|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Study: Wives Happiest With Breadwinner Husbands NewsMax.com Wires A study of 5,000 couples found that a bread-winning husband, a stay-at-home wife and commitment to a lifelong union make for the happiest wives.
Add a sensitive man and you have marital bliss, the researchers found.
"Women seem to be looking for elements of the new and the old in their marriages," researcher W. Bradford Wilcox said. "On the one hand, they want a husband who is emotionally engaged, but they also want a husband who is a good provider."
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project, said the study is important because it answers the question, "What do women really want?" She views its findings as more post-Betty Friedan, the late feminist pioneer, rather than Phyllis Schlafly, the pro-family activist.
"What I see is not a return to old gender roles," Whitehead said in an interview Friday. "This is consistent with the way marriage is changing to reflect contemporary circumstances."
Story Continues Below
Wilcox and Steven Nock, sociologists at the University of Virginia, studied 5,000 married couples from the National Survey of Families and Households, conducted by the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and funded by the federal government and the Lilly Endowment.
The study, "What's Love Got to Do With It," will be published in the March issue of Social Forces, a journal of sociology. Key among its findings: women want men to express themselves emotionally but value their traditional role as the primary wage-earner. Even women who believe that men and women should earn income and share housework equally are happier in their marriages when their husbands earn the lion's share of income and when they do not work outside of the home, the study found. "Regardless of what married women say they believe about gender, they tend to have happier marriages when their husband is a good provider provided that he is also emotionally engaged," Wilcox said.
"I was very surprised to find that even egalitarian-minded women are happier when their marriages are organized along more gendered lines," Wilcox said. The study is not intended to proscribe a formula for a happy marriage. It doesn't, for example, deal with the husband's side of marital happiness. "There is a broad recognition even among feminists that women have a lot of choices these days, and that those choices are valuable and valid," Wilcox said Friday in a telephone interview from New York. Among the study's major findings:
"It is also possible that happily married wives let their husbands take the lead in breadwinning, while unhappy wives devote more attention to work because they worry about their marital future," Wilcox said.
"Conventional and academic wisdom now suggests that the best marriages are unions of equals," Nock said. "Our work suggests that the reality is more complicated. " The study measured happiness on a scale of 1 to 7, ranging from very unhappy to very happy. It did not include factors such as sex or income in its measure of happiness.
© 2006 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |