was that ‘maybe we grew up a little’ in the previous three years. Fred and Francie are an example of a young couple struggling, to some extent consciously, with gender roles and the balance of money and housework that all couples have to face. Francie was influenced by feminism and was not willing to fill the role of the housewife portrayed in the film Pleasantville which represented the ‘traditional’ breadwinner/housewife model and which they referred to as a contrast to the arrangements they had made as a couple. But the strong desire that she expressed in the first interview to avoid this role had mellowed to some extent as their relationship progressed and she considered this acceptance as a maturing process. Fred wanted the advantages that the breadwinner role might bring him, but on the other hand he was quite aware that he could not expect this of Francie. He also wanted things in a partner that the traditional breadwinner/housewife model did not encompass, like an actualized partner with her own career aspirations. His conception of equity also included more than money in the equation. Things such as time and the benefits of Francie as a unique individual were important enough to him to prompt him to let go of his expectations of her contributing more housework. During the second interview with them he said that he was very grateful for the housework that she did: Fred: I’m just glad she does it because, I mean, when I come home I don’t want to do all that. But I mean who does? (C2)

Breadwinning and career vs job: Elizabeth and Edsel When breadwinning is shared in a relationship, is the man then relieved of the role of ‘breadwinning’? Are both partners responsible for the economic needs of the couple/family and also more free to pursue jobs or careers that match their interests without the pressure of being the sole provider? In our couples, for the most part, women were happy to share the responsibilities of breadwinning, but some still expected that their partners would choose a career with strong income potential and a degree of prestige. Elizabeth (44 at the time of our first meeting) and Edsel (45) had been a married couple for 12 years at the time of our first interview Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


with them in September 2000. They had been married for ten years and had one daughter, aged 7. Elizabeth worked as a freelance copyeditor and made more money than Edsel who was, at the time, working to establish a private practice as a psychotherapist and massage therapist. Their money was pooled. Elizabeth did the monthly bill paying and money management. Elizabeth and Edsel had moved twice during the course of their marriage, both moves of several hundred miles. The last move, three years earlier to the Pittsburgh area, required that Edsel give up a well-paying job that he really enjoyed. The move was made largely because Elizabeth did not feel comfortable living in the US south because of overt racism to which she did not want their young daughter exposed, and because of gender role expectations that she experienced as different and less traditionally sexist in the north. Elizabeth had grown up in the Pittsburgh region so this move was ‘coming home’ for her. There was tension in the relationship about this move – Edsel felt as if he had made the choice to do what was best for his wife and child at some sacrifice to his career. Elizabeth, apparently feeling guilty about this sacrifice, was insistent that Edsel made the choice freely and should take responsibility for it. Money meant very different things for Elizabeth and Edsel. For Elizabeth money was a very troublesome topic. When asked what role money played for her individually she responded: Way too much! [laughs] Evil! For me. If we could, like, go back to a bartering system I’d be so happy! (C) Elizabeth’s father made a lot of money when she was growing up. She stood out as the ‘rich kid’ among her peers and did not like this role. She also believed, at times, and still struggled with the perception that her parents gave her money instead of love. Because of this there were two different types of money for Elizabeth. There was bad money, money that she hadn’t earned, but instead had been given to her by her parents and was therefore tainted. This money was mostly invested and Elizabeth wanted very little to do with it. She delegated the management of this money to Edsel and to her brother. She would have preferred never to think about this money or to touch it, but it wound up that they dipped Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


into it on a regular basis, because there was not enough ‘good money’ to meet the expenses of their lifestyle. Good money, on the other hand, was money that Elizabeth and Edsel earned. Because they had earned it, it demonstrated their competence and their independence from Elizabeth’s parents and the parents’ bad money. Elizabeth insisted on managing the good money even though it caused her some stress – she paid the bills and juggled their tight budget. She felt competent with the good money, and the good money helped her to feel competent. Another part of Elizabeth’s struggle to establish her identity as a competent individual was related to the role her mother played in her family. Her mother did not work outside of the home: That my mother just has never worked independently – she’s always been the wife in that way. It’s always been real important for me to be as different from her as possible. (W) Making money of her own and contributing to the family income was very important to Elizabeth to establish herself as a competent woman. The fact that she was not able to live the lifestyle she had chosen to live without using the inheritance that her parents had begun to give her caused her a great deal of stress. Some of this stress was brought about by choices that Elizabeth and Edsel had made that caused them to use the money from her parents on a fairly regular basis. For example, their daughter attended an expensive private school that they could not afford based on their incomes alone. The mortgage on the house they lived in was held by Elizabeth’s father. This struggle had very much to do with the negotiation and construction of a gender identity that was in contrast to the traditional gender roles experienced in her family as she was growing up. Money, where it comes from, and whether it is ‘good’ money or ‘bad’ money, played a central role in the construction of the competent, independent adult that Elizabeth wanted very much to be. Money was ‘evil’ when it caused her to call into question this independence and competence. The struggle for competence also went on between Elizabeth and Edsel. Because juggling the tight monthly budget caused Elizabeth stress, Edsel, for a while, took over this task. But he did not do it to Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Elizabeth’s satisfaction. She did not feel that he was competent at this task: Elizabeth: Well I know which bills are getting paid and which aren’t. And I feel more competent than you [referring to Edsel] in that area. Edsel: I was competent. I just pay them my way and not your way. Elizabeth: And they were late. Edsel: Oh two days late oh well. [Both laugh] Elizabeth: Um, I guess I have a certain seriousness about paying bills on time that you don’t. (C) Elizabeth was also concerned with status related to the making of ‘good’ money. Part of the difficulty they faced with their income was that Edsel was not able to find appropriate work after their move to the Pittsburgh area. At the time of our initial interview with them Edsel was working three different jobs and trying to establish a private practice in psychotherapy and massage. His contribution to the family income was lower than it had been before this move. He felt frustrated at the difficulty he was having finding a good job that paid well in his field. Because of this Edsel proposed that he find a better-paying job, for instance driving a truck, so that he could contribute more to the family income and reduce this monthly stress. But this was not an acceptable option for Elizabeth – she wanted her husband to work a job that had a certain amount of prestige: Edsel: But I think there s a status hierarchy that doesn’t allow her to… [laugh] If you’re driving a dump truck, it doesn’t matter how much money you make – that’s not a high enough status occupation. That’s not the occupation that she had envisioned for her partner. Independent of what the income potential would be. (M) For his part Edsel would have liked to be earning money through a rewarding occupation but he did not have the same feelings about money – good or bad, prestigious or not – that Elizabeth did. For him, emotionally, he would have rather reduced the stress of the monthly bills, even if it meant working a job with less prestige. He Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


resented her characterization of him as being incompetent with money. He regarded his money management strategies as being different, and perhaps more relaxed, but not incompetent. The amount of tension that was displayed in this first interview around issues of money was significant. The amount of money earned by the couple, approximately $47 000 annually, was just below the region’s median family income. They were not ‘poor’ by this objective measure, but the amount of stress experienced, especially by Elizabeth, indicated a very strong subjective feeling that there just was not enough money coming in. The fact that they had significant reserves to draw upon only complicated these feelings for her. During the second interview these feelings of stress around money matters had greatly decreased. Edsel had continued to struggle for most of the three years between the interviews to find appropriate employment, at one time opening a private counseling practice in a city two hours drive from home, and getting into considerable debt in the process. For the past year he had been working as a respiratory therapist, a job that he had had a couple decades earlier, and was making enough money so that their combined incomes were now approximately $72 000. Elizabeth still made more money than Edsel, but this was not seen as an issue between them. For the past six months or so they had not needed to dip into their reserves for monthly expenses, and this altered Elizabeth’s outlook on the world: So, not having to, um, use that money at all is wonderful. It’s terrific. Having a steady job at this stage is huge, huge. Just in every outlook, how the world looks. How, um, you know, the level of anxiety is everything. It’s huge. (C2) Edsel’s job also came with health insurance, which they had previously had to purchase privately, at the expense of $800 per month. Now that they were not using their money reserves Elizabeth felt that she could ignore them and use them only for more appropriate purposes: It was always money that I thought of as retirement, you know, to pay for [our daughter’s] schooling, that was for her, and for Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


emergencies. If anything terrible happened and we had to pay for it we’d be able to. And, so using it to pay bills every month just, I hated that. (C2) Because the need to use the inherited money had faded from the day-to-day, we can see more clearly that there were some appropriate uses for this money that Elizabeth did not feel bad about. Again, this had to do with her ability to feel competent – that she and Edsel were able to meet the day-to-day financial needs of the family without leaning on her parents. Edsel seemed to feel somewhat disappointed that he had had to resort to respiratory therapy for work. This was something that he had done prior to meeting Elizabeth, when he had just an Associate’s Degree. He now has a Master’s Degree in Social Work and felt that with this investment he should have been able to get a job that was more stimulating and better paid. He felt that the respiratory care job was ‘tedious’ but it had its good points, including a schedule in which he worked three long days (12 to 16 hours per day) and then had four days per week off. This gave him time to engage in family activities and also to pursue further training. He would have liked to become involved in Adventure-based counseling – outdoor challenge activities for team-building and for troubled youth. He doubted he would ever be able to do this as a full-time job but he was enjoying participating in it in small ways at that time. The meaning of Edsel’s improved work situation for Elizabeth involved paying monthly bills without dipping into the ‘bad’ money, but it also meant more. She felt that with his increased financial contributions, and the accompanying decrease in stress for them as a couple, Edsel was an ‘equal partner, helping out again, that we are in this together.’ (C2) Elizabeth and Edsel report that just prior to Edsel getting this new job, they went through a really rough time. They were very unhappy with each other, their sex life suffered, and Elizabeth was angry. They had been in couples counseling previously, which they think did some good, but during the worst period they just ‘white knuckled’ their way through it. Once Edsel got his current job all of these problems seemed to evaporate and now they characterized themselves as happy. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Money played a very central role in ‘doing couple’ for Elizabeth and Edsel. Because of Elizabeth’s strong feelings about money, which she brought into the relationship, and because of lifestyle decisions that they made that led them to spend more than they brought in month-to-month, money became a point of tension in the relationship that at one point threatened to undo them. But, largely because of their commitment to their daughter, they toughed it out and got to a more stable and less stressful point in their relationship, a point at which money, because there was more of it, started to recede into the background. The role of breadwinning was really shared in this relationship and the fact that Elizabeth made more money was not a point of contention for either one of them. Edsel was willing to do what needed to be done to help support the family. He wanted a rewarding career, in line with the advanced training he had received, but was willing to take a solid job that would pay the bills and relieve the stress of the tight budget they experienced. But for Elizabeth, the type of job really mattered. She had a job that was rewarding and high enough in prestige, and she wanted a partner with a similar degree of career prestige. Money was a huge problem for Elizabeth, but even more, the image that came with the way that money was earned, was important to her and seriously affected Edsel’s options.

The obligation to provide: Jane and Jeffrey and Lucy and Larry In most of our couples we found that men, even when they have a partner who brings in a considerable amount of money, still feel the obligation to provide for their family (more for their children than for their partner) in a way that is different from what they expect from their partner, and in a way that is different from what we heard from the women. Women have a strong desire to contribute to their families and a need to have their own money and the feeling of independence that comes with that, but do not seem to feel the obligation in the same way that their partners do. Women’s sense of obligation seems to be more personal – they want to feel that they are doing their share, that they are competent and independent individuals, and that they have control over a portion of Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


the finances for their own independent use. Men’s sense seems to be more public – they want to be able to represent themselves to the world as a provider. Most of our research participants grew up in families in which this obligation to provide was a very strong motivation for their fathers. For instance, though an extreme example, the story of Karen’s father illustrates this sense of obligation and the pressure that came with it. As a teenager she had a close-up view of the dark side of the breadwinner/housewife family model. After losing his job through lay-off, Karen’s father suffered periods of severe depression that resulted at times in confinement to mental institutions. While a student in graduate school her father committed suicide. As she noted, Then…it was like, you know, the breadwinner loses his job and it’s this very shameful kind of thing. (W) She came to reject that model. Jane (35), an educator and school administrator, and Jeffrey (37), an environmental scientist, had been married for ten years and were the parents of a five-year old son when we first interviewed them in August 2001. For her, money meant independence, and more than that, it served as concrete evidence of her competence and success as a professional. Jeffrey, who liked his job well enough, also offered that he would just as soon work as a clerk at a home improvement store, or remodel houses, but felt that his obligations to support his family required the stability of his current job. I enjoy what I’m doing now it’s just, you know, I work to pay the bills. And it’s a good, stable job. I’ve been lucky because I haven’t been laid off at all. (C) He earned about $60 000 per year, while she earned about $55 000, making them dual breadwinners. They established joint accounts by mutual agreement early in their marriage. When we first interviewed them Jane described their financial situation as very fortunate and comfortable. Jeffrey managed their money and Jane stayed intentionally ignorant of the exact financial situation (e.g. she said that she didn’t know the exact amount of her own paycheck, or of Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


his). She said that she was happy to have Jeffrey manage the money partly because she didn’t trust herself to do it. He’s good. I’m not. It’s very simple. I’ll admit it. I don’t want the responsibility. I don’t want it. (C) Jeffrey, too, seemed more than satisfied with their arrangement. He felt that he was more suited to manage the details of the bills and wanted to get them on a budget, a difficult goal to achieve. Jane claimed responsibility for this – she said that she was hard to control and admitted that sometimes she went shopping and ‘wasted’ money to get back at him for one thing or another. They said that the only arguments they ever had were about money, and this seemed mostly about the fact that Jane would spend money on her debit card and not give Jeffrey the receipts in a timely way.2 When asked what they do to nurture their relationship she answered: I try not to make him mad. Like money. It always falls on the money. I mean we don’t fight about anything else and I’m sure that’s, you know, because people fight about money. (C) And somewhat later in the interview Jeffrey complained about her problem with receipts: I just yell when she doesn’t give me the receipts. How hard is it to give me receipts? Put it in a little box. Is it that hard? (C) But it was clear that it was not just the money they fought about. In several other ways Jeffrey would have liked a more ‘traditional’ family structure with the benefits that he would receive as the recognized family breadwinner. He was prepared to support the family and to do the home repair and yard work that was typical of a man’s responsibilities in his father’s generation. Jane did most of the housework and cooking, but complained about it. She would have liked him to pitch in and do more of his share. Jane worked a full-time job and then did some other things as well – she was taking classes towards an advanced degree and she taught religious education classes at their synagogue. Jeffrey would have liked to Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


have her home more. He also resented the fact that Jane had not taken his name when they got married. ‘It’s tradition. It’s the way it’s supposed to be.’ (C). She has kept her birth name because ‘I like being me’. (C) When we contacted them to arrange for a second interview three years later, Jane informed us that they had separated. She suggested, though, that we conduct the interview with them together, and coordinated their schedules so that we could do so. We met in the same home where we had interviewed them previously and where Jeffrey still lives. Jane was living in a rented apartment about a mile away. Their son, now eight, spends equal time with both parents and they still did many things together as a family, even going to the mountains on weekends during the summer. When asked what led to the separation, neither of them could point to anything concrete. Jane said: Well, I don’t know. I guess it was just a lot of stuff in my head. Jeffrey’s a wonderful person. I couldn’t say bad things about him. We still get along fine. It was just me, not being happy. It was really all me not being happy here, married. (C2) She also reported just needing a lot of time to herself, not wanting to take care of anyone else, except their son, because she took care of children with behavior problems all day long. Jane did not see herself ever getting married again. Jeffrey, on the other hand, said that he would like to get remarried at some point. When we specifically asked them, though, if money played a part in their separation, Jane replied: Not necessarily finances, it was more of the control of the finances because I work, I bring home a good salary… I think that’s why I spent so much just to get even. Because I wanted control over my own money. I need my own money. (C2) When asked what it meant to her to have her own money she responded: It just helps me feel responsible. I mean I don’t like to necessarily depend on people and I don’t like that whole control thing and I Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


was just feeling controlled. I mean not that I do anything different. I’m better now with my money and I don’t spend as much on stuff and I don’t care about things that I used to probably care about but it just makes me feel more responsible. (C2) Jeffrey appeared frustrated by this conversation, saying that he had offered to give her money in the form of a monthly allowance. He also felt that the only control he was trying to exercise was to get her to give him receipts from all her purchases in order to record them in the check book so he would know what their balance was. And in general he seemed mystified about what went wrong in their relationship. He felt that he was just trying to be a good guy, and this wasn’t enough for her. When we first met them, Lucy (42), a psychotherapist and Larry (50), a highly-paid lawyer, had been married for 4 years, were the parents of one young child, with another on the way. For her, money also meant independence and success. Larry, who came from a large, happy, working-class ‘traditional’ family background, was an example of the ‘American dream’ of upward mobility being achievable through initiative, planning, and hard work. He did not forget his origins and for him the meaning of money was that it was something not to squander, and to support your family with. During his adult life Larry had been married and divorced twice, without any children. Although growing up in a family that had split up via divorce in her youth, Lucy similarly stood out as someone from rather humble origins attaining a high level of success. Money was the reward for her effort, recognition of her achievement, and the key for her establishing and maintaining her independence. Larry earned more than $200 000 a year and Lucy earned about $50 000 annually working part time. Their combined income placed them among the top 1–2 percent of all households in the region. Originally coming together as successful middle-aged professionals desiring a family, neither had independent histories of spending lavishly, and both brought substantial financial assets (both owned houses, for instance) into the relationship. Although not consumed at all with money matters, they were individually more than competent at managing their resources and occasionally hired financial specialists to handle investments and taxes. They had two wedding ceremonies, the first in December, which they consider to be their Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


real anniversary date, and then another at the beginning of the following year, where the legal documents were actually signed. Doing that gave them a substantial tax advantage. They did not negotiate a pre-nuptial agreement. Lucy and Larry maintained independent management and control of their individual accounts even after marrying, and only had general knowledge about the other’s finances. There were obviously many expenses they had in common as a family, and the ways those were handled emerged through daily practice and were situational. Decisions about big expenditures (home remodeling, vehicle purchase, etc.) were made jointly, and there was also a great deal of consulting about much smaller individual purchases, especially by Larry. He regularly asked her permission to make purchases of recreational items that he desired. Lucy, in fact, thought that funny and certainly not necessary. Larry seemed ambivalent about his work. On the one hand, he was able to make enough money to have a comfortable lifestyle and put money away for retirement and his kids’ college education. On the other hand, he found his work ‘mind numbing’ and thought at times about teaching or working in some other way with young children. But the obligation to support his children, not so much his wife, motivated him to stay with work that paid well. Larry was also very active around the house. He did most of the housework, although he felt that Lucy did a fair amount as well. He would have liked her to help more with the yard work, planting flowers, mowing the lawn, and so on, but she was not interested in doing these things, and he, although frustrated, seemed to have accepted this. When we interviewed them again three years later, the only circumstances that had changed were that there were two young children in the household instead of one, and that together the couple earned somewhat more than before. Larry, who always had a substantially higher income and possessed more financial assets, designated special monies in the form of savings and investment accounts, earmarked for the future college education of their children. For this couple a financial problem amounted to having to contribute less than substantial amounts to those special accounts, because of an annual increase in regular family expenses. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


The couple had discussed, and had been planning for, a possible early retirement for Larry, so that he could spend more time with the children. This would be accomplished based on his personal special savings and investment accounts, and Lucy increasing the time devoted to her own counseling practice. At this stage she had freely chosen to work part time, and planned to gradually increase her working hours as the children entered school. They both understood that if she was practicing full-time her income would be, if not as great as Larry’s, substantial nonetheless. Having her own money, resources, and options for increasing her income level, in the context of a couple relationship where there are no pressures for her to do so, gave her a great deal of individual control. Larry, whose previous marriage to a successful and independent professional woman ended in divorce, showed no emotional or genderrole scars from that experience, and sought only relationships with just those kinds of women. Lucy, of course, was that kind, and although coming from a more ‘traditional’ background, Larry had no desire to be a part of the breadwinner/housewife relationship option, though he did feel the responsibility to provide for his children. Larry and Jeffrey, like many other men in the US, still feel a strong obligation to provide for their families. This obligation constrains the choices they can make regarding their careers. Although both have skills that could be parlayed into other careers, or at least other jobs, they feel the need to choose the option that maximizes their income so that family resources will be available. Jeffrey, who would have preferred a more ‘traditional’ marriage altogether, with the benefits as well as the obligations of being a breadwinner, did not really understand what had gone wrong with his marriage. He was willing to accept Jane’s explanation that it was all her fault, that she just needed more space. He disagreed that he had tried to exercise a degree of control that was unreasonable over their finances, and didn’t think that there had been anything wrong with his failure to do a greater share of the household chores. Partly due to the high income they brought in Lucy and Larry were able to balance both Larry’s need to provide for his children and Lucy’s need to have control and independence in her own finances. They seemed comfortable and well able to adjust to each others’ particular needs and desires. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Women as breadwinners: Ian and Irene In the couples we have described so far women were contributing substantially to the couple’s finances, sometimes more than their partners, but, at most, their contribution was considered shared breadwinning. In the case of Ian and Irene, during our second interview with them, she was making substantially more than he, but also her work was more stable and could be counted on to support them into the future. Ian characterized Irene as the family breadwinner. And although this did not seem to be a major problem for them, it did create some discomfort. Ian (38) and Irene (30) had been a couple for 13 years when we first met them. For the first 11 years they did not share a household. They had the lowest combined income of any of the couples we interviewed (approximately $14 000 annually). Surprisingly, given this low income, they seemed rather unconcerned about money in general. Irene, being a full-time student, was out of the paid labor market as a full-time worker for the first time in her adult life. This was a problem for her, not because of a lack of money, but because her self-image was very tied up with being a productive member of society. Being a student didn’t fulfill this requirement. She had decided to become a full-time student in order to finish her undergraduate degree in the shortest time possible, but she was looking forward to ‘really’ working again. The time and effort Irene was devoting to her studies was not understood by her as being real work. Money was the result of real work, and for Irene it meant responsibility. Ian was a graduate student earning money as a teaching assistant. The main emotion expressed by him about money was a negative reaction to having to take out student loans. Being in debt like this meant that he had to pay attention to money more than he really wanted to. As he succinctly noted, ‘money’s necessary, but it’s not a priority.’ (C) Both explicitly rejected the breadwinner/housewife family model, at least for themselves. When we first talked to them Ian was the primary earner, but at a very low level. Upon establishing their household, they maintained separate accounts and continued paying their personal bills such as credit cards and student loans from them accordingly. They did, however, consider that their money was ‘communal’ and they operated with what really amounted to a pooled financial system. By Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


mutual agreement Irene acted as the money manager, with Ian turning over most of his pay to her. By the time of our revisit in 2004 Irene had graduated, resumed working full time, and with a salary of $32 000 a year at a real estate title company, was earning more than double Ian’s income. A small part of the reason they married was so that both would have medical benefits. That had become a money issue prior to their marriage, when Irene incurred a hospital bill of $600, relatively large given their low income level, and didn’t have insurance to help pay for it. Although Ian did have medical coverage through his employment, additional coverage was only available to legal spouses in heterosexual families. The couple now had organized their finances into a joint account, and in what amounted to a woman whole wage system, Ian turned over his paycheck and Irene managed accounts. It is fair to say that they shared joint control of their money, making all big spending decisions together. In their second interview, Ian expressed frustration about their financial situation. He was patch-working together an income as an adjunct professor, teaching several courses a semester and making very little money. Irene was working a job as, in Ian’s words, a ‘corporate whore’, making significantly more money than he. Ian: I’m older and I’m tired of not knowing where the next meal is going to come from. I’m tired of her working so hard and being the primary breadwinner right now because she’s making double of what I am. It’s just frustrating. (C2) Ian’s frustration was not really that Irene was making more money than he was. He wanted to make more money, something closer to her contribution to the household, and he wanted his income to be more stable and predictable from one semester to the next. He was frustrated that he did not have a more secure future and a plan for a career. He felt that he was old and the financial uncertainty in his life right now was depressing him. When Ian was the primary breadwinner Irene felt uncomfortable, not because she was dependent on him, or because he was in the position of supporting her, but because her self-image required that she be a ‘productive’ member of society – that she work and bring in a wage. Ian’s feeling of discomfort about Irene being the primary Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


breadwinner, though, was about putting her in the position of having to support them. Somehow this felt wrong to him, inappropriate, out of place. Both Irene and Ian as individuals shared very similar meanings of money, and that made their joint understandings about financial matters free of internal tension. At different times each provided disproportionately more to the ‘common pot’. They seemed to be the same couple in each situation. Although they now earned close to the median household figure for the region, they felt their financial situation was worse than it had been three years before, as a result of a large debt burden from student loans and credit card use when they previously could not make ends meet. They did not, and do not, blame each other for failing to provide an equal share of the household income, however.

Conclusions Our emphasis on breadwinning in this chapter has been focused on the continuing influence of that no longer dominant idealized model during its late modern decline. Ulrich Beck’s notion of ‘zombie categories’ (2002) is helpful here. As he theorizes ‘reflexive modernization’, previously dominant relationship models do not disappear even as they empirically diminish. Instead they continue as a kind of empty but lingering form as they are reduced to merely another option among many from which individuals or individuals in couples can choose. The lingering has a certain amount of power though, typically not fully conscious, not explicitly embraced, but still influential. Breadwinning has traditionally been considered a masculine pursuit, even a marker of masculinity. A man’s ability to ‘provide’ for his family has been a measure of how much of a ‘man’ he truly is. What has changed in the dual-earner couple? Is the man released from this obligation and also its presumed advantages? Do women share this burden equally? Women certainly have become more involved in the activity of contributing to the economic needs of the family. And with their economic contributions most women expect that their partner will share in the responsibilities of the household and childcare. But do they feel an equal amount of responsibility for breadwinning? Does Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


the act of breadwinning somehow define their value as individuals? We would say in some ways yes, and in some ways no, and in different ways than it does for men, for the most part. If one conceives of gender as a continuum, from masculine to feminine (rather than, e.g. mutually exclusive opposites), it is clear that it is more socially acceptable for women to explore almost the whole continuum, but it is not acceptable for men to do the same. Women can wear pants without comment, without notice, whereas men can wear skirts only under certain very limited circumstances (as a bagpiper for instance). This may seem a trivial point, but, in fact, it is symbolic of the gender options open and closed to men and women. If a woman ‘wears the pants’ in the family, e.g. is the breadwinner, is the authoritarian, it may raise some eyebrows, may seem slightly unbecoming, but more and more it is not seen as unusual or inappropriate. On the other hand, ‘Mr. Mom’ is a role for men that, while possible, and even desirable within some couples, has still not reached a level of social acceptance and is noted more for its rarity than for its acceptance. Women can do it all – bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, so to speak. They can be economically independent enough to leave their partners, have a career and raise children on their own. Men can do this as well, and do, but the more a man wears an apron and makes career decisions based on the needs of his family, the less ‘masculine’ he is considered, and this loss of masculinity matters, typically, both to the man himself and to the society at large. Women can take off their pants, put on a dress and some lipstick and be feminine, but are not required in everyday interaction to emphasize their femininity. Men, on the other hand, still feel the pressure to display their masculinity fairly constantly in social interaction. The form of this masculinity has changed and expanded over time but masculinity still matters. It must be stated that these gender options are not power-neutral. Although men have fewer options in exploring the gender continuum, a great deal of the power – at least power on a societal level – is concentrated at that end of the continuum. Part of the limit on men’s mobility is no doubt connected with the reluctance (conscious or not) to give up this power. And certainly part of women’s desire to explore the masculine portion of the continuum has to do with a desire to secure more power – in the form of independence and autonomy, but also to impact the world around them. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Breadwinning is still part of the construct of masculinity. Although the actual activity of economic contribution to the family was shared in each of the couples we talked with, there is still something distinctive about the activity for men. If a woman has a career she wants her husband to have a career as well, not just a job, as we saw in the case of Elizabeth and Edsel. It is all right for a man to have a career and his partner a job, although more and more men desire a partner who is their intellectual equal. It is still much more acceptable for a woman to stay home with the kids while the man works than the other way around. There are men who would still ideally like to be acknowledged as the breadwinner, such as Fred and Jeffrey, and accrue the benefits (mostly release from housework responsibilities) that this role would bring. In our couples these men realized that they could not achieve this state of affairs, and even appreciated that their partners were contributing valuable things to the relationship (not just money, but themselves as unique individuals and interesting partners with talents and interests), but there was still a note of lament in their stories. None of our couples embraced the breadwinner/housewife model as their ideal. Most of the couples did not refer explicitly to the role of breadwinning as something that was the exclusive purview of the men. Yet it is clear that breadwinning and masculinity are still tied up with one another. The knots may be loosening and there are more threads being introduced into the definition of masculinity, but breadwinning still contributes an important strand in the weave.

Notes 1 Pfau-Effinger uses breadwinner rather than earner in her schema, and does not draw Crompton’s distinction between state and marketized carer models. She does, however, include another ‘traditional’ household type, the family economic gender model, which predates the breadwinner/female home carer model. In it men, women, and children all contribute to the family economy, typically as a farming or craft-based family business. While there is inevitably gendered division of labor, it is not of the ‘separate spheres’ variety. Among our couples Heather and Henry, while both working full-time in the labor market, seem to share a dream of operating a family business together. If their dream does come true it is easy to imagine their children fully participating in the family economy. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


2 Actually they also reported arguments, or at least disagreements, about the division of household labor. Almost every couple, in fact, noted either tension or problems arising over this issue. The people in these couples did not always resolve their differences, but neither did the differences escalate to a more serious level.


5 The Intertwining of Money and Love in Couple Relationships Capitolina Díaz, Sandra Dema and Marta Ibáñez

Love is blind, which results in those who are hit by it being unaware of the way their capital resources are being managed. It also hinders any attempt to assess the effects of marriage since, whenever love is taken into consideration, it seems to represent, and be the equivalent of, the sum total of the individual’s wealth (…) If the factor love is introduced into the analysis the accounts miraculously balance, thanks to the emotional profit. (Singly 1996: 21). This chapter examines the role of money in intimate relationships, more specifically, with the role of money in the interactive construction of the couple and of the individuals within it. In analysing the role of money in eight Spanish couples a common feature emerges: the commonality of household money. It is not only that the money and resources are pooled, but that they are considered and treated as ‘family money’. In the first instance, for the couples all household income becomes our money. It is not my money, nor yours. For most of the couples interviewed the household money is kept in common, is mutually owned and used. Although the pooling of income is a common form of allocation of money, as previous research on money and families shows (Vogler and Pahl 1993, 1994; Pahl 1989), what we found in all Spanish cases is the insistence on considering money and resources as common. All the couples analysed share the concept of pooled money. In the interviews both men and women insisted that they do not have personal money. Money belongs to the family. Both 100 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

The Intertwining of Money and Love in Couple Relationships 101

men and women rejected the idea of their ‘own money’. The idea of separate purses is alien among the Spanish couples studied. When we asked about their individual money all individuals, regardless of sex, age or income (except one, Elisa, whose case will be presented below when the rationale behind keeping a small separate and earmarked amount of money is discussed) found it a strange concept: Guillermo: Yes, there are people who kind of have their own salary and put only part of it into the common household fund. All the money that we bring in goes to the pool… Gloria: Yes, The common fund is everything for us. (C) Herminia: We have two accounts that belong to both of us. So, one [salary] goes to one of our accounts and the other goes to another joint one. (C) Ines: No. The idea of one’s own money? I certainly don’t hold with it at all. I have an idea about money coming in, I mean, the money in the pool fund, regardless of whether it comes from the work of one of us or the other. We don’t quibble about whether I earn five euros more than you or whether you earn three euros more than me. No, it’s money for the household pool. (C) Jacinta: From the beginning we decided to have a joint account, not two separate accounts, and to share expenses. We thought we would like everything to belong to both of us, and so we have had a joint account from the beginning. (C) Interviewer: Do you distinguish between your own money and shared money? Lidia: No, not at all! Interviewer: Not at all? Lidia: No, not in the slightest. Interviewer: Isn’t there a part of the common fund that you can think that you can do whatever you want with? Lidia: No (laughter), no, no, no. Interviewer: What about money that you think of as his? Lidia: There’s none of that either. Interviewer: What about pocket money? Do you have any kind of pocket money? Lidia: No. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Lidia: Look… we have a little pile of money (laughing) and we take money from it (laughing) and when it’s gone, we put back into the pile, but, no, there’s no pocket money or money for extras. No. (C) Manuel: Separate accounts? Never, no, no, never. Our incomes are put together in the same place (…) All we have is pooled. (M) It is important to bear in mind that our analysis is based on data from Spain. This high regard for pooled money among Spanish couples must be seen in the context of pooled family resources characteristic of the familist Mediterranean welfare states (Moreno 2003; Sarraceno 1995) or high ‘familization’, in the words of MacLaughlin and Glendinning (1994), in which families (included extended families) act as a micro-solidarity safety net. In Spain the symbolic link between a couple and their pooled money is very strong since the legal marriage agreement by default1 is a system of community property. In an ordinary everyday conversation (and in our research experience) if a couple has separate property they feel the need to explain it, whereas if they have common property they mention the fact without further explanation since they are following the norm, the legal norm and common law. Common money is institutionalized and positively emotionally charged. The fact that the couples in our study considered household money to be shared is not merely to comply with the law. Quite the contrary in fact: the law provides legal status to what is a longstanding custom in most of the country. Seeing family income and property as pooled resources is part of a widespread culture. Changing such a norm seems to be acceptable only in special circumstances: families of businessmen, millionaires, and so forth. A further ubiquitous facet shown by all the interviewees was the idea that money did not matter in their intimate relationships. The role of money in the relationship is generally played down in an attempt to curb or to cover up the idea of market relations impinging upon affairs of the heart. However, all interviewees said that money does matter when it comes to deciding about the everyday family economy, the monthly bills, the big expenditures and when they were not directly asked, all couples but one admitted the important role that money plays in their lives and in their relationship. But when we questioned couples about the importance of money in their relationship, they denied it existed. Men and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


women both argue that money does not interfere in a couple’s life or spark conflict. Lidia states as much very clearly when talking about what she expects from her partner: In the sixteen years we’ve been married, we have never had any conflict because of money matters. Never. That must mean we don’t see money as being too important, doesn’t it? [laughter] (W) Yet all couples provide examples of other couples in which money has caused problems, couples where one of the spouses has spent money ignoring the needs of the collective. This comes across in the interview with Inés: Yes, we know quite a few who go her or his own way, but they always end up clashing. (W) Although we have focused our research on money, when analysing couples’ lives we realized that love comes before money in intimate relationships. Often money and love are considered to be in different worlds. Love legitimates the couple relationship. According to our informants love, romantic love, is the first and only reason to become a couple, but they see themselves as a settled couple once they have started to pool their money. Coincidental with this, the social sanction of a couple relationship includes both mutual love and shared money. Shared money, besides being an economic resource, can operate as a glue in a couple’s relationship or it may help to dissolve it. Money can make partners equal or can highlight the inequalities. Love sometimes hides the inequalities produced by money, but at times can make them bearable. In the dynamics of the permanent construction of the couple and of the two individuals within it, money serves diverse purposes. The cases presented below reveal that some couples use money in common to strengthen their relationship (in their own eyes and in the eyes of relatives and friends) or simply to support it, whereas other couples use it to fulfill the vital project of one partner to the detriment of the other. Therefore we will try to explain how couples use money to construct different types of relationships and different individualities within the couple. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


From the eight couples we analysed the five presented here cover a variety of forms of understanding and organizing the family money with diverse consequences for both the affirmation of each spouse’s identity and for the degree of in/equality among the partners. They are the following: 1. Maria and Manuel (‘Common money, independent lives’) are the most equal of the couples analysed. They have a shop of their own and organize their lives according to principles of equality, mutual agreement and freedom to have quite independent lives. 2. Jacinta and Juan (‘Common money to strengthen bonds’) are a recomposed couple who uses their common money to reinforce their union and to display to relatives and friends the seriousness and durability of their relationship. But each partner, at the same time, keeps her/his individual profile and social personality. 3. Herminia and Hector (‘Common money to support one partner’s vital project’) use their common money to help Hector follow his artistic career to Herminia’s economic detriment. Her individuality is subsumed in the artistic project of her husband, partially supported by her higher income. She enjoys the higher status that his artistic activities give him. 4. Fatima and Fernando (‘Political correctness and inequality’) have their money in common, although this commonality hides the persistence of inequality between them. Nominally both have access to the common purse but Fernando’s higher income allows him to impose his desires on the big expenditures while Fatima keeps a low profile waiting for better times to realize her ambitions. 5. Elisa and Ernesto (‘Own money means autonomy’) are the only couple to keep some money apart and earmarked, allowing Elisa to reinforce her individuality.

Spanish background Let us introduce some general data about Spain to give a context for our sample. Spain has important statistical differences when compared with Sweden and the US. Most of its particular features are common to the other Southern European welfare states (Italy, Greece and Portugal), also called ‘rudimentary welfare state regimes’, charCapitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


acterized by scarce welfare rights, no history of full employment and a recent history of authoritarian politics, which have prevented the development of a full welfare system. Compared with Sweden or the US, Spain can be defined as a familist country,2 among other things for the high position that the family has in the value scale of most Spaniards, even the younger ones. For Spanish youngsters family is the most important institution in their lives. According to the Centre for Sociological Investigation (CIS),3 76 per cent of the Spanish population between 15 and 29 years old considered family ‘very important’; 23 per cent ‘quite important’ and only 1 per cent ‘of little importance or not important’ (Estudio 2.221). The extended family creates the safety net that compensates for the limitations of the insufficient provision of the Spanish welfare system. The main responsibility for this safety net falls on women (Moreno 2002; Tobío 2005). The number of working women has increased rapidly in recent decades in Spain, although it does not appear so compared with the number in other European countries. This is due to the large number of unemployed women over 40 in Spain. But if we look at the activity rate of women aged 30–34, it went up from 30.8 per cent in 1981, to 68.1 in 1999 and a prediction of 80 per cent at the end of 2005 (Tobío 2005). In Spain dual-earner couples are mostly full-time workers (83 per cent) regardless of whether or not they have children (Franco and Winqwist 2002). The traditional family mentality expected of a familist country such as Spain is more an appearance than a reality. In fact the male breadwinner model was considered unacceptable for two out of every three Spanish women a decade ago (CIS 1995), although this unacceptability may be more a matter of belief than of social practice, as we will see in the analysis that follows.

