Journal of Family Issues 2004 Zipp 923 48

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of Family Issues
Wives, Husbands, and Hidden Power in Marriage

John F. Zipp, Ariane Prohaska and Michelle Bemiller
Journal of Family Issues 2004 25: 923
DOI: 10.1177/0192513X04267151
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JOURNAL
10.1177/0192513X04267151
Zipp et al. / OF
WIVES,
FAMILY
HUSBANDS,
ISSUES / AND
October
HIDDEN
2004 POWER
Wives, Husbands, and

Hidden Power in Marriage
JOHN F. ZIPP
ARIANE PROHASKA
MICHELLE BEMILLER
University of Akron
A recurrent theme in scholarship on gender and the family is the asymmetry between hus-
bands and wives on decision making, the division of household labor, child care, and so forth.
In this article, the authors tested to see if this asymmetry can be explained, in part, by taking
into account the invisible power of men. Using data from the third wave of the British House-
hold Panel Survey, the authors tested this by assessing whether agreement between husbands
and wives on stereotypical men’s and stereotypical women’s issues increased when one of
the spouses heard the other’s responses before answering himself or herself. The authors’key
findings are that (a) wives were much more likely than husbands to agree with their spouses’
known answers and (b) that this remains true even in conditions where wives earn more
money or are more interested in politics than their husbands.
Keywords: gender; marital power; husbands; wives
A recurrent theme in scholarship on gender and the family is the asymme-

try between husbands and wives on such matters as decision making, the
division of household labor, child care, the control of finances, communi-
cation, and caring behavior. Moreover, male dominance in these areas
seems only modestly affected by women’s economic standing, the time
demands of each spouse, and both men and women’s socialization and
gender ideologies (Coltrane, 2000; Fox & Murry, 2000; Gerstel &
Gallagher, 2001; Tichenor, 1999). Feminist scholars have interpreted
these sorts of findings as support for a general social constructionist ap-
proach (e.g., gender theory and doing gender) that contends that gender is
Authors’ Note: This research was supported, in part, by the Department of Sociology at the
University of Akron. The authors benefited greatly from the thoughtful comments of Rebecca
Erickson, Kathryn Feltey, and two anonymous reviewers. None of them were responsible for
any of the conclusions reported here. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to John F. Zipp, Department of Sociology, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-
1905.
JOURNAL OF FAMILY ISSUES, Vol. 25 No. 7, October 2004 933-958
DOI: 10.1177/0192513X04267151
© 2004 Sage Publications
933

934 JOURNAL OF FAMILY ISSUES / October 2004
a constitutive element of social structure and, as such, is closely tied to the

distribution of power and resources (Ferree, 1990; Fox & Murry, 2000;
West & Zimmerman, 1987). Thus, male dominance in the wider society is
pervasive enough that, even when individual women hold some relative
advantages compared to their partners, gender inequalities continue to af-
fect the ways in which men and women construct their intimate
relationships in marriage, with men continuing to have greater marital
power.
Although we are quite persuaded by these feminist views, there is a no-
ticeable gap between the theory and the evidence used to support them.
Much of the literature on marital power, especially the quantitative stud-
ies, has either implicitly or explicitly adopted a Weberian view of power as
the ability to get one’s way, even over the opposition of others (Knudson-
Martin & Mahoney, 1998). Thus, a common focus is on decision making—
who has more say on various family issues—and the impact that differential
resources have on this decision making. Although it is clear that this is one
aspect of power and that it is important to study decision making, political
sociologists have long recognized that power has other faces: It may be la-
tent by keeping some issues from arising (e.g., in nondecisions; Bachrach
& Baratz, 1962), or it may be invisible via the ways in which institutional
arrangements shape individuals even without their recognition (Lukes,
1974; Schattschneider, 1960). Yet with the exception of a few, small quali-
tative or clinical studies (Ball, Cowan, & Cowan, 1995; Hare-Mustin,
1991; Komter, 1989; Tichenor, 1999; Zvonkovic, Greaves, Schmeige, &
Hall, 1996), family and gender researchers have typically ignored these
other dimensions of power.
This has created an ironic situation. On one hand, the large-scale quan-
titative studies of marital power are typically unable to explain why the
greater material equality between spouses has not led to significantly
more interpersonal equality between husbands and wives. On the other
hand, the studies that suggest that men’s latent and invisible power may
be partially responsible for this use small, unrepresentative qualitative
samples—typically centering on White, middle-class, highly educated
couples—that make it hard to generalize about the existence and im-
pact of these other forms of power.
Even when scholars are aware of the theoretical importance of moving
beyond a sole focus on overt instances of power, a powerful methodo-
logical hurdle remains: It is difficult to develop empirical tests for what
is latent or hidden. For instance, attributions of power always involve a
relevant counterfactual—what an actor would do or want without the in-
fluence of another actor (Lukes, 1974). This is relatively easy to identify

Zipp et al. / WIVES, HUSBANDS, AND HIDDEN POWER 935
with respect to decision making as there are typically two positions, with
one (or a blend of the two) being adopted. However, it is quite difficult to
identify the relevant counterfactuals for latent or hidden power, especially
in large-scale survey research.
A recent article by Zipp and Toth (2002) may inadvertently provide a
way to combine the theoretical interest in the more subtle aspects of mari-
tal power that are uncovered in qualitative research with a large represen-
tative sample that is suitable for statistical analyses. In a mainly method-
ological article, Zipp and Toth found that spousal presence in face-to-face
interviews increased the likelihood that partners agreed on a series of po-
litical attitudes and attributions of responsibility for household labor. The
source of this agreement, however, at least for political attitudes, was dif-
ferent for men and for women. Because their British data allowed them to
identify the order in which spouses were interviewed, Zipp and Toth were
able to isolate two groups of couples: husbands present for their wives’ in-
terviews before the husbands themselves were questioned and wives at-
tending their husbands’ interviews before the wives themselves were sur-
veyed. They found that agreement tended to be higher when wives were
interviewed after their husbands, with no such increased agreement when
men were interviewed after their wives. Thus, wives seemed to modify
their answers to agree with their husbands, whereas husbands seemed to
be not so inclined to agree with their wives.
A wife who hears her husband’s interview and is then interviewed
alone has the opportunity to agree or disagree with her husband’s known
answer—without him knowing. In other words, a husband may be shap-
ing his wife’s preferences without being aware of doing so. In Lukes’s
(1974) terms, we can restate this as follows: In the absence of her hus-
band’s power—measured as the wife knowing her husband’s answers—a
wife is less likely to give answers that agree with her husband’s position.
Power, then, is not just about actively trying to get a spouse to agree with
your position in a dispute, but rather, it also has a more subtle face that may
unconsciously shape one’s preferences. In this way, Zipp and Toth’s find-
ings appear to provide empirical evidence that supports the invisible
power still wielded by husbands.
Although Zipp and Toth’s results are provocative, it is important to rec-
ognize that they found these effects primarily regarding political issues,
domains traditionally seen as masculine. Thus, before using their findings
as evidence of male dominance, future research needs to consider whether
husbands might indeed defer to their wives on matters seen more tradi-
tionally as women’s issues (e.g., children, family). The purpose of this ar-
ticle, then, is to provide a more complete analysis of the invisible power of

men. By considering questions that have historically been in the province

of either men (e.g., politics, finances) or women (e.g., personal events,
values for children), we aim to discover whether the likelihood of agree-
ment by the spouse interviewed second depends on power or on the nature
of the question being asked.
The difference between these two possibilities is important both theo-
retically and substantively for research on gender and family. At the theo-
retical level, the difference corresponds to two divergent perspectives on
why couples might be influenced by each other. The first view, structural
equivalence (Burt, 1987), holds that individuals are more likely to trust in-
formation from those whom they hold in high personal regard. For in-
stance, Burt found that doctors were heavily influenced by their profes-
sional peers and equals in deciding whether to adopt a new drug. Thus, it
seems quite reasonable for husbands and wives to rely on each other’s
views on topics presumed to be in the other’s bailiwick. Indeed, previous
work has found that husbands see themselves as more competent on poli-
tics and that wives are more likely to report discussing politics with their
husbands than vice versa (Brickell, Huckfeldt, & Sprague, 1995). Apply-
ing this here, husbands and wives may agree because they each embrace
the husband’s attitudes regarding politics and the wife’s attitudes regard-
ing child care. If this occurs, there is no evidence of men’s invisible power,
rendering Zipp and Toth’s (2002) results an artifact of the questions that
they examined.1
An alternative possibility, gender theory (Ferree, 1990; West &
Zimmerman, 1987), is partially the opposite of structural equivalence. It
directs attention to the processes that differentiate men and women, espe-
cially those that privilege men. According to this view, gender is created
and maintained in interaction. From an early age, we possess a common
understanding of the expectations and behaviors that coincide with being
a man or a woman, and we do gender, or perform as a male or female, in
accordance with these expectations. Deviation from gendered proscrip-
tions leads to negative appraisals; thus, doing gender socially shapes indi-
vidual behaviors, leading to an unequal distribution of power and re-
sources between genders at both the individual and structural level, with
the advantage falling to men.
Marriage is one arena in which men and women can repeatedly display
that they are men and women, respectively. Because male dominance is
deeply entrenched in advanced societies, the gender perspective might
suggest that spousal agreement is a product of women adopting the views
of their husbands rather than vice versa and should not depend on the topic
being queried. For instance, in a qualitative study of 61 couples,

Zvonkovic et al. (1996) found that although couples talked about how
their agreements were forged through discussions, decisions were more
likely to reflect what the husband wanted rather than what the wife
wanted. In a similar vein, Tichenor (1999) reported that women, even
when they earned significantly more money than their husbands, did gen-
der by deferring to their husbands so as not to appear to be claiming
greater power. In the case at hand, because interviews are social settings in
which meaning and reality are created (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), when
being interviewed after their husbands, wives perform (or do gender) for
the interviewer—a person whom the wife knows has heard her husband’s
answers—by adhering to meanings attached to femininity (e.g., agreeing
with her husband’s answers, taking on the role of the subservient one in
the relationship). In this way, the fact that agreement after hearing their
partner’s answers was higher for wives than it was for husbands may very
well be an indication of doing gender and of the presence of the hidden
power of men.
At a substantive level, the difference between these two explanations
bears on issues of marital power. If structural equivalence is a better expla-
nation, this would mean that both husbands and wives were exerting hid-
den power over their spouse. Even though the ways in which this power
works reinforces traditional gender roles, it, nonetheless, would indicate
that women have more marital power than previously thought or found.
On the other hand, if gender theory is correct, with men displaying hidden
power over women but not vice versa, this would imply that many of the
reasons for the cultural entrenchment (Nock, 1998) of men as dominant
partners may be less visible than expected. This is important to understand
because power that is hidden is power that is more difficult to resist or
change.
MEASURES AND METHOD
We are testing these claims regarding hidden power in marriage by

building on and expanding the work of Zipp and Toth (2002). Although
their aims were methodological, their approach—essentially treating the
interview itself as a research setting, a natural field experiment of sorts—
provides a window for us to observe whether husbands exert hidden
power over their wives or vice versa. Similar to Zipp and Toth, we are us-
ing data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Conducted by
the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex,
United Kingdom, the BHPS is a nationally representative panel study of

households in Britain (there are now 11 waves of data available, with the
most recent being collected in 2002). The survey itself focuses on eco-
nomic and social change, with a wide range of social and political topics
being addressed. Most of the data were collected in a 40-minute face-to-
face interview, with some additional questions asked in a short (5-minute)
self-administered questionnaire (more of this below). Zipp and Toth used
the first wave, although we draw on the third (1993) wave as it contains
items that traditionally have been in the province of either men or women.
In the first wave, households were chosen using a two-stage, clustered
probability design. Interviewers were asked to complete an interview with
all household members ages 16 and older. In Wave 1, interviews were
completed with 10,264 individuals in 5,538 households. Subsequent
waves attempted to interview original household members with those
who were newly eligible (e.g., children who had turned 16 and new adult
members). The BHPS was very successful, as full interviews were con-
ducted in the third wave with approximately 80% of the original sample.2
Among these households were approximately 2,000 married couples
available for analysis.3
We have 25 dependent variables, 17 in which men are traditionally ex-
pected to have more sway and 8 in which women are expected to have
more influence. In each case, our dependent measure is a dichotomous
variable, tapping whether or not husbands and wives agree (agreement is
coded as 1, and disagreement is coded as 0). Men’s traditional domain
centers around political and financial matters, whereas women focus
more on the family and household.
MEN’S TRADITIONAL DOMAIN
Politics.4 We had several different types of political attitudes and be-

haviors, with the first question regarding party identification. Respon-
dents were asked their political party preference, and answers were re-
corded in nine categories. The answers included the three major parties
(Labor, Conservative, and Liberal, comprising more than 95% of all re-
spondents), three minor parties (Scot National, Green, and Plaid Cymru),
two catchall answers (other party and other answer), plus one “none” an-
swer. The vast majority of respondents identified with one of the three ma-
jor parties, and thus, we restricted our analyses to them. In a related vein,
respondents were also asked to assess their level of political interest, with
their answer choices ranging from very interested to fairly interested to

not very interested to not interested at all (1 = very interested, 4 = not at all
interested).
A third set of political variables concerned economic liberalism. Re-
spondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed (on a 5-point scale, with
1 = strongly agree and 5 = strongly disagree) with the following six state-
ments: (a) “Ordinary people get their fair share of the nation’s wealth,” (b)
“There is one law for the rich and one for the poor,” (c) “Private enterprise
is the best way to solve Britain’s economic problems,” (d) “Major public
services and industries ought to be in state ownership,” (e) “It is the gov-
ernment’s responsibility to provide a job for everyone who wants one,”
and (f) “Strong trade unions are needed to protect the working conditions
and wages of employees.” Our measures tap whether couples agree on
each of these six indicators of economic liberalism.
In a related vein, the BHPS included three items concerning the role of
government in providing health care. Respondents were asked to agree or
disagree (with the same 5-point scale as for economic liberalism) with the
following three statements: (a) “All health care should be available free of
charge to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay,” (b) “People who can
afford it should have to take out private health insurance rather than use the
National Health Service,” and (3) “It is not fair that some people can get
medical treatment before others just because they can afford to pay for it.”
The BHPS also contained two questions that tapped whether the re-
spondent had materialist or postmaterialist attitudes. Respondents were
asked to name their first and second choices among the following political
goals: (a) maintain order, (b) people have more say, (c) rising prices, (d)
and free speech. Following Inglehart’s method (1977), we used the sec-
ond and fourth goals as indicators of postmaterialism. Thus, for both hus-
bands and wives, we had dichotomous measures, with 1 indicating that a
respondent’s most important or second most important political goals
were postmaterialist. The agreement measures reflected whether
husbands and wives shared the same two goals.
Money and finances. We had four different items, with the first two as-
sessing how reluctant respondents were to use savings or credit at the time
of questioning for a major purchase. The remaining two questions were
broader, querying who is mainly in charge of paying the bills and who has
the final say in financial matters. Respondents had four choices: (a) “The
task was done mostly by myself,” (b) “the task was done mostly by my
partner,” (c) “it was shared,” or (d) “it was done by someone else.”

WOMEN’S TRADITIONAL DOMAIN
The first set of variables centered on important life events of the last
year. Respondents were asked the following question:
Would you please tell me anything that has happened to you (or your fam-
ily) which has stood out as important? This might be things you’ve done, or
things that have been of interest or concern. Just whatever comes to mind as
important to you.
Their responses were recorded verbatim, and their first four answers were
coded in two different ways in the BHPS: the exact event (66 different cat-
egories) and the subject—the person whom the life event concerned. De-
spite the different coding schemes, there was substantial correlation be-
tween these two types of measures (ranging from .518 on the first life
event to .984 on the fourth). Thus, to have a conservative measure of
agreement, we relied on agreement in naming the exact event. This gave us
four measures—one for each of the top four named events—of husband-
wife agreement on the major life events of the past year.
The BHPS included a set of items centering on the topic of values for
children. Respondents were given a list of five qualities—well liked, think
for self, work hard, help others, and obey parents—and were asked, “If
you had to choose, which quality on this list would you pick as the most
important for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life?” The BHPS re-
corded their top four choices, and we assessed husband-wife agreement
on each of them.
One possible shortcoming is that we have better indicators for men’s
traditional domain than we do for women’s. As noted earlier, consistent
with the idea of separate spheres for men and women, women’s expertise
is more likely concerned with matters of the family and home. By far, the
lion’s share of research on marital decision making has focused on one as-
pect of this: the household division of labor (see Coltrane, 2000, for a re-
cent summary). Unfortunately, the only questions included on this survey
concern paying the bills and finances, matters that traditionally have been
seen as masculine (or nonroutine; Coltrane & Collins, 2001).
Despite this limitation, the questions about life events and values for
children do tap important aspects of women’s traditional domains. As
Orbuch and Zimmer (2001) noted, married women have been seen as kin
keepers for the family, in charge of maintaining ties to the extended fam-
ily. In this way, women are more responsible for social and familial rela-
tionships. Our measures of life events address some parts of this role for
women, as they cover the important events that have characterized family

life in the past year. Providing some face validity for this, women were
more likely than men to cite any event (25% of men and 19% of women re-
ported no important event) and to cite a family event as the most important
(30% of women and 25% of men).
In a similar fashion, research supports the impact that women have in
shaping values for children. Menaghan and Parcel (1991), for instance,
have emphasized women’s important role in providing children with cul-
turally approved values, focusing on the connection between mothers’en-
hanced self-esteem and the knowledge that they are positively impacting
their children’s development. Simons, Whitbeck, Conger, and Melby
(1990) found that mothers’ values and attitudes have direct effects on how
fathers interact with children. Finally, perhaps the clearest evidence co-
mes from Kohn and Slomczynski (1990). They discovered that, in both
the United States and Poland, mothers’ values for their children shape the
values that their husbands hold but that the husbands’ values have no im-
pact on their wives’ values.5
Before describing our independent variables, it is helpful to assess the
overall level of agreement among couples on our dependent measures. Ta-
ble 1 demonstrates that agreement ranges from very high on important life
events (90% on the fourth major life event, 75% to 77% on party identifi-
cation and on who pays the bills) to much more modest (30% to 40%
agreement) on economic liberalism and postmaterialism. Because it is
likely that some of this agreement is solely because of chance, we also
have reported the kappa coefficient (see Smith, Gager, & Morgan, 1998,
for a discussion of why kappa is used) because it removes chance agree-
ment. The agreement levels (reported in percentages in column 2) are
much lower on most items but still reasonably strong on a number of mea-
sures (party identification, who pays the bills, and the right time to use
savings or credit).
INDEPENDENT VARIABLES
The primary goals of this analysis were to model Zipp and Toth’s
(2002) analysis and to use certain methodological features of the inter-
view situation to discover if there is any evidence of men’s hidden power
in the family. Two sets of survey questions are key to this design, with the
first being spousal presence in the interviews. Following each section of
the questionnaire, interviewers recorded whether the respondent was in-
terviewed alone. If the respondent was not alone, the interviewer noted
who else—spouse or partner, children, or other adults—witnessed that
section of the survey.6 Restricting our attention only to spouses,7 respon-

TABLE 1
Percentage of Spousal Agreement on Dependent Variables
% Agree %K
Stereotypical men’s items

Party identification 77.5 65.9
Ordinary people get their fair share of the nation’s wealth 48.4 20.0
There is one law for the rich and one for the poor 49.6 20.8
Private enterprise is the best way to solve Britain’s
economic problems 37.6 15.7
Major public services and industries ought to be in
state ownership 39.7 15.5
It is the government’s responsibility to provide a job for
everyone who wants one 47.0 23.0
Strong trade unions are needed to protect the working
conditions and wages of employees 44.4 21.0
Who has more say in finances 41.1 14.3
Who makes sure bills are paid 75.3 46.6
Postmaterialism 1 41.4 15.3
Postmaterialism 2 30.9 11.1
Level of political interest 42.4 16.1
All health care should be free 47.9 15.5
Compulsory private insurance should exist if you can pay 45.3 13.5
It is unfair that wealth buys medical priority 43.6 16.1
The right time to use credit 66.8 46.5
The right time to use savings 66.1 46.8
Stereotypical women’s items
First major life event (exact match) 44.3 NA
Second major life event (exact match) 51.9 NA
Third major life event (exact match) 74.4 NA
Fourth major life event (exact match) 90.7 9.1
Most important quality that prepares child for life 41.7 16.5
Second most important quality that prepares child for life 31.6 7.8
Third most important quality that prepares child for life 28.3 5.4
Fourth most important quality that prepares child for life 59.8 16.8
NOTE: NA = kappa not applicable because the table was not symmetric.
dents were interviewed alone for roughly 40% of the time, with each at-
tending the other’s interview in 35% of the cases and one of the spouses
present in approximately 25% of the cases. In the latter instances, wives
were much more likely to attend their husband’s interview than the hus-
bands were to attend their wife’s interview (15% vs. 9%). Because we
were interested in assessing the existence of hidden power, our analysis
was restricted to the unbalanced spousal presence conditions: The hus-

TABLE 2
Spousal Presence and Interview Order
Percentage Husband Interviewed First
Values,
Opinions, Household
Attitudes and Finances Medical
Respondent interviewed alone

Percentage 38.9 38.7 41.9
n 805 773 856
Wife present at husband’s interview
n 311 288 298
Husband present at wife’s interview
n 183 180 179
Both spouses present
n 718 758 708
Percentage Wife Interviewed First

Values,
Opinions, Household
Attitudes and Finances Medical
Respondent interviewed alone (%) 57.6 58.2 58.8

Wife present at husband’s interview (%) 54.0 54.2 63.8
Husband present at wife’s interview (%) 57.4 59.4 53.1
Both spouses present (%) 50.6 50.1 45.6
Total (%) 54.5 54.7 54.5
band attends his wife’s interview, and the wife attends her husband’s
interview.8
We used a second set of questions to identify our key independent vari-
able: the order in which the spouses were interviewed. The BHPS con-
tains information on the date as well as the starting and finishing times of
the interviews. Most couples were interviewed on the same day, and over-
all, 55% of wives were interviewed prior to their husbands.9 Table 2 con-
tains a breakdown of these two variables—spouse presence and the inter-
view order—for each of the three sections of the questionnaire.
It is important to mention three caveats before turning to our results.
First, we need to recognize that the order in which spouses are interviewed

may not be a random occurrence; thus, we should account for other factors
that may shape it before attributing any influence to the order in which
spouses were interviewed. It is not surprising that there is no literature that
we are aware of that speaks to the factors that shape the order in which
spouses are interviewed. As a result, the best guide that we have is re-
search on whether a spouse is likely to attend his or her partner’s inter-
view. Aquilino (1993) developed the most extensive model explaining
spousal presence, and Zipp and Toth (2002) adapted this to their analysis
of the BHPS. Drawing on both, we have included the following control
variables: the age, education, and work status (employed or not) of both
spouses; the number of children the couple has; their family income; the
number of rooms in their dwelling; and the interviewer’s assessment (for
both husbands and wives) of the degree to which the spouse influenced the
respondent’s answers. In addition, it is possible that some spouses will
agree on our measures because they agree on many things; in fact, it could
be that this basic sort of agreement is part of what led them to marry and
keep their marriage intact. Although we have no direct measure of this, we
are fortunate that the BHPS includes a series of nine gender-role items ob-
tained in a self-administered questionnaire (see the appendix for the ques-
tions). Because the spouses answered these alone, we can use agreement
on them to provide some measure of a baseline level of agreement be-
tween husbands and wives, agreement that is not affected by spousal pres-
ence. This is quite important as it should allow us to control for the
likelihood that spouses agree without knowing their partner’s answers.
The second caveat builds on this and centers on the role that hearing a
partner’s answers plays in producing agreement. It may very well be that
women who believe in traditional gender roles will be more likely to agree
with their husbands, with the opposite true for husbands holding these be-
liefs; thus, greater agreement is a result of these views and not a result of
hearing a spouse’s answers. Although this is only a possibility for matters
on which a spouse knows for certain what his or her partner’s opinion is,
we will control for this by including two variables—husband’s gender
ideology and wife’s gender ideology—into all of our equations. These are
the sum of responses to the nine gender-role questions listed in the appen-
dix; all are coded such that higher scores indicate more liberal attitudes.10
Our final caveat concerns the generalizability of our results. As noted
above, we used British data to test claims that have been made in various
advanced industrial societies. It is reasonable to consider the degree to
which our findings may be contingent on the larger gender climate in the
country. For instance, nations clearly differ on the degree to which gender
equality is codified in law and enacted in practice (Acker, 1994;

