Couples, power and transitions

“Most importantly, institutions reveal and reproduce power relations within a society [...]”

(Cooke, 2011, 5).

Elder (1985) introduces the dimension of “interdependent lives” or linked lives in his ap-proach to life course theory. In addition to social conditions, the family network plays a crucial role for individual lives (Heinz, 1991, 18). Male and female life courses are interwo-ven (Born and Kr¨uger, 2001, 11). Within couples, the partners’ careers, levels of education, and lifestyles have effects on each other. Decisions about e.g. changing employment, starting formational training, staying in a full-time position, joining the neighboring tennis club, or getting involved in political work always have an impact on the other’s life. Hence not only transitions which both individuals experience, like marriage or childbirth, but also events in one partner’s life course, like unemployment, influence both lives. Furthermore, although transitions such as child birth are experienced by both partners, they might be experienced in different ways and might have different consequences for men’s and women’s responsibilities and opportunities.

Transitions have an effect on partners’ opportunity structures. Transitions change partners’

responsibilities, gender arrangements, and life course patterns. Childbirth, for instance, has

an effect on a woman’s professional life, on her responsibilities and on the partners’ ratio of resources. Before childbirth already, women stop working and interrupt their careers at least for a couple of months. Especially in the first few months after childbirth they are often pri-marily responsible for child care. During this period of time the main responsibility for the financial situation of the family shifts to the man. As transitions significantly affect the op-portunity structure of individuals and change the social context in which the couple lives, the partners are induced to negotiate their responsibilities, duties, and life course patterns. They have to make agreements about how to deal with the changes. Ferree (1990) emphasizes that

“changes in the opportunity structures in which life course patterns and social responsibilities are negotiated” influence gender arrangments (Heinz, 1991, 21). In the case of childbirth the partners have to bargain about the division of child care and, related to this, (re)negotiate other arrangements in the household, predominantly the division of housework. Furthermore, the partners have to agree upon the division of work in the labor market, e.g. if or when she will re-enter and whether he will take parental leave.

Since they change opportunity structures, transitions not only have an impact on partners’

gender arrangements, but also on their power relation. In her study, Gillespie (1971) analyzes the impact of life course events on power within intimate relationships (Gillespie, 1971, 456).

She shows that at the beginning of the marriage, power within the couple is distributed some-what equally. The most important event for the decline of the wife’s power is the birth of the first child. Her power decreases further as the number of children grows (Gillespie, 1971, 456). “Couples making the transition to parenthood are faced with new demands that chal-lenge the norms that regulate their day-to-day activities” (Johnson and Huston, 1998, 195).

Thus, parenthood is an event which highly changes partners’ life courses, and requires new arrangements and coordinations between partners (Johnson and Huston, 1998, 196). These might also change partners’ power allocations.

Even though Gillespie’s study from the beginning of the 1970s might be outdated by now, especially regarding changes in women’s participation in the labor market, children may still constitute a power disadvantage for women in Germany today, since states shape perceptions regarding gender and family, and state ideologies guide public policy (Treas and Widmer, 2000, 1415). We have already argued that the taxation system of the German welfare state supports non-working wives. The scarcity of day care centers further discourages women from re-entering the labor market after the birth of their first child. Hence childbirth contin-ues to be a traditionalizing factor in German couples. Children are therefore analyzed in the context of transitions and power in this study. However, childbirth will be only one of three transitions which will be considered in the empirical analysis. The other two transitions are marriage and changes in the partners’ relative employment status.

In addition to child birth, Vogler (1998) and Vogler et al. (2006), for Great Britain, and Lott (2009), for Germany, have shown that there are immense differences between married and cohabiting couples with regard to control over the income and decision-making. In Germany,

married women have less often decision-making power than their nonmarried counterparts. In the UK and Germany, cohabiting couples cooperate less often than married couples. However, these analysis are cross-sectional. We do not know whether marriage has any impact on the couple’s arrangements or whether self-selection processes take place, meaning that couples who have traditional arrangements in the first place are more likely to get married. In the lat-ter case, marriage itself would not change the power allocation within the couples. According to Berger and Kellner (1965), marriage can be perceived as an expression of the relationship between two individuals rather than as an event that changes the relationship. In their article the authors describe the construction of reality in marriages. Although the individual per-ceives her or his world in the same way as before marriage, reality changes significantly and becomes a symbiosis with the reality of the other. Spouses construct their world through dis-course within the relation, which is then a world on its own, in some ways independent from the world outside the relationship. Each partner has the impression to discover his- or herself in the relationship, and defines his or her identity and the mythology of the relationship. In or-der to stabilize their world, the partners surround themselves with individuals who live in the same way, i.e. with other couples. These theoretical assumptions, which Berger and Kellner (1965) have been applied only on marriages, can be extended to cohabitations. Since nowa-days most couples delay marriage and practise cohabitation as a so-called “trial marriage”, it can be assumed that the construction of reality takes place already before getting married. In this case marriage itself does not change the relationship but is just another expression of the social world of the partners. One aim of this study is to analyze whether differences between married and cohabiting couples are due to marriage.

While marriage and childbirth are events which affect the life courses of both partners, changes in employment status are limited initially to the individual life course. However, seen within the concept of linked lives formulated by Elder et al. (2003), the individual life course is not isolated from the lives of others. Life courses have to be considered as interdependently in-fluencing and changing each other. Thus, changes in one partners’ employment status also impact on the life course of the other partner, as well as on the relationship as a whole. Es-tablished gender arrangments such as power allocation may be challenged by changes in the distribution of the partners’ paid work in the labor market. Individuals can change to a lower or a higher employment status relative to the employment status of their partner. Accord-ing to rational choice theory, a higher employment status implies a higher social status and a higher income. In addition, work in the labor market provides acess to social networks and, hence, also includes alternative social relations. It can therefore be expected that changing to a lower employment status reduces an individual’s power – especially for men, since their gender identity is more related to paid work in the labor market than women’s gender identity.

The combination of rational choice and gender theories which has been developed earlier is also applied to the effect of changes in partners’ relative employment statuses and their power relation.

The previous sections have outlined a life course perspective on power in intimate relation-ships. They argued that transitions in particular have a significant impact on the life courses of individuals and may change partners’ power allocations. This section has explained that marriage, childbirth and changes in partners’ relative employment status may have an impact on power within couples. This study’s theoretical concept differentiates between power bases, power processes, and power outcomes (see Figure 1). Whereas rational choice theories, gen-der theory, and life course theories predominantly discuss power bases and power processes, the power outcomes of this study have been neglected so far. Therefore, the definition of the power outcomes will be explained in more detail in the following sections. In addition, the subjective character of the power outcomes measured in the SOEP andpairfamdata will be outlined.