Five Spanish dual-earner couples Our sample consists of 16 couples and 48 interviews altogether from which we will here only present and analyse the eight dual-earner couples of the main sample and their 24 interviews. In six couples both spouses worked full time; the other two have one part-time and one full-time employed spouse. In one couple, the full-time worker is the wife, in the other it is the husband. The sample Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


included several types of couples: conventional couples, in which husbands’ income and occupational status is higher than that of their wives; status-reversal couples, in which wives’ income and occupational status are higher than that of their husbands; symmetric couples, in which income and status of both spouses are similar; and semi-status-reversal couples, in which wives’ occupational status is higher but the income is similar to their husbands. Because of women’s high level of participation in the labor market, in social activities and in home responsibilities, these women can be included in what Moreno (2002) calls the ‘superwoman type’ of the Mediterranean rim.4 The women’s jobs are: bank employee, cook, lecturer, librarian, masseuse, secretary, shop owner and social educator. Men’s jobs are: skilled steelworker, builder, accountant, civil servant, salesman, driver, shop owner, and social educator. Their ages range between 21 and 55. There are four couples with children and four without. Only one couple is in a recombined family: that is, both spouses had been married previously. The eight couples are married, although we did not specifically look for legally married couples – it just happened as cohabitation is low in Spain, though increasing.5 More than half the wives have a bachelor’s degree, compared with less than half of the husbands. In the status-reversal or semi-reversal couples the wives have more education or more formal training than their husbands. In some of the conventional couples both spouses have a similar level of education, in others the husbands have less education than their wives. The youngest couple has been living together for two years and has been married for a year. The oldest couple, in their 50s, has been married for 25 years. All couples live in the same urban area, in Asturias in the north of Spain. This is an area with an important industrial past but is now more dedicated to service industries. The couples were recruited by snowball sampling through referrals of the researchers’ acquaintances. An initial telephone contact was made with the respondents in which they were informed about the theme and the expected length of the interviews. As a courtesy, once the interviews were finished the couple received a €40 voucher. Common business, common money: Maria and Manuel Maria and Manuel were both around 45 years of age when they were interviewed in the spring of 2001. They had known each other for Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


15 years. They had many mutual friends with whom they would get together now and then. They had been together as a couple for about ten years. Manuel had one more year to go before graduating as a primary school teacher and Maria studied Business Administration. They were childless by choice, Maria defending her wish not to have children. Manuel did not have any problems accepting Maria’s desire not to become a mother. When their relationship as a couple began Manuel was the owner of a bookstore specializing in comics. Maria ran a nutrition shop with a partner. When her business partner died Maria was left with the shop. A few months later Manuel’s business failed and Maria offered to share her business with him. She asked him to take care of the financial management as a way of involving him in her business without humiliating him. They still had this arrangement when we interviewed them. Both Maria and Manuel come from working-class families. They share certain ideologies of the left associated with the generation that saw the political transition in Spain (from the dictatorship to the democracy). One point of interest is Maria’s involvement in a feminist organization that has a strong presence in her local community. She dedicates at least two afternoons each week to attending meetings and working for this feminist organization. Maria’s participation in this feminist organization and its activities have become important to her sense of personal identity. Manuel actively supports his wife’s involvement. The couple’s income comes from two sources: the nutrition shop where they both work and from Manuel’s part-time job as a janitor for a large department store. The shop is the principal source of income and both recognize this fact. Maria is the owner: she is the one who started the business and the one with the knowledge of the products sold to customers. However, this does not mean that Manuel’s work to make sure the shop is running efficiently is not taken seriously. They both consider the shop to be a family business. Manuel’s part-time job as a janitor is considered by both to be a secondary income (this is what it is in economic terms). The income that comes from Manuel’s part-time job is money the couple reserves for potential unexpected expenses or if they were to encounter difficult times and needed some extra cash. Money from these two sources goes to the common purse. Throughout the Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


interview this idea of a single family purse was very evident. They reiterated time and time again that the money is neither for one nor the other, rather for both. They do not differentiate between the different incomes. The idea of having individual money is seen in a negative light. Manuel: No, no. Never, never. All our income goes to the same place. What I mean to say is that the money from the shop goes to a certain bank account, the money that I get from my janitor job goes to a different bank account. We have debit cards. Normally, listen, if I have to spend money on something important, I tell her. What I want to say is that when I spend a significant amount of money, normally it is for something for both of us. She does the same. If she spends good money, it could be on clothes let’s say or something else, she then tells me about it. This includes what I buy, whatever. No, no, all that we have, we have it in common, jointly. (M) For this couple, specifically for the woman, money cannot interfere in their life. She would prefer to split as a couple than to have discussions about money. She will not live with someone who has a different view from hers on money. And she is adamant about that. He agrees with her, although in important issues it appears as though she is the first to put her point of view on the table and he agrees. This does not mean that he is passive, just that it is she who is determined to live according to principles that happen to coincide with his. Their position about the common money, their expenditures, their accountability, is well described in the following quote. Interviewer: Have you ever had any conflicts about money? Manuel: No. Interviewer: At anytime? Manuel: No. Not for any reasons of spending limits or… no, spending limits no. Maria: Well, I could not, let’s see, I understand that a couple must live relaxed, if I have to be tense and scolding for cash, for every little thing, and if I have to chide about the house not being clean enough and if I have to scold… Why not live alone, right? It is crystal clear to me. I don’t worry about it for a minute. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


We have common tastes. He is not going to save and have me spend to my heart’s content and I am not going to save and have him spend as if there were no tomorrow. Manuel: No, we try to limit ourselves. Maria: Both of us. Manuel: But, well, if I like something I will buy it. Maria: Well, both of us are pretty… Manuel: Neither is it a big deal… Maria: Pretty moderate. Yes? So, in this sense… Manuel: I think so yes. I like computer games, so I buy a few. Maria: It does not occur to me to ask, why did you get three computer games, the ones that you got the other day?. No, because I assume he knows if he can buy three computer games or not. Interviewer: Have you been able to discuss the subject of money? Manuel: Yes, on what we spend it on yes. No, it has not been difficult to discuss, the subject of money has never been a problem to talk about. What I want to say is that, for example, I know more about the shop in terms of financial questions than Maria does. (C) On occasion there are allusions to the origin of the money, for example, when they refer to the money earned by Manuel in his janitorial job, but just as a description about how they organize expenses and savings. This money does not belong to him, and is earmarked as a safety net that many small businesses like to have and/or as holiday money. Maria: We have everything accounted for and we try to put the money he earns into the bank. We try to see if we can save it and try to support ourselves with what the shop brings in. When we see that the income from the shop isn’t going as well, we can use the (debit) card from his money. But what we have it saved for is vacations and extra expenses from what he earns that’s the only reason why we have this one bank account. And the rest of the income goes to the other bank, to our other accounts. (C) Although it is Maria who speaks about the money Manuel earns as ‘his’ money (‘we try to put the money he earns… we can use the card from his money’. ‘The money he earns’), it cannot be inferred Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


from this that it belongs to him for his exclusive use. It remains clear that the decision on how the money (all income) is spent is handled jointly. The reference to ‘his money’ or ‘what he earns’ is merely a description of its origin. Maria and Manuel often speak as if they were independent persons (in first person singular) when referring to spending and in general when speaking about specific purchases. This gives a clear idea of their perception that at the same time that the money is common, each one has room for her or his autonomous expenditures. They talk as a couple (in plural) when referring to any income or expenditure done by both or that affects both. The management of finances is a way of sharing responsibilities in the shop. Both are aware of their financial status, both make the major decisions after discussing them, but it is Manuel who goes to make payments at the bank in the mornings while Maria remains at the shop where she is not only selling but also purchasing and doing all the necessary things, except the finances, to run the business. In a way Maria is following a quite common pattern among independent business women who, upon marriage, tend to cede money management to their husbands, as is documented by Coria (1998). But in this case she does not take a secondary role in the business. The couple explains that Manuel is in charge of the finances more than Maria because of Manuel’s previous experience managing his own business. They understand that he has the experience and superior knowledge in managing a small business. However, as has been said, in this case managing the finances of the business does not mean greater control. Manuel considers Maria to be the one responsible for the shop, the shop owner. She is the expert. He sees his job as helping, at times, with the complicated accounting procedures in running a business. Manuel clearly understands that the shop belongs to Maria: it is her business. For instance, when the interviewer asks what they would do with the money if they were to win the lottery: Manuel: Yes, well, one thing, I would buy something for you, for example, I would buy a new computer. (C) He sees getting a new computer for the shop (to manage the business better) as a purchase for Maria, although on other occasions Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Manuel talks about ‘our shop’ and he feels a great responsibility in the management of the business and stops Maria from taking financial risks. Manuel: There are many times when I need to stop her. Listen, she would want to buy this or that for the shop. Well, no. Because she isn’t going to sell it and suppose its fifty thousand pesetas. Listen, it does not make sense for us. (M) Manuel: At times she would like to have accessories, but I say if you are able to sell them, yes. But if they don’t sell, no. (M) In this couple we do not see signs of explicit negotiation concerning money management. However, they negotiate other issues. While the use and management of money appears to be ‘natural’, without need for further discussion, household chores are another matter. They have established a clear division for some of the household chores and business responsibilities. For instance, Manuel opens the shop in the afternoons since Maria likes to have a nap after lunch. By the same token, after her nap Maria does some extra domestic chores in exchange for some hours in the business. Manuel: No. What happens is that I… here we have divided it, by a series of understandings and a series of agreements that we have arrived at. I simply open the shop in the morning and in the afternoons. Well, then when I am not working, if I am working in the morning she opens the shop. But in the afternoons I always do. Well, then I prefer to go to the shop, stay in the shop rather than stay at home doing things there and resting a bit. Well, then, we came to an agreement that benefits me and I take full advantage of it. Because before I always ironed. And now I don’t. Maria doesn’t like to iron. She didn’t like to iron and I didn’t like to iron but it didn’t bother me as much and so we came to an agreement, a tacit agreement. It was a verbal agreement, doing it like that, you go to the shop and I’ll stay. (C) They have come to divide up the household and business chores because both understand that this is the best and most convenient system for each one individually. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Maria: The household and business chores, fifty-fifty for sure. Manuel: Yes, me too. I think it is the same work, the same work. It’s better for me. Maria: It works better for me, but… Manuel: What I want to say, I say the same, well, at times I prefer to do one thing over another, of course, at first it may look like I receive more than I give, yes? If I choose, but well, I think that one way or another, it works, it works for her. Maria: Make it clear that I do more. Let’s not lower the bar [laughs]. Manuel: Well, if things… Maria: At home… Manuel: At home yes it’s clear, it’s clear. I want to say, that at home it’s clear that you do more, you do much more. That’s clear, but now there is a… Maria: But, it’s the opposite… Manuel: A sort of part… Maria: Halfway. Manuel: With respect to the time at hand. I prefer working in the store to scrubbing dishes [laughs]. I prefer to work four hours straight in the shop to scrubbing dishes for half an hour, for example. Even though it is more than scrubbing dishes, yes? Well, then I say fifty percent because it works out for both of us. Now, well, for me it works out better. Maria: If we didn’t take turns, watch out [laughs]. In this arrangement there is a hint of gender role differentiation. The man describes the division of domestic chores as being fifty-fifty but in Maria’s words there is a hint of the load being greater for her (Man: ‘a sort of pact’. Woman: ‘halfway’). Maria sees her husband taking less responsibility for household chores. Despite this, the agreement between the couple is clear: Maria: If we didn’t take turns, watch out [laughs] Maria and Manuel are a good example of a couple who have a strongly internalized view of a single family purse that serves the equal development of both spouses and for whom money is not an issue. Furthermore, we have selected this couple as one that repreCapitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


sents a phenomenon already observed by other researchers who have studied couples with a business that was initially the woman’s (Coria 1991). That is, the tendency for independent women to cede or put their spouse in charge of the economic aspects of a business previously owned and managed by the woman. In this case, the male management of the business finances does not give the man the control, of either the business or the money. His management of the business money is to balance her ownership and her knowhow of the business. Despite some division of labour at home and in the business, Maria and Manuel can be considered a symmetric couple. They share the business, the money and the household on very symmetrical terms. They have discussed their participation in the work that needs to be done, either at home or in the business, and they discuss and establish enough freedom in the use of money and enough free time for each partner to allow each to develop her or his own individuality, besides the time and the money that the couple spends as such. Maria and Manuel ‘do couple’ very consciously. Both know the danger of gender divisions and make the important decisions for their daily lives after open debate and taking into account that the consequences of their actions can be different for each partner due to early gender socialization. Common money to strengthen bonds: Jacinta and Juan Jacinta and Juan were 41 and 51 respectively and had a son of about two when we interviewed them. They had been living together for five years. Both had been married before and had children from their previous marriages, who had already left home or were living with the other parent. Jacinta married for the first time at an early age because she was pregnant. Her first marriage lasted ten years and from the outset she took on the upkeep of the house and the children while also preparing for vocational public examinations. She got her first job at 25. A few months before her divorce she started working at the bank that she continues to work in to this day. Juan started working at a steel factory as soon as he was old enough. He married for the first time at the age of 24 and his son was born two years later. His spouse was a housewife. He was a trade unionist and worked as a shop steward for 20 years. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Jacinta and Juan met almost five years before we interviewed them at a meeting of the union of which they are both active members, and had an extramarital relationship for several months until Juan decided to divorce his wife. The divorce was rather traumatic for the family and those closest to Juan. Jacinta and Juan wanted to have a child and establish a family from the very beginning of their relationship. The baby was born two years after they started living together. Months later they married to avoid problems related to his children’s inheritance and for the new marriage to gain social acceptance, particularly among Juan’s family, rather than out of conviction. No such problems of acceptance arose in Jacinta’s family in which Juan was well received from the outset. Jacinta was already divorced long before she met Juan. Both earn approximately the same income. They are one of the couples with the highest salaries of all those interviewed in the Spanish sample, with an income of around €60,000 a year. Juan works longer hours than Jacinta as he does another job after he finishes his main one. This second job provides him with some satisfaction and some additional income. When they are not working they like to stay at home or they go for walks with their young son and their dogs. Since both have salaries that are rather high, they have bought real estate and have a number of projects intended to consolidate the family’s assets. This is the only couple in the Spanish sample where both spouses are married for a second time. They are also the only ones to raise their young son with the strong involvement of both parents. Unlike most couples involved in second marriages money is not kept separate, as documented by Burgoyne and Morison (1997) and Sarrible (1996). According to the these researchers, couples involved in previous marriages tend to try to stop economic problems from interfering with their lives by establishing a system of separate accounts. However, Juan and Jacinta have two joint bank accounts and consider all their money to be shared. None of it is considered to belong to just one of them. Money was also shared in their previous marriages. Despite having altered many things in their second marriage, they have not changed the way they see money as being shared between them. This common fund is something they take for granted when forming a partnership: it is one of their ideals: Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Jacinta: We wanted a joint account rather than two separate accounts, and wanted to share the expenses from the beginning. We thought we wanted everything to belong to both of us, so the account was a joint account from the word ‘go’. (C) Just as the money they earn is shared, so also are the expenses and assets of each of them. No distinction is made. The flat they live in was bought by Jacinta before she met Juan and is in her name. However, as money has been shared since they started living together, both contribute toward the mortgage. They have acquired other real estate jointly, but they have also received presents and donations from their respective families, and all expenses, including alimony payments to the former wife, come out of the shared fund. Both spouses are aware of the fact that it would have been easier to have separate economies to avoid problems if they separate: Jacinta: When we applied for the last mortgage, we were told in the notary’s office that if we split up it would be very difficult to know what belonged to whom, because I bought the flat but paid off very little capital. But fifty-odd percent is mine and forty-odd percent is legally shared equally between us under the conditions of our wedding. So the notary would go crazy trying to sort out whose everything was. I suppose that if we do split up, it will be amicably and we’ll just split everything down the middle and each of us will get on with the rest of life. (C) The pooled money makes the price of splitting up so high that it would be better not to and both see separation as being unlikely. If the worst comes to the worst they trust that they will be able to reach some agreement, even though no such agreement could be reached for Jacinta’s divorce and even though Jacinta does not give the impression that she is very happy with Juan’s divorce arrangements, which she sees as being too favorable to his former wife. The child support that Juan pays to his ex-wife is a major slice of his fixed monthly expenses; indeed, it is the second largest expense: Jacinta: We do that basically with our money. A large part goes towards paying for the house and the small flat, and now for this country house. Another part that is quite considerable is what we Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


pay my sister for looking after our son, and then there is quite a large outlay on food, household expenses, light, water, gas, and then there’s …. Juan: My ex-wife’s alimony payments. Jacinta: The child support payments to Juan’s ex-wife are at least the second biggest slice. And the rest goes on food and clothing and socializing, which we don’t spend a lot on, and our son’s expenses, clothes and nappies. He’s starting kindergarten soon, which is another expense, but we have planned for that, and then there’s a little for saving. (C) However, Juan’s child support payments are more than just a major financial outlay: they are the price they have had to pay to live together, and Jacinta accepts this, despite not having taken part in the negotiations. Jacinta: No, Juan is paying quite a lot of alimony to his ex-wife, and that’s quite a burden, coming as it did after he came to live with me. He knew he was going to have to pay something, but, well, they negotiated quite a big figure between them and he was also very generous towards her. I mean, there was no court hearing, he just wanted to pay her off like that of his own free will. He left her the flat they had in usufruct, not in ownership. It was completely paid off. Juan: Except for the car, everything was paid for. Jacinta: He left everything to come here. (C) As Jacinta points out, leaving everything is what brought down the curtain on Juan’s previous marriage. The end of the first marriage marks the end of their economic communality, but to end the relationship with his first wife Juan has to take on major financial costs. This marriage was not liquidated by splitting the assets equally, as is usually the case when there are no children involved. Instead, Juan left the flat to his ex-wife and agreed to a high child support payment. He was prepared to pay whatever it cost, even if that involved financial loss, in order to start his new married life. In the case of Jacinta and Juan, shared money and investment in real estate is used as a way to build up the relationship. They are using money to build up a project for life that will signal to family Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


and friends, particularly in Juan’s case, that the relationship is not a fleeting one. They are trying to overcome the consequences of Juan’s divorce and to have their new marriage accepted in their immediate social circles. We are told this when they explain the meaning for them of building a second home in the village where Juan was born: Jacinta: It is extremely symbolic for us because it’s the village where Juan was born and where his family lives. Until very recently, I could hardly go to the village. His parents still didn’t know me. The scandal was still rife [about Juan’s divorce]… so that’s why it’s symbolic, because it breaks with the previous situation once and for all. Juan: For me, there is another symbolic side to it too. My father, my brothers, me and my elder children all grew up in this village. We spent our summers in this village, we learnt to swim in this village, so we really are from this village. So for me it’s very important for my younger son to be able to enjoy all this as well, isn’t it? Jacinta: Yes, although we thought that would not be allowed. (C) As Bourdieu points out in his research on social structures in the economy, what is tacitly being stated by building a family house is the will to create a permanent group united by stable social relationships (Bourdieu 2000: 35). Building a second home in the man’s home town is a common project that sparks off and strengthens affective cohesion for this couple. At the same time, the meaning of money invested in real estate relates for this couple with the issue of their offspring, i.e., with guaranteeing the future well-being of their children, who will inherit these assets. It is as if the couple project themselves through their children via the property that they purchase. Jacinta: We are building up an inheritance for our children without having to go without anything ourselves. (W). Here we can see how money is used to strengthen bonds. Priority is given to building up the couple, while the risks and potential problems that might arise from having a communality of assets are Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


ignored. Money serves for Juan and Jacinta to support and reinforce their affective ties. The couple’s relationship is consolidated by a project for a shared life in which having shared money and making joint investments provides the couple with stability and social acceptance, just as having and sharing a child also strengthens the couple. Money plays a neutral role in relation to the exercise of Jacinta and Juan’s autonomy. They have free access to money, and freedom to spend it. Both are aware of their limits since their freedom is exerted in a context of planned budgeting. The budget is supervised by Jacinta for two reasons. On the one hand, she works in a bank and it is easier for her whereas Juan doesn’t like to bother with money. On the other hand, she learned to be in charge of her own money once she was divorced and she enjoyed the feeling of independence and control of running her own finances.

Common money to support one partner’s vital project: Herminia and Hector Herminia and Hector were 40 and 41 years of age respectively when we interviewed them. They met at work; they are both social educators.6 They began to see each other after work everyday and started their relationship when Herminia had to move to another children’s institution. After a three-year relationship in which they lived with their respective parents they decided to get married. Their decision to get married was a result of Herminia passing the exams to become a civil servant7 and her impending transfer to another children’s centre. After their decision, they spent almost a year planning their wedding. They had a traditional Catholic wedding with many invited guests. At the time of the interview they had been married for four years and had no children. They lived in a new flat on the outskirts of the city, in a very new area still under construction, with few services and a lot of green areas. They bought their flat six months before we interviewed them and when interviewed they were still living with their things packed in boxes. They were in a state of transition as they were considering selling the flat and moving to another city nearby where Herminia then worked. Although both do the same type of work, Herminia works fulltime and Hector part-time. He has chosen to work on a part-time Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


basis in order to have spare time to dedicate to his artistic activities that give him personal satisfaction and that allow him to become the singular individual he wants to be: Hector: I’m very happy having a regular income and spare time to paint, draw and do what I like to do. I mean, I imagine the future working as an educator or something similar, not many hours per week and having time to carry on drawing. And then, if I can do something else from time to time… I like it this way. (M) Hector does not define himself as a social educator but as an artist. However, his part-time job (he is also a civil servant and his position is for life) gives him security and stability. He currently works only on Saturdays and Sundays: Hector: I was not aware about the weekend job. I took the exams without expecting anything and when I passed them I was delighted because part time work allows me… Herminia: Yes, he has the opportunity to switch to full-time. Hector: …it allows me to draw, to paint, to change from one job to another. (C) As Herminia states, Hector could have a full-time job but he has not considered this possibility. After they married he did not change his work situation, he never looked for a switch to full time, although at the time of the interview he was considering getting another job for the weekdays: Hector: Now, I’m considering doing some work during the rest of the week but I haven’t started to look for it yet. I’m thinking about something related to the Internet, teaching training courses, things like that. (C) In any case, Hector prefers to develop his professional future doing activities related to his artistic interests, even though these kinds of activities are more vulnerable, insecure and provide him with less income. He does not want to shift his current part-time into a fulltime job as Herminia suggested.