Widerberg, 1991). On some dimensions—politics and economics—

women in Great Britain fare rather poorly in international comparisons.
For instance, even though the number of women members of Parliament
almost tripled between 1983 and 1992 (from 23 to 60), British women
held only 9.2% of the seats in Parliament, a percentage that is relatively
low compared to other European nations (Norris & Lovenduski, 1993).
Similarly, women in Great Britain earned approximately 70¢ to the man’s
dollar during the late 1980s (Norris, 1987).11 On other fronts, however,
scholars have found comparable situations, especially in the domestic
sphere, facing women in different countries. Research has consistently
shown that women perform almost two thirds of housework in Great Brit-
ain, whereas more than half of British citizens believe that mothers with
young children should not participate in the labor force (see Pilcher, 1999,
for a detailed review of the literature on women’s participation in house-
work and paid work in Great Britain). Indeed, rates of participation in
housework and caregiving are remarkably similar among Western women
(Goldschmidt-Clermont & Pagnossin-Aligisakis, 1995; Pilcher, 1999).
Thus, it appears that the gender climate in Great Britain is not different
enough from that of women in other advanced Western societies to
seriously limit the generalizability of our results.
RESULTS
The first step in our analysis is to determine if the order in which

spouses are interviewed increases agreement between husbands and
wives. Because we are interested in using these results to bear on the exis-
tence of hidden power in the family, following Zipp and Toth, we ran sepa-
rate models for the husband who attends his wife’s interview and for the
wife who attends her husband’s interview. We have two different mea-
sures of the order in which spouses were interviewed: The wife was inter-
viewed first (in the models where the husband attends her interview), and
the husband was interviewed first (in the models where the wife attends
his interview). These are just the inverse of the other, but they allow posi-
tive coefficients to indicate increased agreement.
To recapitulate, we have advanced two general explanations for why
agreement might increase when one spouse is interviewed after hearing
his or her partner’s responses. The first, structural equivalence, holds that
each spouse will defer to the other on the other’s areas of expertise. In this
case, this means that agreement should be higher for husbands on tradi-
tional women’s items and higher for wives on traditional men’s issues.

Thus, what is important is the issue. The alternative explanation, doing

gender, suggests that gender is primary. Following this logic, women’s
agreement should be higher, whereas men should assert their masculinity
by being unlikely to agree with their wives.
It is important to note that, in a number of ways, our test is a very con-
servative test for the presence of the hidden power of a spouse. First and
most importantly, our measure of hidden power is based on one spouse
agreeing with the other without his or her partner knowing it. Thus, not
only is there no direct exercise of power from one spouse to another, but
also the more powerful spouse remains unaware of his or her influence.
This effectively rules out pleasing a more powerful partner as a motive for
agreement. Second, we are examining this agreement over and above a
baseline level of agreement (on gender roles). Combining these two
makes it quite difficult to find any effects and, thus, makes any impact that
we find quite notable.
Table 3 provides the results of agreement on the order in which spouses
were interviewed in Wave 3 of the BHPS. Separately, for husbands attend-
ing their wives’ interviews and wives attending their husbands’ inter-
views, we looked at the likelihood of spousal agreement on variables that
coincide with gendered proscriptions. For each model, we regressed one
of our dependent variables on the relevant measure of interview order (ei-
ther the husband interviewed first or the wife interviewed first) and our 15
control variables (husband’s and wife’s educations, ages, work statuses,
and gender- role ideologies; family income; number of children and num-
ber of children under 12; the number of rooms in the dwelling; the two in-
terviewer assessments of spousal influence; and agreement on gender
roles). We use logistic regression because all of our dependent variables
were dichotomous.
We have presented the results in Table 3 to conserve space and focus on
our central research question. The cell entries are the logistic regression
coefficients for one of two variables measuring the hidden power of
spouses: the wife interviewed first (column 1) and the husband inter-
viewed first (column 3). Each of these coefficients taps the likelihood that
the second interviewed spouse agreed with the answers of his or her part-
ner, who was interviewed first. For instance, a significant coefficient in
column 1 indicates that a husband is more likely to agree with his wife (on
the particular dependent variable reported in that row) when he attends her
interview and is subsequently interviewed. Similarly, a significant coeffi-
cient in column 3 denotes that a wife is more likely to agree with her
husband when she attends his interview and then is herself interviewed.

TABLE 3
Can the Order in Which Spouses Are Interviewed Explain Agreement? Logistic Regression Results
Husband Present Wife Present at
at Wife’s Interview Husband’s Interview
Odds Odds
b Ratio b Ratio
Stereotypical men’s items

Party identification .630 1.877 –.090 .914
Ordinary people get their fair share of the nation’s wealth 0.323 1.382 1.230* 3.420
There is one law for the rich and one for the poor 0.047 1.048 0.987* 2.683
Private enterprise is the best way to solve Britain’s economic problems –0.045 0.956 0.845* 2.329
Major public services and industries ought to be in state ownership 0.680 1.974 0.553* 1.705
It is the government’s responsibility to provide a job for everyone who wants one 0.501 1.650 0.326 1.386
Strong trade unions are needed to protect the working conditions and wages of employees 0.478 1.612 0.887* 2.427
Who has more say in finances –0.387 0.679 0.315 1.371
Who makes sure bills are paid 1.466* 4.331 0.395 1.485
Postmaterialism 1 0.194 1.214 0.066 1.068
Postmaterialism 2 –0.145 0.865 –0.044 0.957
Level of political interest 0.317 1.374 0.135 1.145
All healthcare should be free 0.125 1.134 0.198 1.218
Compulsory private insurance should exist if you can pay –0.184 0.832 0.112 1.119

It is unfair that wealth buys medical priority 0.001 1.001 –0.089 0.915
The right time to use credit 0.557 1.746 0.972* 2.642
The right time to use savings 0.269 1.308 0.710* 2.034
(continued)
947
948
TABLE 3 (continued)
Husband Present Wife Present at

at Wife’s Interview Husband’s Interview
Odds Odds
b Ratio b Ratio
Stereotypical women’s items

First major life event (exact match) 0.613 1.846 –0.099 0.906
Second major life event (exact match) –0.080 0.923 0.114 1.121
Third major life event (exact match) 0.533 1.704 –0.560 0.571
Fourth major life event (exact match) 0.310 1.364 –0.565 0.568
Most important quality that prepares child for life 0.648 1.912 0.870* 2.387
Second most important quality that prepares child for life 0.072 1.075 0.455 1.576
Third most important quality that prepares child for life 1.006* 2.734 0.526 1.692
Fourth most important quality that prepares child for life 0.668 1.950 0.351 1.420
NOTE: All entries are coefficients for the models where the wife was interviewed first and the husband was present and for the models where the husband was
interviewed first and the wife was present.
*p < .05. All coefficients are net of our 15 control variables.