Hector chooses spare time over earning more money. His weekend part-time job allows him to have the weekdays free to develop his artistic skills and interests. He does not assume more domestic duties in his spare time during the week when Herminia is working. His decision to work part-time allows Hector to satisfy his individualistic needs. His goal is to satisfy his own interests and make sure that the relationship he has with his spouse does not collide with those interests. Herminia’s income is higher than his: she earns around €15,600 and he earns around €12,000 per year. Some years Hector receives some extra money from selling some of his paintings and other design work. However, his work as an artist is not a reliable source of income. Also the income from his artwork is offset by the expenses of materials. Hector needs to purchase the paint, brushes, canvases, etc. and prepare for the exhibitions of his drawings. In any case, the couple counts on both salaries to live. The fact that he earns less does not mean that he is considered by Herminia nor by himself less of a provider: on the contrary, they try to hide this difference: Interviewer: Who earns more? Herminia: I have a bigger salary, but with his other incomes he earns more, sure he does. Hector: With the work I produce from time to time we probably earn a similar amount. Herminia: No, I think you earn more. The salary difference, now that we have looked at it, due to this interview, is only €3600 [in favour of the woman]. Hector: Yes, 3600 at the end of the year. Herminia: And you with your extras earn more than that. Hector: My earnings vary from year to year. There are years when my extra income is €2000 and others €8000.8 Herminia: I think that you earn more than me, but it doesn’t matter. It’s more or less the same. Hector: It doesn’t matter; it all goes into the same pool. (C) In this quotation both partners, but particularly Herminia, try to downplay the difference in earnings in order to hide the fact that he earns less than she does. This fact apparently violates the social Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


norm and could question the man’s role and the man’s identity in his own eyes and those of his spouse, relatives or others. Therefore, she insists in order to make the man feel like a co-provider and not a lesser provider. Herminia and Hector, as with the rest of the Spanish couples we interviewed, consider the money they have as common money. However, contrary to the other couples already analysed, money in this case is not held in a joint bank account. Herminia and Hector keep the two bank accounts that they had before their marriage: one is Hector’s account and the other is Herminia’s. Although Herminia’s and Hector’s names appear on both accounts, each one deposits his/her own earning in his/her account: Herminia: We have an account that belongs to both of us. So, one [salary] goes to one of our accounts and the other goes to another joint one [both talk at the same time now]. (C). They have a soft budgeting system with a few fixed items. They use the money from each account to pay different kinds of expenses. From Hector’s account they pay the mortgage and they use Herminia’s account mainly to pay the rest of the monthly expenses: Herminia: In fact now we are living also with this [extra] money from his and with my salary and we even have savings. Because with the other salary, the other from his, his salary, goes directly to the other account. Well, it pays the mortgage. (C) Once the monthly expenses are covered, the remaining money in each account, in effect, works as if it were the property of its original holder. This management system leaves Herminia with less money in her account than in his, as the expenses that she covers are quite high and variable. Regular monthly expenses are paid all month long and there is no fixed amount of money (although they consider around €700 per month). There is always the possibility of spending more to buy something extra. The mortgage is a fixed small amount (€192 per month). Consequently, the separate management practice in this couple favors the male. Once the mortgage is deducted Hector has more money in his account at his disposal than Herminia does in hers. On the other hand, Hector has credit Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


cards from both accounts and uses both of them, whereas Herminia only has and uses a credit card from her own account. In the interview they mentioned a few times the extra money that Hector earns. This extra money does not have any financial importance to the family welfare; however, it has an important symbolic meaning. Hector asserts his individuality through this extra money and this assertion is reinforced by Herminia’s acknowledgement of the importance of this money for him. Therefore, this money is classified as special, but his expenses on his artistic activities come from the pool or rather from the wife’s income, as she herself makes clear: Herminia: The money he gets from his work is more his. But to go so far as to say it is separate, no, no. That’s like saying I’ve got more, what I earn is mine. No [laughs] It’s like the expenses. It makes no difference who is spending. I mean, when he has an exhibition, you have to pay out before you earn. Of course he always says: ‘I don’t know how much I’m going to have to spend’. But I tell him, think of it as an investment, if it does turn out, well, that’s it. He always underspends and I think he shouldn’t, he should spend what he needs to: ‘Right, this is to buy materials, this is to have catalogues done’ and in the end it’s not for the one or the other. (W) Underlying this statement there are various factors that need to be analysed. On the one hand there is the tension between the norm of sharing and possession of one’s own income. Herminia rejects the latter, her money is the family’s, although she takes for granted that she earns more. However, when the gains her husband makes from his artistic activities are mentioned, the norm that money belongs to the one who earns it comes into play. She thinks the gains are more Hector’s than hers, despite the fact that she finances him. In this couple there is a strain between the concepts of money ownership: the woman’s money is for the family and the man’s is above all his. In the wife’s statement, her financial backing for his personal expenditure is evident. There is no opposition on her part to taking the expenses for his pursuits from the pool or even her own money. She thinks he has a right to make these personal purchases and to Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


use the pooled money even when he needs a large sum. She willingly finances this spending as she admires her husband’s artistic talent. What we find in this couple is that since she earns more the financial contribution of the husband is overvalued so his role of provider is not adversely affected. This is how the greater expenses of the men earning less than their wives are justified. A double standard of values is applied to men’s and women’s personal spending. On the one hand there is an attempt to disguise the fact that the man earns less and, on the other, his higher personal spending level is accepted as conforming to the rules. Our research, together with that of Tichenor (1999) and Brines (1994), shows that men are given the right to make such expenditures and, if they are high, strategies are employed to alter their consideration as expenses and to cover up the fact that they spend more. On the other hand, in spite of the fact that these women earn more, at times they end up adopting a couple lifestyle that is not the one they prefer. They do not use their higher status to impose decisions favoring their interests, as is the case with Herminia. She would like to engage domestic help, but in the end this wish is put off – despite being able to afford it – because her partner does not want the same thing: Herminia: When I lose my rag, the next day, he does it all. Well, all he can see, because, of course, there are things he doesn’t even see. But it’s not that. I don’t want him to do it. Well, he could say, I don’t see the house is dirty and wait for me to do it the following day, couldn’t he? To tell the truth what I’d really like is to pay someone to do it for me and that would be that, wouldn’t it? (W) In this couple, neither one of them is interested in the household financial management. There is a non-active economy and the management on many occasions is more a responsibility than a privilege or a source of power. This could reflect the lack of a defined family project. As we know, Hector has a clear goal for himself, which centres on his artistic interests. However, Herminia does not take the risk of articulating a specific goal. Perhaps she does not express her own desires because she does not want to risk having her goal collide with that of her husband. She assumes her husband’s goal as Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


her own and supports him not only emotionally, but also financially, being his material and moral support. Although Herminia has a full-time job and a higher salary than his, the way they manage and use the money in the household reinforces his life project and allows him to put it into practice, whereas she does not use her money to impose decisions favoring her interests, for instance, her desire to engage domestic help. Political correctness can hide inequality. Fatima and Fernando When we interviewed Fatima and Fernando in 2001 they were in their 40s. They had met and started going out together as undergraduates some 20 years earlier. When Fatima graduated they split up, as she left to work in a city on the Mediterranean coast about 1000 kilometres away from Asturias. The separation lasted about a year and a half, until she left her job (where she had a permanent contract) and returned to Asturias to be with Fernando. After living together outside of wedlock for a few years, during which time Fatima failed to find a sufficiently stable job in line with her qualifications, they split up. After a year’s separation, they decided to have a child and to get married, which they did, and one year later they had their first child. The second arrived three years after. Both Fatima and Fernando identify themselves politically with the left. In fact, Fernando is an active member of his trade union and left-wing party, and maintains good relations and friendships with professional politicians. He has even spent some time on paid leave from his job to work for the trade union and the party. Fernando is a civil servant by training, on the highest pay scale, and Fatima works in a technical post, but has a temporary contract and works split shifts, which means she spends more time at work than he does, despite earning half his salary. Their income is high by Spanish standards, and their standard of living and expenses are what one would expect of the middle classes (paying off a mortgage, buying a second home in their home town, and expenses paid out for training courses in both their cases). As they are also bringing up two small children, their expenses are fixed and there is little room for manoeuvre or discussion. The basis of the economic organization of this couple is a joint pool: all assets from the marriage are shared. They have a single joint bank account and all income belongs to this ‘common fund’, Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


as neither Fernando nor Fatima have any conception of money being individually owned. This has been how they have organized themselves from the start of their relationship. Fatima and Fernando have pooled their money since they started going out together at university. At that time they were in a position of equality: two university students living with their parents, being given some money by their parents and working occasional jobs. When they were going out together they shared their money in a more ‘natural’ way, i.e., each of them put in whatever they had, depending on the situation (doing military service, doing an occasional job, and so forth), and the money was shared to carry out shared activities. The ‘kitty’ was a basic fact of life throughout the first four or five years of their relationship. Their lack of financial resources was one facet of how they organized their time, which they spent together in a situation of material and psychological equality. This initial situation of equality is compounded by a shared idea, which they strongly defend on occasions during the interview: the ideal of the egalitarian couple. For example, paid work is essential for Fatima. She has really fought hard to get her various jobs, she is studying so that she has better work prospects (she goes to a private language school three times a week in her lunch break to learn English), and most of all, she does not see herself as a housewife: Fatima: I just know it wouldn’t be for me, I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. When you work you are fulfilling a social role; at least for me, I like my work; I don’t know, I think I would be unhappier, and in fact I took it very badly when I was not working. For me, the whole business of cooking and laying the table and nothing else, just waiting for him to arrive… it is a model I don’t think I could cope with; I don’t think I could. [laughter]. (C) Nor could Fernando imagine living with a woman whose only life involved the family: Fernando: … being married to someone who is at home all day seems complicated to me. (C) Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Moreover, he emphasizes the importance of two incomes: Fernando: … the way things are going these days, either one person has to really earn a lot or you need two salaries to make ends meet, right? Otherwise, it’s difficult to maintain a … You would have to do so much cost-cutting that you would have to go without thousands of things that nowadays just seen to be basic, right? (C) In short, they consider traditional couples with specialized roles to be obsolete, although for different reasons. For Fernando money, to have two salaries, is as important as having a professional spouse whereas for Fatima what counts is to be a professional, to have a social role outside the family. Today’s educational and professional levels among women and the acknowledgement of equal rights for men and women make it ideologically unthinkable for left-wing activists to express support for the traditional couple made up of the breadwinner and the housewife. But Fatima points out the negative consequences for women who accept the housewife role with its attendant conditions. Fatima: [on the subject of traditional couples] … it creates tremendous imbalance of power. In fact, women are being killed every day. I think that if the man is the one who rules the roost and is the one who brings home the cash then… that’s bad, it’s what creates the problems that women face when …. when these things happen, right? It’s all down to that. I don’t think that this model can establish a balance; I think that traditionally it has caused imbalance. (C). Here we have a couple who want to see themselves and also project the image of the symmetrical couple. Both work; both pool their money; major expenses are discussed, and at one level of discussion they show their egalitarian tendencies in such a way that if some inequality in the relationship is made explicit, they then find a way to justify it. When Fatima reveals the limited control she has over money, she also explains that she has no interest in the matter and does not mind accepting Fernando’s criteria, even though, as we will later see, she resents some of the investment decisions made by her husband: Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Fatima: But that’s because I don’t [laughter] … I mean, I haven’t. Despite this desire and the ideal of having an egalitarian relationship, of not having individual funds and having equal formal access to the shared pool, we find that their relationship as far as money is concerned is far from being equal. First, Fernando takes charge of managing their finances. Fernando plays the role of expert in financial affairs; he knows what they earn and what they spend. It is Fernando who withdraws funds from the bank, and he is the one who knows what their bank balance is. Fatima is very clear about the fact that her husband is in charge of money matters. She is not concerned about money management and is usually unaware of the bank balance and mortgage payments. She asks Fernando for money as and when she needs it,9 and even though she has a credit card she does not use it, among other reasons because she does not know their bank balance and she knows that they are sometimes in the red. Moreover, when this specialization in money management is explicitly pointed out, Fatima suggests that it was her own decision to have nothing to do with the issue because she prefers it that way. This leads to Fernando taking on the role of main breadwinner by not mentioning the importance of Fatima’s financial contribution. The impression is that he is the only provider: Fernando: I would like to improve my income. Particularly for the family and the future of the family, right. (M) This direct control over money coincides with Fernando’s preeminence in decisions regarding expenditure. Fatima and Fernando do not share the same financial priorities, which is a source of conflict. Spending that is actually made coincides with his priorities; she does not offer outright resistance to this except on specific occasions. This general tendency is highlighted by the two major financial decisions that the couple have made: buying the apartment they live in and a house in the village. Fernando took the initiative; he was the one who put forward the arguments about the advantages of buying both properties. Conflict arose with the purchase of the house in the village. Fatima’s number one priority is renovating the kitchen and other parts of the house they live in, Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


such as the terrace and the bathroom. She is prepared to negotiate about her second priority (a new car versus renovating the village house). Fatima is also more interested than Fernando in taking holidays; they hardly ever go away and holidays are usually spent in the village they were born in, which she is not very happy about. Priorities for Fernando are to renovate both houses, although he is not bothered about continuing to live the way they do now; the car is not an immediate priority, even though Fatima uses it every day to go to work and they spend quite a lot of money on repairs. Fernando has more skill in arguing his case and Fatima accepts his decisions. The investment in the village house has caused them to experience lean years recently. This will continue in the near future, which seriously annoys Fatima who feels that the renovation jobs that are important to her are progressing too slowly. Central heating is an example. What was a basic need for Fatima was only installed a few months before the interview, after living for seven years with little children and without a central heating system. Moreover, Fatima and Fernando have different access to the common fund. Fernando handles the money and she asks him for money when she needs it. Fernando knows the state of their accounts and makes decisions on behalf of the family without consultation on a systematic basis. He perceives himself as the family’s legitimate representative. As we said before, he assumes the mantle of family breadwinner. The fact that Fernando is the financial manager and that they currently owe money and have debts means that Fatima has to consult him before committing to any outlay. Being in debt and being responsible as far as money is concerned combine to stop Fatima from behaving as an independent, autonomous person as far as spending is concerned. However, Fatima’s position in relation to money management is ambivalent since she backs Fernando specializing in their money management and makes him responsible for making the big decisions: Fatima: I always had the idea that he would renovate the house in Oviedo first. (W) She assumes that he is the one who has the last word on big expenses. Although they talk about their expenses, she accepts that it is her Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


husband who does what he prefers first. In other aspects, they are also fairly conventionally organized as far as looking after the children is concerned, although they do not explicitly acknowledge the fact. Fatima is not at home for the afternoons because of her work commitments and they have a nanny who looks after the children even though Fernando could be at home then as he only works mornings. The nanny’s salary is a major expense, yet Fatima did not bring the point up until Fernando suggested that if they spent less money they would have to do without the nanny: Fernando: We’d probably have to do without the lady who looks after the children, obviously. Fatima: Of course…and cut down on our activities, right? Mine would be [laughing] working … well, I don’t know, I just think that …. We are just getting by anyway. Just getting by. (C) Outlay on their children also comes before spending on herself for Fatima, which she considers to be common among mothers. The same attitude is not observed for Fernando, who is also aware that his wife is looking after the children. There is one final point to be made in this overview of the different uses to which money is put: it turns out that Fernando is the ‘social finance secretary’. Fernando usually has more money in his pocket than Fatima, and is the one who pays when they go out. He justifies this by saying that ‘he is out and about more often’ and he needs to have more cash available as he sometimes finds himself in unforeseen circumstances, unlike his wife whose habits are more routine. As we have seen, the issue of money, specifically pooled money, in couples is complex, ambiguous and unclear. This couple have pooled money but they don’t share the pool on equal terms. Pooled money does not mean an equal economy. This is the obvious case. Fatima and Fernando live in a flagrant contradiction between what they claim to be – an egalitarian couple – and their day-to-day reality, where the male clearly controls the purse strings and the female seems to turn a blind eye to the situation. How do they handle such a situation? What strategies and mechanisms are in place to resolve the conflict between what they claim to be and what they really are? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


The strategy that is most frequently employed seems to be, quite simply, not to make the situation of inequality explicit, to cover it up, to hide the fact from their own eyes as well as those of the interviewer. In this respect pooled money provides a marvellous excuse: they are equal because they have equal access to funds. If either of them does not exploit the situation, this is due to a personal, freely made decision. As was pointed out at the beginning, Fatima and Fernando, in the process of forming themselves as a couple, embraced an egalitarian ideology and the equal pooling and sharing of their money. This is the image they still have of themselves. On the other hand, here we have two political activists; one becomes more politically committed and is called to certain tasks that provide him with enhanced prestige in the eyes of his partner, who consents to him spending more time on the party than on looking after his children and doing housework. Rather than the differentiation process and establishment of the hierarchy in the couple being gradual, it seems to have been the outcome of certain decisions that changed the rules, by which we are referring to Fatima’s decision to leave a steady, well-paid job to go back to live with Fernando. They started to live together when she returned, and they saw the pool as the most natural, apparently equalitarian form of financial organization. However, equality suffered in the process, since Fernando had a fixed income, whereas Fatima experienced job problems over those years. This fact caused their income and professional statuses to reach different levels and Fernando became the main provider. Marriage seems to have been a second watershed: they decided to marry after a year of crisis and separation. The purchase of the family home and the birth of a child one year later followed in the wake of the marriage. Fatima: When we got married it was because we wanted to have children, we wanted to form a family, otherwise we wouldn’t have got married after so many years together and after going through so much together. We wouldn’t have got married. (C) Both have accepted deep down that money is at the service of the couple or the family and surpasses individual interests. The gender trap may lie in how gender roles are accepted in different ways and how they work out when the context shifts from two equals (two Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


cash-strapped students who pool resources so that they could go further) to living as a couple or a family. In the latter context, specialized gender roles kicked in. If we again consider the mechanisms whereby this coexistence of the ideal of the egalitarian couple and their everyday reality exists, we find that the male is more persuasive in his arguments. This is also an important point when analysing a relationship that includes conversation, discourse, the ability to sustain a personal position and point of view, since theoreticians of postmodernity such as Giddens and Beck argue that modern couples founded on equality talk and argue in order to reach decisions. In this respect, when the couple’s interaction is analysed, it becomes clear that Fernando is more accustomed to speaking in public and does so brilliantly, as is confirmed by the joint interview. Fernando speaks more and Fatima hangs on his every word. She often intervenes to confirm what Fernando says or finish his sentences rather than expressing her point of view. He is the financial ‘expert’ and she often asks him questions in the course of the interviews. As far as major issues are concerned, Fernando also asks Fatima for her opinion, although sometimes he does not wait for the answer and carries on speaking himself. She then repeats what he has said as if it were her own opinion. Their different resources allow them to speak about money, but not to do real negotiation (Blood and Wolfe 1960; Nyman and Evertsson 2005). When conflict is explicit and Fernando fails to convince Fatima of his opinion, the solution, at least as it relates to the issue of major expenses, has been to go with Fernando’s wishes. Sometimes she backs down and waits for her opportunity; for example, she does not take part in the renovation of the house in the village, which she does not like visiting. We would underline two points about her attitude: first, Fatima has accepted, at least for the moment, her secondary role within the couple. This is demonstrated by her having a say in affairs but backing down and accepting Fernando’s view in cases of conflict. Furthermore, in her eyes this situation is transitory. Fatima is a person who thinks a lot about the future: the time will come when the kids will have grown up, she will have a permanent job (that is why she is studying English) and then, she believes, she will be in a position to negotiate with Fernando on an equal footing. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Own money means autonomy: Elisa and Ernesto Elisa, 24, had been living with her husband Ernesto, 22, for nearly two years and married for one year when we met them in the summer of 2000. They had no children. She is a qualified primary school teacher and is in her final year of a degree course in physical education and is also reading gerontology for a Master’s degree. They met when both were students at university, but Ernesto dropped out when his father, the owner of a small business, fell ill and the family asked him to take over control of the firm. When Ernesto moved to his home town he and Elisa met at weekends until finally Elisa moved to Ernesto’s parents’ home and lived there for several months before they married. At the time of the interview they were living in an unfurnished three-bedroom rented apartment, 50 percent financed by the municipality (under a young people’s accommodation scheme). Ernesto’s parents helped them furnish it. Ernesto has a monthly income of €900 working for the family firm (below the national average of €1200). Elisa has a small grant and does occasional low-paying jobs. Her total income is about 20 percent of her husband’s. Elisa and Ernesto come from very different backgrounds. Elisa comes from a working-class family, her father experienced several spells of unemployment, her mother lost her job when pregnant and is now working away from her husband and teenaged daughter in a kind of separation prior to divorce. Elisa has lived on a shoestring budget most of her life and she does not indulge in impulse buying. In contrast, Ernesto’s parents are well educated and financially comfortable. Elisa and Ernesto break the common money pattern that we found in the other couples interviewed. Before marriage, following Ernesto’s family’s recommendation, they established a regime of separate property. For Ernesto this separation is only virtual, it operates only to save the family money in case of bankruptcy, but in real life his money operates as community property. He gives Elisa his pay cheque and she manages the monthly income, while keeping her own separate account. When they were students and started their intimate relationship, they lived separately. Once Elisa moved to Ernesto’s hometown to live with Ernesto and his parents, on Ernesto’s income, they institutionalized their couple relationship. Now married and living on Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Ernesto’s earnings, Elisa keeps her own small income for herself, to finance her studies. Elisa accepts that Ernesto pays her small everyday expenses and the running of the house, but not for her studies. She makes it very clear that her own money will pay for her studies. She will not accept Ernesto sponsoring her education. She is seemingly inflexible on this question: Elisa: …to pay for my Master’s I used my savings. I was adamant about that. I insisted that I should pay with the money I had from before we married, I can’t accept his money for my education. For other things I can take money from the common purse, but definitely not for my education. I had saved that money, I wanted it for my education and I’ll invest it in that. That’s all. (W) That is, although Ernesto has an income four times greater than Elisa’s and both share it for regular living expenses and joint saving, she does not share her money. It appears that she likes to keep it to have a minimum of self-respect. Keeping back her grant money for herself gives Elisa a certain autonomy and financial identity apart from her husband. Being able to pay for her own education is for Elisa a symbol that one day, when she gets the Master’s degree she will be able to take care of herself. She knows that her income is too low to live on, but it has extraordinary importance to her. Using her own money to pay for her education, at least the fees, allows her to feel that if her husband has money, so has she. She even has savings and says it immediately: Ernesto: When we left my parents’ home I was already working and spending nothing as I was living with them and her too. I had my own savings. Elisa: Me too. I also had my savings. Ernesto: We were keeping the savings apart. Elisa: Yes, we even tried to pay for the wedding, but in the end they [Ernesto’s parents] paid for it, I think. Ernesto: Yes, it was perfect. Elisa: At the time I didn’t realize they paid. (C) This quote reveals Elisa’s pride in having her own money, besides her contribution – through frugality – to the common savings. It Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


also reveals her pretence of ignoring that Ernesto’s family paid for the wedding, which most probably conflicts with her pride. She does not see any conflict in keeping her own money and, at the same time, sharing her husband’s income; neither does her husband. She feels very strongly that she needs her own money in order to maintain a sense of autonomy, even a small amount of money that is put to a very specific purpose. She is not happy with their financial arrangements. Ernesto’s money, the money of the family business, is kept separate because of potential risks associated with a small business. But this leaves Elisa out of the potential profits of the firm and in a weak position in an eventual divorce. In the couple interview Ernesto refers only to the positive side of the legally separate accounts and Elisa does not contradict him. Ernesto: We have legally separate properties because, in theory, I’ll inherit my family firm and if there were to be any legal problem…. If Elisa and I will buy any thing big [a house, a car] I’ll put it in her name. If, for example, I broke, or I have problems with the taxes, they can take the firm, but not the house or the car, or any other goods. We have separate properties because of that. Elisa: It was good advice. Ernesto: It was my father’s advice, a lawyer who is a friend of his, said ‘if your son will marry tell him that the first thing is to arrange legal separate properties. Why? Because that and that…’ For example, in Catalonia they have separate properties by default. The wedding and separate properties, if you want to have pooled money you must ask for it. (C) However, in her individual interview, she explicitly states her worries: Elisa: The meaning of own money… My own money can be my safety net in the case of a crisis in our relationship, because any relationship can go to hell. If it happened, I’d be naked. As we have legal separate accounts I’ll get nothing, not even… well, just… nothing. (W) The idea of the separate property comes from Ernesto’s family on the expectation that one day he will become the proprietor of the Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


family business, but at the moment and for the foreseeable future, his parents will keep control of the firm and he will continue being a salaried employee. Even hints of her lack of money trouble her since in her childhood Elisa learned the humiliating effect that the lack of her own money had on her mother. This can be reason enough to keep personal money and to reduce economic dependency to a minimum. Elisa: My father was the one working while my mother was the one without work and my father, well, he used to throw it in her face saying ‘look, I’m the one earning money’ and when my mother started to have her own money she said ‘We’ll see now’ and ‘now we can both go our own way’. (W) Love moved Elisa from an economic dependency on her family and a grant to a dependency on her partner. Yet now she feels less humiliated, considering this dependency is of a temporary nature, keeping it to a minimum and managing the daily expenses with such care and meticulousness that her efforts increase the couple’s savings. Elisa avoids all but necessary expenses and cuts even necessary ones to the bone, especially those for herself. Her role as day-to-day manager induces her to show her worth by spending as little as possible on joint expenses. On the contrary, Ernesto has no difficulty whatsoever in spending, since the money, at least in theory, is there to satisfy their wishes and needs. Although no direct control is exercised by Ernesto, who has the privilege of not bothering about money, Elisa imposes a financial limit on herself, and does not usually spend, unless it is absolutely necessary, trying to reduce her dependency on her spouse. As can be seen in the following extract, she needs new glasses but has not bought them despite her husband’s insistence: Elisa: Well, we are still left with the question of my glasses. Ernesto: Yes. Elisa: I don’t mean to get them yet. Ernesto: She’s got some glasses that are only fit to be thrown away and she still won’t get new ones.10 Elisa: He’s always after me for expenses like that. (C) Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


In the same way, she carries saving to extremes in managing the daily expenses she makes: Elisa: Let’s have a look at food. There are times when we even don’t consume the food we bought and it goes rotten and I say you have to think about it, it’s nothing but when you are checking the accounts and I say: well, that’s right, but look at what we bought the other day and then ended up not eating it. (C) Elisa: If he says ‘do go shopping’ I say ‘No’. Ernesto: If I say ‘ why you don’t buy for yourself’, she says: ‘later’. As has been said, Ernesto’s spending criteria are very different. He does not restrict himself, either in his own expenses or in those for the home. So then he and she have two very distinct ways of using money, which lead to very different life-styles within the couple. While Elisa saves all she can, proportionally large amounts are invested in what Ernesto enjoys. The criterion for daily expenses – imposed by Elisa – is one of severe austerity, but at the same time they buy an expensive television complete with a home cinema system because he wants it. In this family unit the nonchalant spending habits of the husband, typical of a young man in a consumer society, are combined with those of the woman, which belong more to a home in strained circumstances. Both styles are mingled because the main provider imposes his criteria on the general spending subtly and smoothly, and his wife accepts as he is the provider. Even so, she adopts the strategy of cutting down her personal expenses to the very minimum in an attempt to avoid as far as possible the symbolic and financial dependence on the man. In so doing she increases the family savings. It is her way of contributing to the common purse. Ernesto: I think that money, as far as we have it, is for buying things that both of us like or need, or things we desire, but Elisa is more conservative with money, she says that money must be saved for bigger projects such as a house or a car, I also like these things but we can buy nice little things for our apartment now (M) Her lack of money and her childhood experiences have led Elisa to have a great regard for the value of money and to look for economic Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


security by reducing her needs. The less money she needs, the better. Elisa: For the basic things we have the same criterion. Maybe our only difference is that he spends money on clothes, shoes, etc. and I don’t. I’m so thrifty that I don’t spend on clothes or shoes, only if I need them desperately, if my trousers are too old. I’m very extreme in my attitude about spending, I realize that, but I feel good as I am. I suppose that it is because of what I went through as a child. (W) Elisa finds it natural that the one who earns the money has some freedom to use it. She uses her own for her studies and understands that Ernesto must enjoy his own. Elisa: I tried to show him that I recognize the money is mainly his. If he earns more money, at least he ought to keep some for himself. I don’t know how to say it (…) but if you earn the money and you fancy something just like when you were single, well you go and buy it and Bob’s your uncle. (W) Although Ernesto’s income is pooled Elisa clearly sees that this is mainly his money and consequently he can use it to indulge his whims. It is a manifestation of her view on the relation between money and independence, for her and for anyone else (Burgoyne 1990). Ernesto had a professional project of his own. He has abandoned it – for the moment – because of his father’s illness. But once in the family firm he adapted well to the situation. He has a full-time job in a business that he expects to inherit and a salary that, although modest, is higher than that of most of his age group. Ernesto: Money gives me economic independence. Independence from my parents. It means independence to do anything that I choose to do. (M) The money that Ernesto earns, the family money, is the main economic support of the couple: without Ernesto’s income they could not live together. Ernesto was content being able to maintain his Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


parents’ business and his couple relationship, whereas Elisa was dissatisfied with her situation and she was actively trying to improve her status by investing in professional training to get a good job. She lives seeking a different future believing that with a better job, with a salary and a status similar to her husband’s, the current asymmetry of the couple will be overcome. Elisa: I’ll do it [a full-time job] to feel right, that’s the truth. I don’t feel I need to study so much. I’d like to have a job, that’s what I need. I need it for myself, to realize my own expectations, to feel that I’m useful… (W) In a way, consenting to begin a life together by giving up financial independence and postponing other plans (a job and possible working career) and university studies (and its potential for a working future) are signs that Elisa was ready to surrender important things for a life as part of a couple, for marriage, but only on a temporary basis. She does not like her current position of studenthousewife, but she puts up with it, not only because she thinks that it is provisional, but also because Ernesto too has sacrificed his initial plan. For the future, Elisa has a career plan for herself that is compatible with her marriage. Ernesto agrees and supports her in her studies and both look for ways of sharing her weekly trips to the university (100 kilometers away) with his business. But she is quite impatient to start her professional career. She does not want to continue studying, but does it while looking for a job and to be better qualified. In fact, it is the high unemployment in the area, especially among primary school teachers (Elisa’s qualification) that moved Elisa to do a Master’s course and finish her degree in Physical Education, although she lives far away from her university. Elisa understands that the situation they were in when interviewed was temporary, at least for her. In her view the situation of exchanging his money for her time doing the housework in a quid pro quo11 scheme was temporary and, eventually, the roles will be reversed when she has a proper job. Elisa: We Yes, yes of course blatantly, that’s it. What we do is to balance it, besides we thought of it like that. Well, I thought it. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


We thought about it, but I decided it: I do more of the housework because you are out and you don’t have the time. At the weekend you do the housework. If the situation changes, end of the agreement. We’ll re-think the system. (C) Elisa continues her studies to fulfill her ambition of being a teacher of physical education for old people. Her Master’s in gerontology and her degree in physical education are what she needs. She has thought of starting work as a teacher in a public system of care for the elderly but wishes to have her own care centre. Doing the housework and depending economically on her husband are endured because of this vision of economic independence and professional self-fulfillment in the coming years. Elisa currently does not have economic independence but fights to have some autonomy in economic terms. She decides how to use her own scarce money and she chooses to reduce her economic dependence on Ernesto by expending the minimum on herself and on the domestic bills. Ernesto, although he left the university (unwillingly) to work in his parents’ business, now finds that the money he earns in the firm gives him autonomy and a higher independence from his family than most youngsters of his age. He values this autonomy for himself and for Elisa, since he does not feel that Elisa depends on him. He feels deeply that the money he earns belongs to Elisa as much as to himself.

Some concluding thoughts Almost all the Spanish couples we interviewed think of money as pooled and the idea of one’s own money is alien to them. This is a standard pattern in a wider context of Mediterranean family resource pooling. Nevertheless, the fact that the majority of the 16 couples we interviewed make no differentiation between their own money and that of their spouse and think of all money as belonging to the common pool does not mean that men and women use money in the same way. In some cases sight is lost of where this pooled money comes from, whose income it is, or whether it is from capital or inherited, and so on, and each partner uses it without needing to give account to the other. However, in other cases it is clear where it comes from and thus it establishes differences and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


hierarchies, frequently under the guise of being pooled. Whatever the reason our research shows that the formula of pooled money is a hindrance to women being able to achieve independence and individuality and that common money and common family resources with equal access to money hides gender inequalities that vary from couple to couple but are present in all of them. Since money is pooled and the couples act within a soft budgeting system, individuality is, above all, reflected in personal spending and in the couple’s use of the pool. In many cases the pooled money is in name only. The two spouses cannot do what they like with the money and, even if they could, they do not all do so. The 32 interviewees do not spend much on themselves and women usually place more limits on their personal expenditures than do the men. From our research it can be learned that men spend more on themselves to a greater degree than women. This is suggested also by other researchers such as Coria (1991), Nyman (1999 and 2002), Pahl and Vogler (1993 and 1994), among others. Men’s and women’s behaviour relative to money differs; neither doubt that men should have money for their personal expenses, whereas some women do not feel authorized to spend money on themselves. Although the money is pooled the women who earn less than their husbands are very conscious of the difference in income and as a result put a limit on spending, especially personal. The women in these couples, though having a symmetric couple ideal, when spending behave in a similar way to the women in traditional couples of the breadwinner and housewife type. Women with less income than their husbands avoid heavy spending, either because they can’t afford it, or because the money is already earmarked for family plans to which they cannot object in their capacity as lesser earners. They also think of the money as more their husband’s than theirs, and if they spend it as if it were theirs they feel they are deepening their dependency. This inhibition in using money can be seen even in the instances where women are the greater earners. Although earning more these women do not see the money as more theirs, nor do they all show autonomy in spending. Those who do achieve autonomy do not do so without argument. The independent use of money by women who earn more than their men, can, at times, cause conflict between the couple. To avoid conflict and to comply with social patterns of masculine dominance, women who Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


are main providers veil their higher incomes and avoid having a higher profile than their husbands. In some cases they even live vicariously through their husband’s life project. We found that for most interviewed couples there is a great distance between what the couples have as an ideal of a couple relationship and the reality of their everyday life. Their ideal is that of a symmetric couple, a couple that shares money, work and household duties in equal terms. Their daily practice is different. This distance between the ideal and the reality can be related to the transition period Spanish society is experiencing. If we were to use the three long-standing ‘family/gender models’ of Western Europe identified by Pfau-Effinger, Spain is in a transition between the ‘agrarian’ family/gender model and the ‘egalitarian-individualistc’ family/gender model. The remains of the agrarian family/gender model with strong family support but also strong family control in many ways pervades the fight of modern working women to achieve a gender egalitarian couple relationship. In all couples interviewed we found that women devote more time and energy to household chores than men. Women work full time and care about domestic responsibilities, whereas men, even if they work fewer hours than their partners, dedicate less time to family and domestic duties. There is also another relationship pattern that repeats itself: it always seems to be the man who acquires so-called prestige in exchange for scant responsibility in household tasks. Either through their professional jobs, their involvement in politics or in singular hobbies such as artistic activities, men appear to have a higher social profile than their wives. Some women are willing to contribute to their spouse’s social prestige by remaining in an inferior position and complying with the extended social norm of masculine dominance.

Notes 1 2

3

Except in Catalonia. Although some authors reduce the familist character of our welfare regime. Victor Pérez Díaz (1998) considers that the concept is too simple and needs to be expanded and Chiara Sarraceno (1995) talks about the ambivalent familism of Mediterranean countries. The Centre for Sociological Investigation (CIS) is the most important official institution for sociological research in Spain. It publishes some of its data under the name of Estudios.



4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11

Luis Moreno (2002) states: ‘As “superwoman” we refer to a type of Mediterranean woman who has been able to reconcile her unpaid work at home with her increasing and everyday more demanding professional activities in the regular labour market’. According to the Spanish Institute of Statistics (INE), the rate of cohabitation moved from 1.1 per cent of the total number of couples in Spain in 1985 to 6.9 per cent in 1999. In Spain a social educator is a teacher who works in an institution for children (children without parents, children with parents who cannot care for them or children in custody). The children go to a school during school hours and the social educators take care of them when they are back at the institution. In Spain most public services have a tenure; to gain a tenure the employee must pass a public exam. Analysing the whole interview we realized that he earned €8000 only one year, that he did an exhibition of his drawings and sold some pictures. But in other years he earns as much as €2000 extra and there are some years that he has no extra income at all. How she asks for it, as if it were being loaned, is surprising: ‘Have you got some cash to lend me’. Elisa’s glasses have a broken side-piece held together with sellotape. They have this legend engraved in their wedding rings.