As can be seen in Table 3, there is notable asymmetry in the results for

husbands and wives. When husbands attended their wives’ interviews and
were subsequently interviewed, there were only two instances—one
men’s traditional domain and one women’s traditional domain—in which
agreement was higher: who makes sure that the bills are paid (1.466) and
the third most important quality that prepares a child for life (1.006). Be-
cause this means that there were only two significant coefficients out of 25
possibilities, including only one of which was expected, it is probably rea-
sonable to conclude that husband’s agreement was nothing greater than
chance.
The same cannot be said for wives who hear their husbands’ answers
and who are then interviewed. As can be seen in the last two columns of
Table 3, agreement is higher in 8 of the 25 models, including 7 of the 17
variables in the stereotypical men’s domain. These include five of the six
items on economic liberalism and the two items on using credit or savings
for a major purchase. It is important to point out that this increased agree-
ment is net of a wide range of control variables, including a baseline level
of agreement on gender roles (recall that these were assessed in a self-
administered questionnaire).
At this point, the results point to a combination of both the structural
equivalence and the gender explanations. As gender theory suggests, hus-
bands do not appear to be affected by their wives’ answers, whereas wives
pay much more attention to their husbands’ answers. However, the impor-
tant qualifier for gender theory is that wives appear to listen to their hus-
bands mainly with regard to politics and finances. In essence, women may
still feel that they have expertise in only women’s traditional domains.
Before accepting these results, it is worth probing the behavior of hus-
bands and wives a bit more deeply. Although male dominance has a long
tradition, it is possible that it varies across all types of couples, depending
on how traditional the couples are. For instance, it may very well be that in
couples in which the wife earns more income, husbands might be more
likely to pay attention to the answers of their senior partner.
Toward this end, we ran a series of logistic regression equations, identi-
cal to those in Table 3, for husbands who attended their wives’ interviews,
adding variables measuring one of the following: educational differences
between spouses, husband’s gender-role attitudes, wife’s share of house-
hold income, if the wife is working and her husband is not (indicating that
the wife is the head of the household), and if the wife is more interested in
politics than her husband is.12 An interaction term combining each of
these variables with the wife interviewing first was also included in each
equation.

Each of these represents a situation in which husbands might be ex-

pected to pay more attention to their wives on either masculine or femi-
nine items or both. Thus, a significant positive interaction coefficient in
these equations means that husbands are more likely to agree with their
wives when she is the senior partner in one way or another. More specifi-
cally, we expect that, when she occupies a position that is more stereo-
typically occupied by her husband—has higher educational qualifica-
tions,13 is more interested in politics, earns more money, or works while
her husband does not—the husband should be more likely to agree with
her on traditionally masculine items. In these cases, because she has more
cultural or financial capital, is the only one working for pay outside of the
home, or is more interested in politics, we would expect the wife to be the
opinion leader on politics and finances. Finally, when the husband is lib-
eral on gender roles, this sensitivity might lead him to give more credence
to his wife’s views on issues in both male and female domains.
These results are contained in the first two columns of Table 4. Because
we ran 92 separate logistic regression equations, to conserve space, we
have reported our results in summary form. Thus, the entries in Table 4 in-
dicate the number of models in which the interaction coefficient was sig-
nificant. For instance, the first row contains the results from testing for the
presence of a statistical interaction among educational differences be-
tween spouses, the wife being interviewed first, and each of the 17
stereotypically male dependent variables.14 In this case, there was one sig-
nificant interaction, and it occurred for the first of our two postmaterialism
dependent variables (see the key at the bottom of Table 4): Men who had
less education than their wives were less likely to agree with her attitudes
on postmaterialism (b = –.201) after hearing her answer.
More generally, there were 7 cases, in 92 equations, in which there
were significant interactions (see Table 4). Although, at first blush, this
may appear to indicate that men in nontraditional families have signifi-
cantly less hidden power, as the key at the bottom of Table 4 indicates, in 3
of the 7 instances, husbands were less likely to agree with their wives after
hearing their wives’ answers. Thus, in only 4 of the 92 possible instances
in which conditions depart from the traditional family are husbands likely
to agree with their wives. Given that this is not much different than chance
(5 of 100 is chance), this is fairly clear evidence for the hidden power of
men.
We can extend this logic to wives in nontraditional relationships,
though here, our expectations are the opposite: When a wife has higher
educational qualifications, is more interested in politics, earns more
money, or works while her husband does not, she should be less likely to

TABLE 4
Can the Order in Which Spouses Are Interviewed
Explain Agreement? Number of Significant Interaction Terms
Wife at Husband’s
Interview,
Husband at Wife’s Interview, Husbands
a b
Wife Interviewed First Interviewed First
Dependent Dependent
Variables Variables
Stereotypical Stereotypical Stereotypical
Men’s Items Women’s Men’s Items
Interaction With: (n = 17) Items (n = 8) (n = 17)
Educational differences 1 NA 0
Wife’s percentage of household income 0 NA 2
Political interestc 2 NA 0
Wife head of household 2 NA 0
Husband gender-role ideology 1 1 NA
NOTE: NA = not appropriate.

a. Significant interaction coefficients with wife interviewed first: educational differences, b =
–0.201 (Postmaterialism 1 is the dependent variable.); political interest, b = 3.404 (ordinary
people get their fair share of wealth is the dependent variable), b–= –4.069 (all health care
should be free is the dependent variable); wife is head of household, b = –2.314 (private en-
terprise is best way to solve Britain’s economic problems is the dependent variable), b =
2.217 (ordinary people get their fair share of wealth is the dependent variable); husband’s
gender-role ideology, b = 0.168 (ordinary people get their fair share of wealth is the depend-
ent variable), b = 0.176 (second most important quality for children is the dependent vari-
able).
b. Significant interaction coefficients with husband interviewed first: wife percentage of
household income, b = 6.198 (who has more say in finances is the dependent variable),
b = –3.836 (the right time to use savings is the dependent variable).
c. Political interest was not used as a dependent variable, leaving only 16 dependent
variables.
follow her husband’s lead on traditional men’s items. Thus, even though
we found above that husbands in these situations are not more likely to
agree with their wives, it may very well be that the wives’ higher levels of
cultural or financial capital or political interest provide them with the re-
sources to be less likely to agree with their husbands on political and
financial issues.
These results are contained in the last column of Table 4. We ran 67 lo-
gistic regression equations and found significant interactions in only 2
models. These results are not only less than what one would expect
by chance, but they are also mixed in direction. As noted at the bottom of

Table 4, in only one of the two instances—wives who have a higher share
of income are more likely to disagree with their husbands’ views on
whether it is the right time to use savings—is the effect in the predicted di-
rection. Again, this is reasonably clear evidence that even being the senior
partner in a relationship is not enough to overcome the weight of gender.
Thus, doing gender is a way to reorder the hierarchy when it is violated by
a woman’s senior status (Tichenor, 1999).
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION
Our primary purpose in this article was to determine if either spouse

wielded hidden power in marriage. Using the interview itself as a research
setting, we tested this by assessing whether agreement between husbands
and wives on stereotypical men’s (e.g., political and financial) and stereo-
typical women’s (e.g., domestic) issues increased when one of the spouses
heard the other’s responses before answering himself or herself. We of-
fered two different theoretical explanations for why agreement might be
higher: Structural equivalence contends that the nature of the issue should
matter, suggesting that each spouse will defer to the other in the area of the
other’s presumed expertise, whereas gender theory holds that gender is
the key, with agreement higher when women hear their husbands’
responses than vice versa.
We have several key findings. First, wives were much more likely than
husbands to agree with their spouses’ known answers. Agreement was
higher in 2 of 25 instances for husbands but in 8 of 25 instances for wives,
including in 7 of the 17 matters in which men are stereotypically seen as
more dominant. Second, recognizing that male dominance might depend
on how traditional the couple is, we tested the degree to which husbands’
agreement and wives’ agreement varied when wives were the senior part-
ner. These tests, however, detected little or no evidence that the power
wielded by husbands is substantially diminished, even in conditions in
which wives earn more money or are more interested in politics than their
husbands.
Taken together, these findings provide support for a blending of the
two theoretical explanations. True to gender theory, men used the inter-
view situation to assert their dominance by largely ignoring their wives’
answers, even on matters in which women have traditionally held sway or
in situations in which they themselves were the junior partner. Addition-
ally, agreement was much higher when women responded after hearing
their husbands’ answers, an indirect indication of men’s dominance, and

the likelihood of women agreeing with their husbands was virtually unaf-
fected by women’s financial, cultural, and political capital. However, as
suggested by structural equivalence, this subordinate role for women oc-
curred almost exclusively on stereotypical male issues. Thus, the nature of
the issue mattered somewhat as hearing their husbands’ views on family
and domestic issues did not spur women to agree with them.
Before accepting this conclusion, we need to consider several alterna-
tive explanations. One possible alternative interpretation to the second in-
terviewed spouse agreeing with his or her mate is that the spouse who in-
terviewed first—in the presence of a partner—alters his or her answer in
anticipation of the other’s expected response. This surely could happen,
especially on matters that have been frequently discussed, but it is un-
likely here for two reasons. First, a good number of our dependent vari-
ables concern issues to which it would be hard to guess a partner’s re-
sponse. Second, if this were the case, it would mean that husbands are
better at knowing their wives’ beliefs and then changing their own re-
sponses in anticipation of them rather than vice versa. Although possible,
this would be contrary to a substantial amount of social psychological re-
search on gender and status (see Yoder, 2003, pp. 113-116, for a
summary).
There is one other alternative explanation that bears considering.15 In
line with the work of Tannen (1992), wives could agree with their hus-
bands’ opinions because women are more likely to value involvement,
whereas men are more concerned with independence. Thus, it may be ar-
gued that our findings do not demonstrate the hidden power of husbands
over their wives but rather demonstrate gender differences in a desire to
support the other’s opinions.
Even assuming that Tannen (1992) is correct about women’s greater
willingness to value the mutual support of the opinions of others, we
would argue that this does not undercut our interpretation. Part of the rea-
son that women are more likely to value mutual support is because of the
structural inequalities between men and women in society. In other words,
this is one way that institutional arrangements empower men vis-à-vis
women. One clever psychological experiment sheds light on the role of
differential power in producing conformity. Roll, McClelland, and Abel
(1996) asked pairs of White and Mexican American women to record
their top three responses to inkblots and to share their answers with their
partners. After this, they asked each partner to add two more responses to
their original list. It is interesting that the Mexican American and White
women were similarly influenced when paired with a partner of the same
ethnicity, but Mexican American women were more influenced when

paired with White women. Thus, individuals with structurally less power
were more likely to follow the lead of those more structurally advantaged.
In other words, this is one way that institutional arrangements shape
women without their recognition. Recall that this is what is meant by
invisible power.
There are several implications of these results. First, they may add an
interesting qualification to the gender perspective. As noted earlier, this
view holds that gender is a product of everyday interaction, focusing on
the idea that recurrent interactions reinforce gender differences. Thus,
women agreeing with their husbands’ (and men not agreeing with their
wives’) answers indicates traditional male dominance, yet this dominance
occurs primarily on issues that are typically in the male province, such as
politics and finances. Women were much less likely to adopt their hus-
band’s views on domestic matters. We cannot be sure why this is so. On
one hand, it may be a further enactment of gender as it relegates women’s
primacy to the domestic sphere. On the other hand, these findings may re-
flect a partial erosion of male dominance in that wives are not likely to be-
lieve that they need to always agree with their husbands to legitimize their
relationship in the eyes of others (Zvonkovic et al., 1996).
In a related vein, the gender perspective refers to the ways that gender
is displayed in interaction, and this is one of the reasons why studying men
and women in intimate relationships is often the focus of research that
draws on this perspective. Indeed, how men and women act in the pres-
ence of each other is a central part of the evidence that is mustered in sup-
port of this view. Even though we analyzed the attitudes of husbands and
wives, the second spouse in our sample answered without his or her part-
ner present. Yet both men and women continued to do gender, this time
not in front of their spouse but rather for the interviewer.16 This raises two
key points. To begin with, it shows the importance of recognizing that no
one is interviewed alone, as the interviewer is always present. Every inter-
view is itself a social setting and needs to be treated as such (Hertz, 1995;
Holstein & Gubrium, 1995). Moreover, it also reinforces the degree to
which gender relations of dominance in the family shape interactions out-
side of the family. Similar to the findings of Zvonkovic et al. (1996), hus-
bands largely continued to display their dominant status, whereas wives
displayed their subordinate status in the interview situation itself, even
without the constraint of the other spouse’s reactions. To paraphrase Rob-
ert and Helen Lynd’s remarks about jobs in Middletown (a fictitious
town), this is one more indication of the long arm of gender.
Our final implication concerns how our results bear on research in the
related area of marital power. Ever since Blood and Wolfe’s (1960) semi-