6 Doing Gender While Doing Couple: Concluding Remarks Björn Halleröd, Capitolina Díaz and Janet Stocks

It has long been observed that money plays a central role in couple and family relationships (Pahl 1989; Zelizer 1989). Money ties people together, causes conflicts and injustices, allows independence and creates dependence. To study money within couple relationships, therefore, becomes a lens through which to observe the way people ‘do couple’. Money is usually viewed by economists and social scientists as a neutral medium of exchange, a medium that transforms one kind of utility into another (Ingham 2001). Historically the introduction of money as a universal transaction instrument has often been linked with the rationalization and instrumentation of social relations. A prominent and early discussion on this view of money can be found in Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (Simmel [1900] 1990). In economic literature studies of income distribution, poverty research, and so on, money is looked upon as something that gives the owner the means to achieve a certain utility – every dollar is like every other dollar. Even though it is often acknowledged that the source from which money comes might affect people’s behavior – for example, creating dependence on welfare transfers – the fact that money from different sources affects the way money is thought about and used and the utility that money can provide is not commonly considered (Zelizer 1989; Zelizer 1996). Through money the value of labor, investments and inheritances is transformed into different kinds of utilities, the main one being consumption of goods and services. Since we are forced to consume in order to live, access to money liberates us from want and squalor. 143 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Money is also a prerequisite for the fulfillment of many of our dreams and wishes, we need money to travel, play golf, and so on. Thus, money has the potential to provide freedom. If we perceive money as a neutral exchange medium, every coin buys the same amount of freedom and from that follows that the circumstances under which we obtain money is irrelevant for the utility that it provides. It is clear that this view of money as neutral is naïve. Money has a double nature. On the one hand it is absolutely objective and neutral. Once you are in the store paying for whatever it might be that you are about to buy, the history of the money you hand over is absolutely irrelevant. However, it is exactly this feature, the fact that money in essence is an objective and neutral medium of exchange, that makes it possible to attach an almost infinitive number of social meanings to money. We have clearly demonstrated what others have reported: money is contaminated with social meaning and particularly with gendered meaning (cf. Pahl 1989; Zelizer 1989; Coria 1991; Pahl 1999). The empirical analysis presented in this book supports the notion of special money, money that carries with it a certain meaning that goes beyond its value as a medium of exchange. Much of the previous research has focused on the fact that ‘special monies’ are earmarked to be used for special purposes. What we have seen in addition to this is that different kinds of money also are attached to different kinds of expectations regarding future obligations. Money that comes as compensation for work, return from investments and in some cases welfare state transfers can be seen as impersonalized money. This type of money bestows the owner, in principle, with independence and freedom. The obligations that are connected with this kind of money are already performed, the work is done, the investment already made, etc. Personalized money is different because it, frequently in a very ambiguous and inexplicit way, is often connected to some kind of expectation regarding future behavior. The husband that brings in the lion’s share of the money to the household might be happy to share his money equally with his wife at the same time as his bigger contribution gives him the last say in money matters and gives the wife a sense that she should do the larger part of the household work in order to balance his contribution. These kinds of mechanisms are discussed at length in the literature that relates to intra-household sharing (Becker 1981; Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Doing Gender While Doing Couple: Concluding Remarks 145

Blood and Wolfe 1960; Brines 1993, 1994; Halleröd 2005; Sørensen and McLanahan 1987; Nyman 2002; Pahl 1989; Vogler and Pahl 1994). This view is explicitly expressed by some of our couples while among others, if not expressed, the pattern is nonetheless clearly visible – if the man brings in the greater portion of the money, he typically has the larger say when it comes to money matters, the same case does not apply when it is the woman who earns more (Dema 2005; Halleröd 2005). Money transferred from parents is also personalized to a large degree as it is sometimes seen as both a confirmation of dependence and also something that can translate into demands and obligations of one sort or another in the future. Inter-generational transfers of money create and maintain bonds that in many cases are seen as positive because they strengthen the social ties within a family (Attias-Donfut 2002; Bengtson 2001; Bengtson et al. 2002; Kohli 1999, 2005), ties that the modern individualized society is said to dismantle (Popenoe 1988, 1993). It is also argued that inter-generational transfers from parents to adult children, especially, increases the position of the parents and strengthens their social status (Arber and Attias-Donfut 2000; Kohli 1999). What is apparent from the interviews presented in this book is that these processes are not always perceived as positive by the receiver. At the same time as the giver’s position is strengthened the receiver sometimes experiences complicated feelings of dependence and a loss of freedom. As we saw in our couples, it is often women who express most directly these complicated feelings and seek to avoid the feelings of dependence that accepting these funds implies. Impersonalized and personalized money are of course to be seen as ideal types, in reality money can be understood on a continuum from completely impersonalized to completely personalized. What we have seen is that much of the monies that are transferred within the family are in a grey zone between these poles. The important thing is that personalized money carries with it different kinds of obligations and debts (debt in its broadest sense) that is or could circumscribe individual freedom. The ambiguity of the matter often creates a situation of uncertainty and anxiety. The receiver is not sure if anything is expected in return, or if something is expected, what it might be. And these expectations might well be of an emotional rather than a material nature. Complex emotional relationCapitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


ships are brought to the fore, but are often not explicitly discussed or resolved, leaving the receiver with feelings that are difficult to manage. In our interviews it was very clear that women were often the ones who were reluctant about receiving this kind of personalized money, be it from a partner or from relatives. The main reason for this reluctance was the loss of, or threat of loss of, independence, self-reliance and self-respect that it sometimes meant. This was most clearly seen among Swedish women but was also a theme that was repeated by women from the other countries. The most obvious reason that women are worried about a loss of independence relates to the historical position of women as being economically dependent on others – namely their husbands and fathers – and the various ways that this subordinates women to men’s will, materially and symbolically. Several of the interviews showed that women, rather then accept dependence on their partner, accepted an unequal intra-household distribution of money. In other words, for some women independence is more important than equality, at least equality of material resources within the home. Women’s feelings of independence and self-respect in these cases is very much tied to the notion that they can provide for themselves (and sometimes their children) without relying on the personalized money that their partners willingly offer. This result adds another dimension to the discussion of intra-household distribution of economic resources. The dominant view about unequal intra-household distribution is that it, in a more-or-less straightforward way, reflects women’s subordination vis-à-vis men. We are not arguing that this view is wrong, but our interviews do indicate that the picture is slightly more complicated and that women sometimes choose a situation of unequal intra-household distribution of money in order to avoid a process that leads to dependence and subordination. Thus, the fact that the wife has less money than the husband is in some cases not a direct outcome of gender inequality but a price that the wife is prepared to pay in order to achieve gender equality. That women have to pay a price to achieve a higher degree of gender equality is, of course, in itself a good example of gender inequality, and one of the most striking gender differences revealed by our interviews was that men, in contrast to women, almost never discussed money in terms of independence. Independence within Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


the couple relationship seems to be a non-issue among men. Our data do not provide us with an explanation of why this is the case, but we speculate that independence for men is taken for granted. Middle-class men, historically, have not been dependent on personalized money for their subsistence and self-respect. They feel an obligation to earn money and to contribute to their families, but the assumption is that this obligation will be fulfilled through access to impersonalized money. As long as this basic requirement is fulfilled, money does not translate into questions of dependence and independence. More puzzling is the fact that even in couples where the husband earned less than the wife, the husband’s discussion of money in terms of independence was completely absent. The men we interviewed did not, as women do, seem to perceive economic dependence as a long-term threat to their own individual freedom. It rather seems as if they take this individual freedom for granted even if they, for the time being, are economically dependent on their wife. Since independence and individualization are closely interlinked we see this as an important point. Independence can be seen as a necessary precondition for individualization. Thus, the conclusion is that men in couple relationships maintain a more individualized position and therefore have less need to fight for independence. The process of individualization, discussed by Beck (2002), Giddens (1993) and others can therefore be seen as something that is mostly related to women’s desire to achieve the same position that men have traditionally occupied. Women, in order to reach this position, must take an active role so as not to be trapped in a process that reproduces the traditional gendered family pattern. Women’s ability to be independent within a relationship is complex for many reasons. One issue on which we focused in our data analysis was the impact of women having their own money on their ability to get their way in multiple arenas within the relationship. For example, when women earn their own money do they have more authority in large money decisions within the couple? Do women have more autonomy if they have their ‘own’ money? Are women in a stronger position to off-load some of the housework and childcare responsibilities if they contribute substantially to the couple’s income? We found that these questions were not easy to answer and that relationships were more complex than a simple Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


accounting for money coming into the household could explain. Women’s ‘own money’ certainly did seem to have an impact on women’s autonomy, but relational issues, including most prominently gendered interactions, had a strong impact as well. Our interviews clearly show the complexity of practical money management within households. Yet another aspect that is apparent is the relationship between affection and, maybe even more importantly, trust and money arrangements. Among the Spanish couples, merging of money was, in most cases, one important aspect of the creation of the couple as such. Among our US and Swedish couples the picture was more ambiguous. It seems, particularly in the Swedish cases that were presented, that there is a clear link between emotional commitment and the degree to which finances were merged. Again, it was women who were the acting agents: as they felt more assured of the husband’s long-standing commitment they accepted a more integrated household economy, which in reality, in most cases, meant an acceptance of intra-household transfers from husband to wife. One way to interpret this is that when women are not feeling a need to keep their ability to potentially leave the relationship open, they relax their efforts for economic independence. Hence, separate economies are not only a way to maintain independence within the relationship but also a way to maintain an exit option. Our findings add substantially to the discussion about intrahousehold sharing of money. Most of the theories in this area build on the assumption that money bestows the owner with power. In this view, it is often husbands who have more access to money and a larger say in financial matters because they are the ones who most often earn a larger share of the income. Our results do not necessarily contest this assumption, but rather our data show that the intrahousehold exchange hides a larger degree of complexity.

Controlling the agenda It is common to refer to the interaction within a couple as negotiations, which in turn leads to the assumption that choices and actions reflect rational decisions and explicit power relations (Walby 1990). However, to look at intimate relationships from this perspective has been questioned and many writers have noticed that it is Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


rather the lack of explicit negotiations that signifies the interactions between spouses (Benjamin and Sullivan 1996; Dema 2005; Komter 1989; Nyman 1999; Stocks and Wilson 2002). It is also difficult, as discussed by Nyman and Evertsson (2005), to identify actions that can be defined as negotiations. Our results clearly indicate that explicit negotiations between spouses are rare (usually occurring when there are emotional or financial problems in the relationship and the couple turns to counseling) and that the way that couples organize daily life most often ‘just happens’. In most cases the organization of everyday life is a result of a series of small decisions that at first are meant to solve discrete everyday problems that individuals face when pursuing their own life path, or when they are ‘doing couple’ trying to solve the logistics of everyday life. These small discrete decisions can lead to a pattern of interaction in the couple that neither had intended. But not all decisions are small and there are several examples in our data when crucial decisions were taken in order to maintain the couple. People give up careers, change jobs, or move from one city to another in order to maintain the couple. We nevertheless see very few signs of explicit negotiation. The lack of explicit negotiation does not, however, mean that the outcome can be seen as a result of some kind of random process. We would rather like to borrow Erikson and Goldthorpe’s (1993) term ‘constant flux’. Implicit decision-making within couples tends to follow an underlying gender script. When coping with everyday life men and women fall back on the roles they were socialized into, that they see around them and therefore seem as more or less natural options. So, in many cases when women and men are doing couple they are also reproducing gender patterns. Because every pattern of decision in almost every part can be seen as unique at the same time as the totality of the outcome is a reproduction of a gendered society, we think it is appropriate to talk about gender reproduction as a constant flux. Couple relationships, at least heterosexual couple relationships, are based to some extent on sexual and gender differentiation: ‘opposites attract’. The institution of marriage, or committed couple relationship, provides a unique arena in our culture today for the construction and reproduction of gender. In many aspects of the public sphere (most significantly the workplace), though gender is often displayed and constructed through interaction, political correctness demands that individuals treat each Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


other in a gender neutral fashion. This is not the case in intimate relationships. There is a clear gender dimension to the negotiation process itself, or to be more correct there is a gender dimension that is related to the initiation of negotiation. Given the fact that decisions concerning family matters are largely un-negotiated, and that there is an underlying gender script, women and men tend to take on more or less traditional gender roles. Since, as we have discussed, issues such as independence are more taken for granted by men, and gender scripts leave more of the household responsibilities to women, it is the women who are often the ones who feel more of a desire to initiate discussions about these issues. Men are simply better off staying silent. This also, not surprisingly, means that women in most cases are the agents behind changes in gender roles. It also has the effect of turning women into the discontented part of the couple, the one who is nagging and complaining. Since women complaining to and about their husbands is one stereotype of a gendered relationship (reproduced in numerous TV series, cartoons, etc.), women’s urge to change gender relations on one level helps to preserve gender stereotypes on another level.

Doing gender through doing couple An unavoidable issue in the daily life of couples is gender relationships. Marriage, or heterosexual couple relationships, are the most gendered institutions in our societies today. Both women and men contribute to this. Often this is not conscious, not explicitly negotiated, and often individuals and couples implicitly and explicitly fight against prescribed gender roles. Doing couple forces people into doing gender as the practices of daily life are navigated. Most of the couples we interviewed believe in gender equality. In addition, in most of the couples we talked with, each partner attempts to give the other the freedom to develop her/his own personality and her/his own gender position. But what the analysis of their discourses about their own practices reveals is that, in the process of doing couple, it is unavoidable for them at the same time to re/produce gender relationships. Women resented, more than men, these gender roles. They also were frustrated about the ease with which they slid into actions that re/produce ‘traditional’ gender Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


relations, or, stated another way, the difficulty of avoiding these gender relations when it came to managing the many details of their daily lives. And while women, most particularly, reacted against gender expectations, at the same time some of their actions contribute to their survival. Women in the analysed couples experience the contradiction between their desires for equity (in economic terms as well as in the distribution of domestic work) and their life as a gendered part of a couple. In other spheres of life women fought for their independence and equity with the traditional tools that other oppressed groups have used, that can be summarized in Karl Marx’s statement: ‘Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains’. But within a couple, a very personalized space, it is hard to take the collective action that women have taken in the public arena to demand equality. The very structure of intimate relationships – a relation of one to one, not many to one – makes it extraordinarily difficult even to think of any kind of collective action. The second part of Marx’s statement is also difficult for women in couples. In a couple women and men have a lot to lose by demanding change that rocks the boat too much. And to threaten the couple relationship is often to threaten a significant life project. There is a strong link between what is happening in the public sphere (the labor market, political life, social policy) and what goes on in the family sphere. De facto equality in public sphere opportunities (where they exist) cannot fully be translated into equality in outcome as long as the family sphere remains gendered. The well known negative impact of housework time on wages gives substantial support for this explanation (Hersch and Stratton 2002). When women have a job and are bringing in a substantial portion of the couple’s income they feel in some respects equalized with their partners but traces of gender – in various degrees depending on couples and on countries – continue to be present in the couple’s daily practices. For instance, in some couples we found that although women’s economic contributions are important to them, and to their partners as a means of enjoying a higher standard of living, both reinforce the re/production of masculinity through breadwinning. To be a breadwinner or to have a status that makes a person a singular and more valuable person in relation to common people (being an artist, for example) is important for women and Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


men, but in somewhat different ways. Up to a point, both need to comply with the social sanction of male as a breadwinner (Brines 1994). Even if the couple is happy with the arrangements they have such as sharing breadwinning and housework responsibilities, in a way they both behave in such a way that they show his ‘external’ and her ‘internal’ value. That is, both try to show, to a certain degree, his breadwinner (although shared) position and her caring role (shared too). Couples are confronted, on the one hand, with this pressure of social norms (both the need of positive social sanctions and the effects of socialization, i.e. parental role models, the media, etc.) and, on the other hand, with concrete problems that need to be solved – how to pay the bills and how to get things done around the house. In the course of daily life they develop the best solutions they can at each point in time, which are sometimes unfair, often leading to an unequal division of labor but accepted under the non-explicit argument that it is a provisional solution. But as the analysis shows, they underestimate the long-term consequences of the immediate decisions that they make that may put one of them in a very unequal position in relation to the other. The process we have observed is very much in line with the doing gender reasoning (Blossfeld and Drobnicˇ 2001; Brines 1994; West and Zimmerman 1987). We see a process in which wives are trying to confirm their femininity and husbands their masculinity. They are also participating in a process in which they confirm their partners’ femininity/masculinity. In doing so they are participating and as a couple reinforcing each other in the process of re/producing gender differences. However, it is important to underline that in our couples, both wives and husbands, but more so wives, are engaged in a process of change. They are not reproducing a static set of gender roles, they are also producing new ways of organizing gender and of doing couple. We have highlighted the many contradictory ways in which gender is both reproduced and challenged by doing couple. Men do not always want the responsibility of being the main breadwinner but would like the advantages that the role could bring. Women resent economic dependence at the same time that they value the husband as the breadwinner. This contradiction is probably one of the most distinctive characteristics of modern couples; the sample of couples presented in this book shows several ways to overcome Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


these contradictions. The dynamic solutions that these couples found are related – in different ways – to the way they initiate their relationship, to the particular position of both partners in the job market, to the welfare regime they live in, to their personalities, and so on. But it is often up to the women to take the most active part in looking for solutions that eventually reduce gender inequality. Therefore, it can be concluded that women, setting the agenda of how they do couple and softening the gender inequalities are the most active social change agents in the couple. Men do not feel the same urge to change as the women we interviewed do.

Country differences Our empirical data were gathered in three countries. In many respects the information from our respondents coincides to a large degree and the general conclusions discussed above can in various degrees be found among couples in all three countries. But, there are also some clearly visible differences. We have chosen to focus the analyses around the issue of money in the relationship and in that way the analyses are coordinated between the countries. The themes that our analyses have revealed, that is, what the interviewees discussed, do nevertheless differ between the countries. The Spanish couples had a strong focus on a pooled economy. Pooling of economic resources was seen as an important aspect of being a couple, a symbol of togetherness. Pooling was also seen as a means to guarantee equal access to money and thus a way of achieving gender equality. That a pooled economy nevertheless could hide a substantial degree of inequality when it comes to real access to economic resources was seldom discussed explicitly. That pooling could lead to dependency and lesser individual freedom was only seen as a problem in one (the youngest) of the Spanish couples. In the US breadwinning and providing for the family was a main theme. Although in fact the act of earning money for the family was shared within the couple, ‘breadwinning’ was still seen, by both men and women, as a particularly male responsibility. Being a breadwinner is an essential component of masculinity in the US. Women can earn money, and even earn more than their partners, but men are held and hold themselves responsible for the act of providing in a way that women are not. Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


In Sweden independence was emphasized. Women were surprisingly willing to forgo an equal share of household resources in order to maintain a sense of independence. Money that is personalized holds a threat to this independence, and women sometimes went to extremes to accept only impersonalized money to meet their day-to-day financial needs. Our aim is not to develop a clear statement of the causes and consequences of the country differences we have observed: we will only provide some tentative speculations. We do find it plausible that the country differences reflect some very general cultural differences between the countries and the role that the view of what a family is plays in each country. At our very first project meeting we started a discussion about what a family is: when are two persons that are emotionally involved with each other to be seen as a couple that forms a family? We could never really agree. Members of the Spanish research team had difficulties understanding how Swedes could define two persons with separate economies, individually taxed, unmarried but that happen to live in the same apartment and having a sexual relationship as a family. The country differences we found also mirror differences in the development of family policy, taxation systems and general welfare policies. The highly individualistic approach taken by the Swedish couples corresponds with a policy that since at least the early 1970s promotes labor market participation for both men and women, offers public services that make it possible to combine parental obligations with paid work and that offers an extensive but almost completely individualistic income security system. In the 1970s Spain was still governed by the Franco regime which promoted an extremely conservative familistic policy. The rapid modernization after Franco’s death in 1976 has lead to a rapid transformation of the Spanish family, most notably signified by a dramatic drop in the fertility rate and in an increase of female labor market participation. In the US, there is much state rhetoric about the importance of the nuclear family, but almost no social welfare support. There are extreme differences in values regarding the family and the gender order in US culture between the religious right and portions of the left such as the gay rights movement. Women are very active in the workforce, but still encounter a ‘glass ceiling’ in many places. Still, our couples show that the perception of the family as an economic Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


unit remains strong, even though, as it seems, this perception contributes to the reproduction of a traditional gender order.

Gender and individualization Our study has shown the complexity and difficulties that couples in modern Western societies are facing today. Men and women are struggling to find a way to organize their daily lives maintaining their individual freedom at the same time as they attempt to keep the family project on track. We have called what they are involved in ‘doing couple’ emphasizing the ongoing process that is not only reproducing traditional family patterns but also producing new ones. What we have seen is that women, in most cases, are the active agents in this process and, with the use of a variety of means, are attempting to achieve both equality and independence within their relationships. The complexity of this process is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that women are sometimes prepared to give up intra-household equality when it comes to access to money in order to gain a more favorable power balance and in the end maintain their independence. Decisions that are made by husbands and wives in their everyday efforts are often guided by a more or less unconscious gender script. Things ‘just happen’ and often actions follow more or less traditional gender roles, reproducing a more or less traditional family pattern. Women, in most cases, have more to lose than men by just letting things happen, which explains why women are most often the agents acting to initiate change. We will end by relating this observation to the more general discussion about modernity and individualization. Modern society is increasingly individualized. However, it is mostly women who are directly affected by this process. It is also women who are actively promoting their own individualization. What about men? Men in modern societies have always been more individualized than women. The big change is that now women are demanding the same degree of individuality and options in their lives. This effort will, of course, also impact men when they are trying to do couple with women.


Appendix A: Protocol for Interviewing Couples

Part A: Introductory speech I [Interviewer]: We are conducting an international comparative study in Europe and in the USA on everyday life, couples’ situation in life and how this life changes in the course of time. Above all, we are interested in YOUR [nonverbally address them both!] situation in life, YOUR relationship, that is THE WAY YOU EXPERIENCE IT. That is why we do not have a completed questionnaire here. Rather, it is important to us that you should tell us what is of importance to YOU [nonverbally address them both]; We simply listen [emphasized]! [said as a passing remark:] and take a few notes so as to inquire later.

A 1: Generating a very broad introductory narration through stimulus I: Because you AS A COUPLE are the centre of attention, just tell me [nonverbally address them both!]: how did you actually come to be a COUPLE?

A 2: narration-generating further questions The only further question we want to ask [if this has not been mentioned]: development of the couple until the PRESENT DAY (completely!).

Explanations of the formatting: • Words or passages printed in bold serve to facilitate subject classification of questions so as to make it instantly clear to us what the question is about. Bold does NOT mean that the word should be especially stressed. • Words in questions printed in italics should be pronounced with emphasis in the interview. • FQ: means further question.

156 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Appendix A: Protocol for Interviewing Couples 157

Part B: Main subjects Occupation and household [FILTER: if job not mentioned yet] I: Could you briefly describe your current job situation?

I: How did that come about?

[FILTER: if job already mentioned] I: You have already mentioned that you (partner 1) work at Y, that you (partner 2) do Y/are at home. Could you describe us your job situation again in a bit more detail? I: How did that come about?

I: You have told us what your job is currently. What do you wish for your career future? I: What is the importance of having a job to you? [FILTER: if job not mentioned yet] I: To many people, unemployment is a significant change in life. What would change in your case?

[FILTER: if job already mentioned] I: To many people, unemployment is a significant change in life. What changed in your case when you became unemployed? if self-employed: I: Do you think you will get a job in I: How would you the future? feel about not I: How do feel about this? getting enough work?

if dependently employed: I: How would you feel about becoming unemployed? I: How would you rearrange your life?

I: How do you make everyday life with work and home work for both of you? Tell us in more detail how you do all that. I: Could you please describe how a typical week goes for you as a couple? FQ: And what does a typical working day look like? FQ: And a weekend? [in each case narration-generating] [FILTER: if common household] I: You share a household. There must be a great deal to do. Please tell me how that works for you. I: Who does what? I: Do you help each other?

[FILTER: if no common household] I: You do not share a household. How have you organized your household? I: Who does what? I: Do you sometimes help each other?

I: How did that come about? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

158 Appendix A: Protocol for Interviewing Couples

I: Did you discuss that with each other or did it just happen? I: Has the housework always been shared like that? I: Are there sometimes problems concerning the housework? Problems where? I: When you were not living together yet: who did what housework? [If children] I: Was it different before the children came?

I: Are there sometimes problems Problems where?

I: How do you rate the sharing which you have described in terms of a give-and-take? I: How do you think other people do that (the HH arrangement)? Do you have an example of that? I: There are couples in which one is responsible for the job, the other for the housework and the children. What is your opinion of that? Do you think such a balance is all right? I: It is often said that housework and bringing up children brings a type of satisfaction which cannot be achieved through paid work. What do you think? I: Consider all this again, work and housework. How satisfied are you with your present situation? I: What would you like to change, and what would you like to stay the same?

Card game I: We have prepared a little game here. Here are a few questions which are regularly asked in surveys carried out among the population. There are the five following possibilities for your answers [present list 1]: ‘I agree completely’, ‘I tend to agree’, ‘half and half’, ‘I tend not to agree’ and ‘I do not agree at all’. Can you agree on a common answer to these statements, or do you have different opinions? Please state your agreement or rejection based on this scale. [Interviewer: Present questions on little cards!] 1) ‘It is good for a child when its mother has a job and does not just focus on the household.’ [44 percent agree – do NOT show that!] Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


2) ‘It is more important for a woman to help her husband with his career than to pursue a career herself.’ [30 percent] 3) ‘A married woman should not work if there is only a limited number of jobs in the economy and if her husband is able to provide adequate support for the family.’ [41 percent] 4) ‘One should get married if one is planning to live with a partner permanently.’ [USA] ‘One should get married if one lives together with a partner permanently.’ [57 percent] [Germany] List 1 I agree completely

I tend to agree

Partly agree, partly disagree

I tend not to agree

I do not agree at all

1

2

3

4

5

Money The following, by and large, is about money. I: What is your financial situation? Tell us how you manage? I: If you were given $20 000, what would you do with the money? [stick out pauses, do not specify the question any further] I: What about if you were given much more, as much as you both earn in one year combined? [Further questions ONLY if touched upon in the answer:] Saving: What for? With what aim? Investing: Why would you choose this form of investment? What made you think of that? Spending on X: What does X mean to you? Settling debts: How did these debts arise? How large are they? What do these debts mean to you? I: Imagine if you suddenly had much less money than you have now. What would change in your situation? [For further questions: for example through an illness etc.] FQ: How could such a situation arise? FQ: What would you do in such a situation? FQ: What people could help you in such a situation? I: In many partnerships, money plays an important role. How important is money in your life? [If the answer only refers to the individual person:] FQ: And how important is money for you as a couple? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: Are you sometimes worried about your financial situation, are you perhaps afraid of not having any money all of a sudden or is that not so much of a problem? [If no general evaluation of the financial situation is possible yet:] I: How do you see your financial situation as a whole – is it a bit tight for you, do you cope quite well with your money or do you have more than you need? I: Some people are not dependent on their jobs, but have enough inheritance or assets to get by. Could you imagine being in this situation yourself? I: How do you manage your money? What we mean by that is what income goes to what accounts, how is the money spent and who is responsible for the various expenses. FQ: What do you spend your money on? FQ: Who earns how much of you two? FQ: What money goes to which accounts? FQ: Do you always know the current balance on your accounts? FQ: How large are your regular expenses? FQ: What money is used for what? FQ: Who pays for that then? (running expenses, going for a meal, household appliances, presents etc.) I: How did you come to this arrangement? I: Since when have you been doing it like that? I: For you, how is spending money connected with earning money? I: How much time do you spend thinking about money matters? I: What questions do you ponder about then? I: Is that a common subject of discussion? FQ: Do you ever play the lottery – and games where you can win money? FQ: Do you use coupons? FQ: Do you specifically look for them? FQ: Do you enjoy hunting around for bargains? FQ: With some of the things you buy, do you wait until it is on sale? FQ: Do you spend time figuring out how you can pay less taxes? [If little time is spent thinking about money:] I: Do you sometimes think you should spend more time thinking about money? I: How important is being frugal to you? I: Do you also save and/or invest money? [If they put money aside:] [If they do not put money aside:] What money is that? I: Why do you not put any money Who does that? aside? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: Why do you put money aside? Why did you opt for this form of investment? What made you think of that? I:How important is saving to you? I: Have you set any money aside for retirement? I: Do you have joint retirement accounts or separate? I: What would the situation be as far as retirement accounts are concerned if you were to split up? FQ: Have you already talked about that? I: Do you have any loans or debts? [if so:] I: How did that come about? I: Are these debts a burden in any way for you? I: Do you feel restricted by them? I: Who is the expert in money matters of the two of you? I: Do you then also decide [to the expert] what is to be done with the money? I: With large purchases people often have to plan ahead to manage them. When you want to acquire something which you would not count as belonging to your everyday purchases, how do you go about it? FQ: Can you remember a concrete example? FQ: Who first proposed this purchase? FQ: How did you figure out how to manage it? FQ: Did you have your differences about the purchase? FQ: If there are differences of opinion, is there someone who usually has the last word? FQ: Does it always go like that? I: It sometimes happens that couples do not agree on money matters or do not agree with the way their partner manages money. When did something like this last occur with you? FQ: How did the argument go? FQ: Does that happen often? I: All in all: how satisfied are you with your current financial situation?

Common or separate activities, friends, networks I: We would like to move on to your spare time activities now. What do you do in your free time? FQ: Do you do that together? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: Are there any spare time activities which you have given up since you have been together? FQ: What were they? FQ: How did you come to give it/them up? I: What new activities have you discovered together? I: How do you usually spend your vacations? I: What is the procedure when you plan your vacations? FQ: Do your expectations concur? I: Do health matters play any role in your spare time arrangements? FQ: Could you elaborate a little please? [if friends already mentioned:] [if friends not mentioned yet:] I: You mentioned before that you I: You have not mentioned any do Y together with friends. How friends up to now. much time do you spend with Do you also spend time with friends? friends? FQ: What kinds of things do you do when you get together with friends? FQ: How many friends do you have? FQ: Where did you get to know these friends? FQ: Are they mutual friends or your own? FQ: How important are these friends to you? I: What other people are important to you? I: How important are your relatives to you? FQ: Which relatives are they? FQ: How do you keep in touch with your relatives? I: When two people become a couple, two families as a rule come together. How did that sort itself out with you? I: How do you typically spend Thanksgiving? I: Are you happy with how Thanksgiving usually goes?

Children [FILTER: if no children:] I: If you form a couple, the children question pops up sooner or later. In retrospect, what role in your life together has the desire to have children had? FQ: How did that actually come about? FQ: Are you both agreed on that? I: Do you think you might have children later on? I: What in your case speaks for/against children? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


[if no children planned (and couples not too old):] I: If you were to find out tomorrow that you are to have a child. How would that change your lives? [if children planned:] I: You are planning to have children. How would you expect that having a child would change your lives? [If children possible (and not definitely excluded):] I: What changes would there be in your relationship? I: How would you share caring for the child/children? I: What effect do you expect children to have on your jobs? I: How do you think a child/children would affect your economic situation? I: Are there any other children who do not live in this household? [FILTER: if children already:] I: You have one (2,3,-…) child(ren). In retrospect, what role in your life together has the desire to have children had so far? I: Were you both in agreement regarding when and how many to have? I: How did your life change after the birth of your (first) child? I: Were there any changes in your relationship because of that? FQ: What changes were they? I: How do you combine work and family? I: Did having children change your financial situation? I: Children need a great deal of time and attention. How do you manage taking care of your child(ren)? FQ: How was this arrangement arrived at? FQ: And who does what with the child/children? I: Do you feel supported in the daily balancing of various requirements? [we want to know, ‘what keeps you going on day to day’] I: Has your circle of friends changed since you have had children? In what respect? I: Are you on the whole satisfied with the situation as it now is?



Relationship [Stick out possible silence for a long time! ] I: Now we would like to come back to you as a couple again. What makes you stay together as a couple? [Non-married couples:] I: Have you considered getting married? What would speak in favour of marrying? And what against? I: How would you sort out the question of last names?

[Married couples:] I: You are already married. How did your getting married come about? I: Did you agree on that? I: Could you tell us a bit more about your wedding celebrations? I: How did you sort out the question of your last names?

I: How important is your relationship to you? [emotional/mental (in)dependence] I: Do you do anything to nurture your relationship? I: So all in all: how do you feel about your relationship?

Sexuality Our next topic would be the importance of sexualtity in your relationship. If you say that is OK, then we will have a look at that together and we will ask a few questions. But if you say we do not wish to discuss that with you, we will of course accept that and we will go on with some concluding questions. I: Some relationships are mainly held together by sex. In other relationships, that plays a less important role. What about in your case? FQ: Could you describe that [whatever needs more exploration] a little bit more detailed? I: Has your sex life changed in the course of the relationship? [If children:] Does that perhaps have something to do with the birth of the child?

Assessing conclusion I: Imagine it is now 2015. What do you imagine has happened by then? What have you achieved by then, what changes have there been for you both? What has remained the same? I: What would have to occur for you to say our life has developed in the best way possible? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


Right, we have now come to the end of our questions and we thank you very much for your patience in answering these very detailed questions. I: Would you like to get anything off your chest, anything you are concerned about? Have we forgotten anything? Finally, we would ask you to give us some information about standard demography, like date of birth, education, parents, accounts etc… [ → Standardized questionnaire] OK, well, again, many many thanks!


Appendix B: Protocol for Interviewing Individuals

Part A: Biographical part – individual biography A 1: Narration stimulus for biographical narration I: In our last interview, you as a couple were to the fore. This time I would like to know more about your OWN life. What interests me is especially YOUR life situation, YOUR life story, the way you see it, what is important to you. Just like last time, I will take a few notes so as to inquire again later. Tell me your life story please, as it appears sensible to you. Simply start how and where you think best – I am listening. [Should questions on the part of the respondent come up concerning this request to narrate, the procedure is to follow the example as described in the interview with the couple: leave yourself time before reacting; then ONLY paraphrase making it ‘more precise’.]

A 2: Narration-generating further inquiry part [In the narrative further inquiry part, narration-generating questions are asked, but ONLY about aspects which have been mentioned but which remain unclear. No inquiry is made about things NOT mentioned (such as getting to know each other, wedding, children, other people in the household). Further questions – according to ‘fit’ – according to the following models (compare Fischer-Rosenthal and Rosenthal 1997, p. 144ff) – for example:] • ‘You mentioned your giving up your job. Could you describe again more precisely how that came about?’ [steering towards a situation mentioned] • ‘You talked about the time when you lived in your own household for the first time. Can you tell me more about that time?’ [steering towards a certain phase in life] • There is for instance a sequence in the narration which has not been expanded on: ‘…and then it got more and more difficult in the partnership at that time and so it soon came to an end…’ [do not ask here ‘Could you describe more exactly how it ended?’ and not ‘Why did it get more and more difficult at that time?’ either, rather ‘Can you remember a situation where it became really apparent to you that it was becoming difficult?’ steering towards proof-narration of an argument presented in the narration] 166 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Appendix B: Protocol for Interviewing Individuals 167

PART B: Main subjects [Each subject block should at first be narrative and then more concrete. The individual subject areas absolutely must be prepared INDIVIDUALLY!]

Occupation and housework [If working:] I: You have already said that you do X. Describe more exactly how your career developed over the course of time. I: How did this occur? I: And how do you think it will go in the future? I: Could you describe concretely what you do day in and day out at work, what you enjoy at work, what you don’t like? I: Do any other things occur to you when you think of the pay, self-realization or acknowledgement you receive for your work?

I: In the past, or perhaps during your education or training, did you imagine having or perhaps wish to have such a job? How? I: How do you see you current job with regard to your education or training? I: Do you and your partner ever compare your jobs? I: Is one of your jobs seen as more important or better than the other? FQ: What gives a particular job value?

[If unemployed:] I: You have already said that you are currently unemployed. Describe how your career developed in the course of time until you became unemployed. I: How did this occur? I: And how do you think it will go in the future? I: Could you describe concretely what you do during the days, what you enjoy and what you don’t like? I: How do you feel about being unemployed? FQ: What advantages and disadvantages do you see with your situation? I: How does being unemployed affect your economic situation? I: Does your being unemployed play a role in the partnership? FQ: How? I: In the past, perhaps during your education or training, did you imagine being unemployed at some point? I: How do you see you current job situation with regard to your education or training?

I: Would your job development have turned out differently without your partner? How? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

168 Appendix B: Protocol for Interviewing Individuals

I: Is it important to your partner that you should stand on your own two feet in your occupation and be earning your own money? I: Is your partner proud of you or can you not tell? I: What is it like the other way round? Is your partner’s occupation important to you? I: Are you proud of his job? I: How satisfied are you on the whole with your own career development? I: How would you wish your career future to be? I: What chances do you see of realizing this wish?

Housework I: When you consider the daily work of the household, what seems particularly important to you? What absolutely has to be done? I: Are there any problems with that? I: Do you have the impression that your partner sees what you do in the household? How is that shown? I: How satisfied are you on the whole with the allocation of housework? I: And how satisfied do you think your partner is? [Points which should be paid attention to during the individual preparation:] • Points of conflict • Gaps or previous jobs • Importance of their own job (individually in their own concept/related to the couple within the relationship) [Reference points if not in the biographical part] • Occupational position (for a limited/indefinite period, full-time/ part-time, remuneration, seniority) and inequalities in this respect; job biography

Money I: During our last meeting, we talked about what role money plays in your relationship. What role does money play for you personally? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: What phases or events in your life entailed a change as regards money? I: What phases were particularly pleasant for you? FQ: What characterized this phase? [present Diagram here:] I: This diagram should help us to bring together what you have told me so far. Could you please give me one line that describes how important money has been to you during your life. I: Could you please add another line that shows your financial development. [If the connection of diagram and narration on the first three questions on money or striking points within the diagram call for further exploration: Do so by referring to the diagram.] [If married:] I: What role if any did finances or benefits play in your decision to get married?

[If not married:] I: What role if any did finances or benefits play in your decision not to get married?

I: To come back to you as a couple: who disposes of what money? [intensive preparation from the interview with the couple is necessary] I: Do you draw a distinction between your own money and common money? I: What does ‘your own money’ mean to you personally? I: With what money can you do whatever you like? FQ: Are there any limits? FQ: Where are these limits? FQ: Do you act with/without your partner’s approval? I: What money do you consider your partner’s money? FQ: Do you place any limits? FQ: Where are these limits? FQ: Does your partner ask for your approval? I: Do you ever overdraw your account? FQ: Does your partner know about that? I: How open are you with your partner when it comes to money? FQ: Do you feel checked up on? I: How open do you rate your partner in this respect? I: Are you similar in the way you handle money? I: If you have differences on money matters, how do you resolve these situations? FQ: For what reason? FQ: With what arguments? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: Do you feel OK about how your partner deals with money matters? FQ: Do you sometimes feel a little frustrated about his/her way of dealing with money matters? I: Would you like to exchange places with your partner in money matters? I: Last time you told us how you deal with the money you have as a couple. How satisfied are you personally with this arrangement? I: How satisfied do you think your partner is with the arrangements you have made? I: How do other couples you know handle money? I: How did your parents arrange money matters? FQ: Comparing your parents’ way of handling money matters to your own way, what are you doing differently? [Further questions: About the asset and account conditions from the standardized questionnaire or from the interview with the couple; inquire about specific sums or models or other unclear matters mentioned in the interview with the couple. Go into detail with conflict fields from the interview with the couple, get to the bottom of conflict potentials and position accordingly.]

Common activities, social networks, friends, relatives I: We talked about spare time activities last time already. You told us you did Y together. Did you both do that before or only one of you? I: How did your doing XY come about? I: You also said that you did Y alone. Can you tell me any more about that? I: Would you like your partner to do that together with you? I: Does your partner support your involvement in that? [If hobby which requires a lot of time and money:] I: Does that also apply to the time and money you (have to) spend on that? [If extreme hobby:] I: Do you think your partner worries about you? I: How does that compare with your partner’s activities? [If not everything comes: Support, worry, acceptance of time and money.] [If hobby was given up:] I: You said you had given up Y. Do you regret that? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: Do you have any differences regarding the arrangement of spare time activities? I: Job, family work and perhaps children too are pretty demanding. Do you have any time left for your friends with all that? I: Would you like to have more time for certain friendships? I: Do you also get on well with your partner’s friends? [according to interview with couple!] I: Supposing you were to split up with your partner. Would you continue to get together with the same friends as now? I: During our last discussion, we talked about your parents and your partner’s parents. How well do you get on with your parents-in-law? I: What do your parents think of your relationship? I: And what do your friends think of your relationship? I: When there are difficulties in your relationship, who do you turn to? I: Do other people, perhaps friends or parents interfere when there are difficulties? I: When you think of your friends, relatives, spare time activities and interests – how satisfied are you on the whole with your private life?

Here allbus card game I: Different areas of life are on these cards. We would like to know how important these individual areas of life are to you. On each of these cards you can see a scale with 7 fields on the right. The bottom field with the number 1 means this area of life is unimportant to you. Field 7 right at the top means the area of life concerned is very important to you. You can rate your answers by means of this scale of numbers. First have a look at all the cards please. Then tell me the letter and the number for each of the cards for which you have decided. [Shuffle yellow card pack and lay ready. First show any card to explain the scale. Now give all the cards together. An answer number must be marked for each of the cards.] A: own profession and own job B: partner’s profession and job C: spare time and recreation D: friends and acquaintances E: relatives F: religion and church Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


G: politics and public life H: children I: partnership I: Now we would like to ask you to put these cards in order of importance. [Several cards can lie next to each other. We have to think about how to fix the arrangement of the cards, e.g. we could stick them on a paper…?]