nal study of Detroit, Michigan, couples, research on marital power has

centered on conflicts over decision making as the primary indicator of
marital power (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Spitze, 1988). Yet a wife
who hears her husband’s interview and is then interviewed has the oppor-
tunity to agree or disagree with her husband’s known answer—without
him knowing whether she agrees or disagrees with him. In other words,
both men and women answering these questions after their spouses are in-
terviewed are not constrained by the possibility of marital conflict. Power
works in more subtle ways, and it is important for those scholars interested
in equality to explicitly build this understanding into their research
designs.
APPENDIX
Our gender-roles measure comes from nine different items (on a 5-point agree-
disagree scale) in a self-administered questionnaire: (a) “A preschool child is
likely to suffer if his or her mother works”; (b) “All in all, family life suffers when
the woman has a full-time job”; (c) “A woman and her family would all be happier
if she goes out to work”; (d) “Both the husband and wife should contribute to the
household income”; (e) “Having a full-time job is the best way for a woman to be
an independent person”; (f) “A husband’s job is to earn money, and a wife’s job is
to look after the home and family”; (g) “Children need a father to be as closely in-
volved in their upbringing as their mother is”; (h) “Employers should make special
arrangements to help mothers combine jobs and child care”; and (i) “A single par-
ent can bring up children as well as a couple can.” Agreement on gender roles is
measured as the number of times that husbands and wives agreed exactly on each
of the nine individual variables; the husband and wife gender ideology variables
are sums of each spouse’s individual responses to each of the nine items, with
higher scores indicating gender liberalism (Items 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 are reverse
coded).17 It is worth noting that both men and women are slightly liberal on these
gender-role items; across all nine measures, the mean for husbands was 3.11, with
the mean for women being 3.33 (3 is the neutral point in the scale).
NOTES
1. It is important to note that this also may be seen as a gender effect because gender
plays a role in structuring the perceived expertise of men and women on different issues.
2. For more information, see Taylor, 1998, or online at http://www.irc.essex.ac.uk/bhps/
index.php.

3. Similar to Zipp and Toth (2002), we restricted our analysis to White couples because
of the small number of non–Whites. There were also a number of couples with duplicate
identification numbers or who had missing data on one of the key variables; we eliminated
them from our subset.
4. We would like to make it clear that we are not contending that all political matters are
masculine domains. Clearly, on issues of militarism, welfare, and so forth, women hold
strong beliefs that may well shape the beliefs of their partners.
5. It is partly because of the link between occupations and values that most of the work
done by Kohn centers on fathers’ values (often labeled parental values). As Kohn (1969)
noted, women were reluctantly excluded from his initial U.S. survey “because of possible
differences between men and women in the meaning of job and occupation” (p. 237). In addi-
tion, even though fathers’ and mothers’ values have approximately the same impact on chil-
dren’s values (Kohn & Slomczynski, 1990), we are interested in the impact that spouses have
on each other, not on their children.
6. Our dependent variables came from three different sections of the survey, with inter-
viewers recording spousal presence at the end of each section. For instance, the economic lib-
eralism questions are in the section on values and opinions, whereas the health items are in a
section on medical care. Thus, spouse presence indicates that one’s partner attended a partic-
ular section, not necessarily the whole interview (correlations on attendance across sections
ranged from a modest .289 to a rather robust .715). It is important to note, however, that there
is no way to know if any spouse heard a particular question.
7. Spouses were most likely the third parties, with children and other adults present in
3% to 7% percent of interviews.
8. The presence of one spouse during his or her partner’s interview, but not the reverse,
raises the question of whether the interviewers did anything to create this unbalanced situa-
tion. British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) administrators, through personal communica-
tion (John Brice, June 5, 2003) have confirmed that, although interviewers never asked any-
one to leave the room, they did ask respondents to fill in the self-completion questionnaire at
the end of the interview. This, and perhaps respondents not wanting to hear the same ques-
tions again, may have lead many not to remain while their partner was being interviewed.
9. In only three valid cases were spouses interviewed at the same time.
10. For clarification, we are including three variables based on answers to the gender-role
items: husband gender ideology, wife gender ideology, and husband-wife agreement on gen-
der roles. The first two are sums of the responses to each of the nine items, with higher scores
indicating more liberal gender- role attitudes. The last measures the number of items on
which spouses agree. It is not surprising that there is a much stronger correlation between
husband and wife gender ideology (.455) than between spousal agreement on gender roles
and husband (.086) and wife (–.082) gender attitudes.
11. It is worth noting that, on both these dimensions, the figures were quite similar to
those for women in the United States.
12. There is one exception: For the educational differences models, we replaced hus-
band’s and wife’s educational qualifications with the one educational difference variable
(any two determine the third variable, so all three could not be in the model simultaneously).
13. Men had higher educational qualifications (5.8) than women (5.1).
14. These are reported in the first column. In the far right column, the interactions are with
educational differences, the husband interviewing first, and these same dependent variables.
We add more on this below.
15. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
16. The BHPS does not record the gender of the interviewers.

17. As Zipp and Toth (2002) pointed out, the BHPS does not provide any way of knowing
if either spouse was present when the other completed the self-administered questionnaire.
However, they noted that administrators of the BHPS told them that it was typical to have one
spouse fill out the self-administered questionnaire while the interview for the other was
starting.
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Wives, Husbands, and Hidden Power in Marriage

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Wives, Husbands, and

Keywords: gender; marital power; husbands; wives

A recurrent theme in scholarship on gender and the family is the asymme-

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a constitutive element of social structure and, as such, is closely tied to the

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men. By considering questions that have historically been in the province

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MEASURES AND METHOD

We are testing these claims regarding hidden power in marriage by

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MEN’S TRADITIONAL DOMAIN

Politics.4 We had several different types of political attitudes and be-

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WOMEN’S TRADITIONAL DOMAIN

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Stereotypical men’s items

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Respondent interviewed alone

Percentage Wife Interviewed First

Respondent interviewed alone (%) 57.6 58.2 58.8

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Widerberg, 1991). On some dimensions—politics and economics—

The first step in our analysis is to determine if the order in which

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Thus, what is important is the issue. The alternative explanation, doing

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Stereotypical men’s items

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Husband Present Wife Present at

Stereotypical women’s items

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As can be seen in Table 3, there is notable asymmetry in the results for

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Each of these represents a situation in which husbands might be ex-

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NOTE: NA = not appropriate.

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SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

Our primary purpose in this article was to determine if either spouse

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nal study of Detroit, Michigan, couples, research on marital power has

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