Relationship I: Now I would like to come back to talking about your partnership. If you think of the beginning of your relationship: what particularly fascinated you about your partner? I: Did your partner’s looks also play a role there? Do any other things occur to you when you think of education, financial situation, sexual attraction? I: You have known each other for a while now: what do you value highly in X as a person permanently? I: What do you find essential for a relationship? I: What do you regard as essential to your relationship? I: What binds you to your partner? I: Does love also play a role in that? [if little comes: stick out the pause!] I: What does love mean to you? I: Where can this love be seen in your everyday life? [e.g. understanding without words…] I: Let us just change perspectives. What do you think X finds fascinating about you? I: And what does he/she especially value in you? I: Is there also something which he/she does not really like about you? I: And now vice versa: does anything disturb you about him/her too? I: When you consider your relationship as a whole: is there someone who is a bit more dominant? I: Relationships can break up. What is it like with you? What could lead to your relationship breaking up? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: Can you imagine your relationship breaking up? I: Did you have other relationships before this one? I: Have you ever lived together with another partner? [Filter if so:] I: Why did these relationships break up? I: Who ended the relationship? I: Was the breakup difficult or good for you or how did it feel? FQ: Did you have plans for another relationship at the time? I: Are there any experiences you had in these relationships of which you would say influenced your current relationship? I: Was there ever a situation where you had to decide between two people? Were there any alternatives? I: Were there any times when other areas of life were more important to you than a partnership, perhaps education or profession? I: Have you ever had several relationships at the same time? And what about at the moment? I: What level of commitment do you think a relationship should involve? [lower level of commitment] [higher level of commitment] I: Does that also mean that a I: Does that mean that a relationship to you is something for relationship to you is something for the short-term? the long-term? I: Does what you have just said about relationships also apply to your current relationship? I: Does X see that in a similar way? I: At our last meeting you told us what you do to nurture your relationship. Do you feel that you both pull equal weight in your relationship? [Further questions from interview with the couple. Individually.]

Children I: We talked about children last time already. You said you wanted children/didn’t want any children. Could you please tell us how this decision was made from your point of view? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


I: How did you think about having children when you were younger, before you met your current partner? FQ: Did this change when you met your current partner? I: What importance do/would children have for your relationship? [If they are opposite views:] I: Are children a field of conflict in your relationship? I: Do you think that time could simply slip by and that you could suddenly be too old or feel too old to have children? I: What would be the oldest age for you personally to have children? I: And what about for your partner? Does age play a role? I: Now you have told me a lot of things regarding your biography, children, partnership and so on. Imagine the relationship with your partner were to break up. What would be different for you? [in general] [Further questions: to be prepared individually from the interview with the couple.]

Part C: Assessment questions I: Was there an event in your life which particularly left a mark on you? I: Now you have told us so much about the most varied areas. If you look back on your life so far, are you satisfied with how it is now?

Sexuality So, now we have come to the end of our open question part actually, and like last time we again have a few questions about the subject of sexuality. If you say that is OK, then we will have a look at it together and we will ask a few questions. But if you say ‘I do not want to discuss that with you’, we will then of course accept that and we will have finished our questions for today. I: For some people sex is very important, for others sex plays a secondary role. What is it like with you? I: How do you feel about sexuality in your relationship? I: When there are differences or disagreements between the two of you, how do you cope with this? FQ: How do you feel about it? FQ: How does the other partner feel about it? FQ: Have you ever had the feeling that your relationship is at risk because of that? I: Contraception is something all couples have to deal with more or less. Contraception is often the subject of conversation and maybe also of Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


conflicts. How do you deal with the question of contraception? Could you just tell us how you do it and how it turned out like that? I: Have you already tried out any other methods of contraception? I: What kind of contraception would you prefer? [FILTER if contraception:] I: Imagine a pregnancy despite the use of contraceptives. What would you do? FQ: Do you both agree on that? I: To what extent is faithfulness important to you in this context? I: What do you understand faithfulness to mean? I: Do you mean by that that your partner does not have an affair or is it more that you share life together, report to each other openly and are honest and sincere with each other? I: Do you have any other sexual relations apart from with your partner? I: Was it ever the case before? [If so:] FQ: Does or did your partner know about it? Right, we have come to the end of our many questions and we thank you again very much for being prepared to answer all the questions! I: Do you still want to say anything, have we forgotten anything? [Debriefing: Whoever has finished first waits for the second partner/interviewer, then the final questions come about the feeling comfortable aspects:] I: What did you think of the length of the interview? I: How did you feel about the interview situation? I: Did you find the questions too personal? I: Would you be prepared to talk to us again in such detail in two or three years? So, again many many thanks and see you next time!


Appendix C: Standardized Demographic Survey Questionnaire Year of birth Sex Religion Marital status

O single O married → pre-nuptial contract? O divorced → pre-nuptial contract before?

Education: highest level of education: Current job since when? Employment contract (for a limited/indefinite period) Working times (part-time/full-time) Previous job(s) (period) Unemployment (number, duration) Number of children Year of birth Sex Parents and brothers and sisters Father Year of birth if applicable: deceased Education: Highest level of education Were parents working when you were 15 years old? Are parents currently working? Parents’ origin (place/region) 176 Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Mother

Appendix C: Standardized Demographic Survey 177

Brothers and sisters Brothers and sisters Year of birth Highest level of education Occupation

Money What accounts do you have? Your own net and gross annual income

net: gross:

Partner’s income

net: gross:

Do you receive welfare? Unemployment benefit? Pension? Do you own any real estate? Do you have any income from renting or leasing? Do you have any side jobs? What do you earn there? Who of you two does the taxes? Do you expect to inherit? What? Amount? How large are your total assets? Do you have a will? Who is the beneficiary? Do you have life insurance? For what amount of money? Who is the beneficiary? What other insurances do you have? Do you contribute regularly to anyone else (e.g. parents, siblings…)? Do you receive money regularly from anyone else (e.g. parents, siblings…)? Do you have any debts or loans? What is the amount? Who did you borrow the money from? How do you plan the repayment? Who signed for the loan? Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

178 Appendix C: Standardized Demographic Survey

Have you agreed to be a co-signer on anybody else’s loans? In the past? Do you have any savings accounts? How much money in those accounts? Who is authorized to withdraw from those accounts? Do you have any debit cards? Do you use them? Who is authorized to use it? Do you have any credit cards? What ones?


Appendix D: The Comprehensive Code List for Analysis of Interviews Analysis codes: (these codes imply minor interpretation that may have to be changed) consensus and conflict agreement and disagreement same and different gendered

refers to interaction refers to opinions refers to habits and preferences refers to gender roles being in place

Linking codes: (these codes link different domains in an individual’s or couple’s life) balancing exchange influence

refers to one person refers to two persons refers to one domain affecting another

Super codes: (these codes can be used for any search, by themselves or in combination with area codes) responsibilities recognition requirements arrangements sharing importance difficulties individual individual-in-relation definition compatibility/incompatibility

planning (and taking responsibility for) who is doing what, when, how neutral

neutral

individual referring to self or other AS individual individual referring to any social relation how interviewee defines the topic being discussed different domains of individuals and/or couples’ lives that can be compatible or not 179


180 Appendix D: The Comprehensive Code List for Analysis of Interviews

Area codes: career (of the interviewees) career–biography career–conflict career–couple interaction–conflict (description of conflict in the couple about career matters) career–couple interaction–recognition (how the individual perceive her/his partner) career–situation (description of the current situation in individuals labour life) career–situation–job (name or status of the job) career–situation–security (employment security or insecurity) career–valuation (positive and negative feelings related to career) career–gender (discussion that indicates some gendered aspects of job) career– meaning (meaning of the career for the individual or the couple) career–mobility (changes in the career or/and changes in the life of the individuals due to the career) career–commuting career–dream job career–financial returns (references to the financial aspects of having a job) career–education/training career–future perspectives career–self realization career–identity (discussion of career as something that provides a sense of identity to the individual) career–labour market (opinions about labour market situation) career–man career–mates career–woman childcare child–education childhood childhood–influence childraising childraising–gender children–abortion children–affect descision to have children–affect economy children–affect individual children–affect interest children–affect lifestyle children–affect relationship children–affect working life children–as center of family children–compromise children–conflict children–danger of isolation Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Appendix D: The Comprehensive Code List for Analysis of Interviews 181

children–demanding children–desire for children–division of chores (all sorts of chores) children–education children–frustration children–help with children children–planning for children–regular routines children–religious rituals children–share thoughts about children–sharing of responsibilities children–unplanned children–use of time education: (of the interviewees) education–boarding school (experience in this type of school or reasons to be in one of them) education–choice (description and/or reasons to choose the field of studies) education–dropping out (description and/or reasons to interrupt/leave the studies) education–half board (experience in this type of school or reasons to be in one of them) education–levels–primary (references to education in this period) education–levels–secondary (references to education in this period) education–levels–professional training (references to education in this period) education–levels–tertiary (references to education in this period) education–man education–money (expended in the studies) education–change (of field of studies) education–valuation (includes positive and negative feelings referred to own education) education–woman family–planning (includes various levels of concreteness) family–surname family oriented friends friends–support friends–spending time (how and how much) friends–being friends as a couple friends–best friend friends–type of friends friends–type of friendship friends–common friends–own friends–partners friends–problem friends–importance of Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


grandparents housework housework–requirements housework–arrangements (replaces housework structure and organization) housework–sharing (replaces division of chores) housework–responsibility housework-satisfaction household–help leisure time leisure time–activities (description of the kind of leisure activities that the interviewees do) leisure time–activities–going out leisure time–activities–making music leisure time–activities–sports leisure time–children (discussion about the activities done by one partner with child/children) leisure time–conflict (description of conflict in the couple about leisure time) leisure time–couple (couple spends leisure time together leisure time–couple interaction–conflict leisure time–family (discussion about the activities done by the couple and child/children) leisure time–frequency (frequency of leisure time activities) leisure time–friends leisure time–man leisure time–money (money expended on leisure) leisure time–relatives (activities with other members of the family) leisure time–tolerance against partner leisure time–vacations leisure time–woman money money–accounts money–accounts–joint money–accounts–management money–accounts–overdrawn money–accounts–savings money–accounts–separate money–children money–common money–debt money–decision–making money–expenses money–expert money–family help money–fantasy–negative money–fantasy–positive money–income Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd

Appendix D: The Comprehensive Code List for Analysis of Interviews 183

money–income–hers money–income–his money–inheritance money–meaning money–own money money–pension money–satisfaction money–separate money–taxes parental leave parenthood parenthood–gender parents–background (includes education, social status, economy, etc.) parents–division of labor parents–division of labor parents–divorce parents–leaving home parents–own parents–partners parents–relationship parents–support relationship relationship–adversity (a period of adversity in the couple’s relationship) relationship–attraction (reasons given for the couple’s attraction to each other) relationship–annoying about partner relationship–change individual (discussion of the ways the couple relationship changed the individual) relationship–before cohabitation relationship–biography relationship–beginning relationship–being oneself relationship–being together relationship–closeness relationship–couple bond (what keeps the couple together) relationship–commitment relationship–confidence relationship–couple future relationship–crisis relationship–definition relationship–demands relationship–divorce relationship–durability, stability relationship–duration relationship–dominance relationship–faithfulness (definition, importance of faithfulness) relationship–first meeting Capitolina Díaz-Martínez and Björn Halleröd


relationship–freedom relationship–honesty relationship–importance relationship–intimacy relationship–insecurity relationship–jealousy relationship–life before relationship–love relationship–marriage relationship–marriage: name (discussion about name) relationship–management of crisis relationship–moving in together relationship–nurture (what the couple does to nurture their Relationship) relationship–own time relationship–previous relationships (all) relationship–previous marriage relationship–reason for split up relationship–satisfaction relationship–unfaithfulness relationship–weekend relationship relationship–wedding relatives relatives–economic support relatives–obligations relatives–relationship relatives–support sexuality sexuality–contraception sexuality–compromise sexuality–first experience sexuality–fidelity sexuality–importance sexuality–satisfaction sexuality–problems siblings unemployment (any general reference to unemployment, own or general) unemployment–advantages unemployment–disadvantages unemployment man unemployment–woman unemployment–worry


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Index Ahrne, G. and C. Roman, 15 allocation of power, 20 of resources, 12–14, 20 systems within households, 13, 15 autonomy of control over money, 17, 24, 140, 147 Bauman, Z., 3 Beck, U., 76, 96, 147 Beck, U., A. Giddens and S. Lash, 28 Björnberg, U., 12 black box of household finances, 8, 12 Blood, R.O. and D.M. Wolfe, 8, 9 Blumberg, R.L., 10 Blumberg, R.L. and M.T. Coleman, 22 Bourdieu, P., 117 breadwinner /housewife model, 74–7, 81, 88, 93, 105, 126, 138, 140 ideology, 20 masculinity, 151–3 meaning of, 77, 98 role, 5, 10, 19, 41, 46–7, 54, 64, 68, 72–3, 78, 97, 123, 127–8, 130, 136 sharing, 65, 87, 94, 121 status and power, 22, 89, 144–5 woman as, 95–6 Brines, J., 123 Burgoyne, C.B., 19, 76 Burgoyne, C.B. and V. Morison, 25, 26, 114 Cheal, D., 13 cohabitation, 3, 24–5, 28, 70, 106, 142

conflict, 11, 44, 45, 66, 67, 69, 76, 103, 108, 127, 129, 131, 134, 140, 143 conflicting ideologies, 19 conflicting meanings, 76 conflicting norms, 23 constant flux, 149 construction of couple, 2, 4, 27. 36, 44–5, 48, 53–4, 58, 69, 76, 100, 103, 148 of gender, 2, 31, 76, 83, 98, 149 of individuals, 2, 52, 79, 83, 100, 103 control, 25, 26, 43, 45, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 66, 67, 69, 76, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 110, 113, 118, 123, 126, 127, 129, 132, 135, 141 Coria, C., 110, 140 daycare, 46 decision-making control of, 18, 43 Delphy, C. and D. Leonard, 7 Dema, S. 18, 27 Dema, S. and C. Díaz, 27 dependence, economic, 41, 45, 62, 64, 135–6, 139, 143, 145–7, 152 Díaz, C., C. Díaz, S. Dema, and M. Ibáñez, 27 divorce, 115, 134 doing couple, 1, 3–6, 31, 36, 42, 45, 47, 58–9, 65, 72, 76–7, 87, 113, 143, 149–50, 153, 155 doing gender, 1, 6, 31, 36, 76, 150, 152 Duncan, S., 32 193


194 Index

earners, 8, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 75, 140 dual-earner, 1, 2, 5, 30, 31, 32, 46, 47, 72, 75, 96, 105 higher earner/primary earner, 25, 74, 94 lower earner/lesser earner, 25, 140 non-earning, 9, 14, 18, 19 single-earners/sole wage earner, 14, 73, 77 women’s earnings/earning wives, 14, 22 Edwards, M. 11–13, 22 egalitarian relationship, 126–7, 129, 131, 140–1 Elizabeth, V., 24, 26 equality in couple, 43 as an ideal, 16, 47, 146 rights, 126 equity, 2 of control, 20 of household resources, 3, 7 Erikson, R. and J.H. Goldthorpe, 149 Exchange Theory, 10 family wage, 73 femininity, 10, 19 feminism, 107 Fleming, R., 12, 16 gender balance of power, 26, 69, 140 and money, 144 dependence/independence, 41–42 equality/inequality, 9–11, 19–20, 23–4, 30, 36, 38, 42, 44–6, 52, 54, 65–6, 68–9, 75, 140, 146, 150, 153 relations, 76, 113, 148 roles/norms, 2, 13, 16, 18, 43, 73–4, 81, 83, 89, 96, 98, 112, 130–1, 147, 150, 152 script, 149 as social institution, 44 socialization, 113

Ghazanfareeon Karlsson, S. and K. Borell, 26 Giddens, A., 43, 68 Giddens, A. and Beck, U., 131, 147 Gullestad, M., 22 Haavind, H., 19 Hobson, B., 10 household finances, 13 housework, 2, 11, 44, 46, 111–12, 120, 123, 141, 144, 147, 150–2 implicit decision-making, 149 independence economic, 20, 41–3, 45–48, 50–2, 54, 56–66, 68–9, 77–8, 87–8, 93, 97, 118, 137–9, 143, 146–8 of individuals within couple, 5, 26, 104, 147 as topic, 38 of women, 11, 83, 91, 93, 137, 151 independent management system, 14, 16–17, 24–5, 48, 92 individualization, 28, 31, 38, 42, 52, 54, 72, 104, 113, 120, 140–1, 145, 147, 154–5 inequality of decision-making, 18 of economic resources within a household, 5, 15, 25–6, 103, 130 within marriage, 17 patterned, 10 of power, 28 joint pooling and independence, 140 of income, 5, 14, 21–2, 49–50, 52, 61, 63, 88, 94, 100, 103, 107–8, 110, 112, 120–1, 124, 126, 130, 133 husband-managed, 15–16, 18 jointly-managed, 15–16, 114–16, 123


Index 195

as marker of couple relationship, 59, 100, 102, 129, 153 partial, 16 wife-managed, 15–16, 18, 82 Komter, A., 18 Lewis, J., 75 love and commitment, 68 and gender, 44 and intimacy, 44, 54 and money, 100, 103, 135 Lukes, S., 18

and gender, 150 of financial issues, 27, 111, 128, 131 Nyman, C., 19, 140 Nyman, C., and L. Evertsson, 149 objective hermeneutics, 36, 39 open systems, 30

MacLaughlin, E. and C. Glendinning, 102 masculinity, 5, 10, 19, 151 modernity, 3, 28, 31, 53, 72, 96, 131, 145, 154–5 money common, 102, 104, 106, 108, 113, 118, 121, 132, 140 control over, 66, 143 family, 23, 24, 100, 104, 132, 137 impersonalized, 144–5, 147, 154 meaning of, 2, 3, 5, 11, 20–2, 24, 30, 45, 48, 50, 54, 58, 65, 80, 82, 91, 96, 117, 122, 143–4 management, 15, 64, 76, 80, 121, 123 as neutral medium of exchange, 143–4 new forms of, 26 own, 22–3, 42, 50, 65, 87, 90, 101, 103, 108, 122, 125, 132–5, 139, 147–8 ownership of, 45, 100, 122 personalized, 144–7, 154 social aspects of, 23, 117 and trust, 148 negotiation within couple, 2, 3, 13, 28, 36, 55–6, 77, 148–9

Pahl, J., 8, 13–15, 21–2, 24, 26 Pahl, J. and C. Vogler, 11, 12, 75–6, 140 Parsons, T., 73 Pfau-Effinger, B., 141 poverty and household finances, 7–8, 143 power decision-making, 9–10, 12, 17, 22, 25 in families/couples, 8, 9, 11, 18, 22, 25, 58 independence, 41 indirect, 18 relational, 19, 45, 54, 76, 148 over resources, 13, 23 as a result of financial contributions to the family, 65 provider, 63, 88, 123, 136 co-provider, 47 main provider, 130, 136, 141 sole/only provider, 81, 127 qualitative methods, 1, 30, 38–9 quantitative methods, 30 remarried couples, 25 Resource Theory, 9–10, 20 resources, distribution of, 11 Roman, C. and C. Vogler, 20 Rowntree, B.S., 7 Sarrible, G., 114 sequential analysis, 39


196 Index

sharing of economic resources, 23, 52, 144, 154 equal, 20, 43 ideology of, 19, 45, 58, 60, 67, 118 unequal, 18 Simmel, G., 143 Singh, S., 8 social emergence, 30 snowball sampling 39 team analysis, 39 Theory of Marital Dependency, 10 Tichenor, V., 123 traditional family forms, 1, 72, 89, 91, 105, 140 Vogler, C. and J. Pahl, 15, 18

Walby, S., 13 welfare regimes/states/system, 4, 11, 28, 31, 62, 68, 69, 102, 104, 105, 141, 144, 153, 154 family welfare, 122 social welfare office, 62 welfare rights, 105 welfare transfers, 143 West, C. and D.H. Zimmerman, 1 whole wage systems female, 14 male, 14 Wohrab-Sahr, M., 37 Young, M. and P. Willmot, 7 Zelizer, V.A., 8, 20–1


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