Accommodative and Influence-oriented Marriage Work

These examples of marriage work illustrate a clear trend in the reports: with the help of friends, women solved marital conflicts by capitulation or adaptation. They used strategies of assertion, manipulation, and resistance far less frequently. Even Rita, who enthusiastically described how Loretta concurred that her husband was a "son of a bitch," continued with an account of her friend's more pacifying advice. Loretta supported Rita's ultimate aim of relieving herself of anger, rather than honing it as a weapon for marital combat.

Only a few times, in fact, did any answers recount discussions with friends aimed at sharpening or focusing anger to sustain or win a conflict. The first was Nancy, who spoke appreciatively of how talks with Helen strengthened her determination to impress Mike that "I'm a person too": "There's times I do rebel. I'll say, 'I'm not going to do such and such because I've talked to my girlfriends

and we've agreed about it. They wouldn't do it either.' In talking to friends you can be reassured that you're right about things."

A second, more dramatic, account of close friends' reinforcing angry resistance was provided by Cass, who described how her family—who were her closest friends—helped her "throw out" her physically abusive husband:

I'd packed up and moved out and gone to their house a lot of times. . .. I wouldn't say they tried to talk me into feeling worse about him, because nobody could have felt worse about him than I did. But I knew they were in favor of getting rid of him.

One night he was ticked off about something and he went to bed. I went out for a bit, but when I got back he wasn't as asleep as I thought he was. He proceeded to go, Pow, pow, pow. I got my family; and my mother stuck a gun in him and told him to hit the road and he did. I was ready for him to go.

Although only a few women collaborated in angry resistance, others worked together in strategizing advantage and more subtle resistance to domination. Recall, for example, Karen's description of an unobtrusive power play that involved figuring out how to get David to cooperate with her plans: "I figure there may be an easier way to do this than arguments." She claimed her friends' cool-headed collective strategizing was often effective. Similarly, Janine described an occasion when Lily advised her to change her tactics to gain her husband's consent to a visit to faraway kin: "Lily said, 'Don't go getting into any more big hassles over it. Just wait a bit. He's not ready for it now. Go home and apologize. You'll be able to go.' So, I did that, and sure enough. . .." Recall also how, in the last chapter, Jean characterized the discussion among a group of close friends scheduling their next get-together—each previewing her bargaining strategy for getting an evening off.

In Louise's case, consulting with Jan yielded useful strategies for asserting her needs to her oftentimes domineering husband. Louise herself believed, though, that what empowered her to change a lot that was wrong in her marriage was the fact of having a close friend. "Gary's had to learn to make some compromises. Before Jan and I were friends, I did all the compromising. It seems like it's kind of switching right now." In the early years of marriage,

Louise maintained, Gary's jealousy impelled her to detach from independent friendships. He sustained friendships, though; and the couple socialized with his friends and their wives. Louise continued: "I think it benefited him all around. He'd never admit that he loved it that way, but it's the truth. I sat home and took care of the house and had the dinner ready and the wash done. I was on top of things because I didn't have anything else to do."

Now, with both the shared activity of her new friendship with Jan and the independent projects Jan encouraged Louise to begin, Louise is less the perfect housewife she once was: "He used to feel sorry for his friend who complained he never had any clean underwear. Now, he'll come around saying, 'How do you work the washing machine? There's no underwear in my drawer again.'" Gary responded to Louise's ardent new friendship with considerable resentment. But Jan's importance to her fortified Louise to "work on" rather than appease her husband's jealousy. She believed that she and Gary were now steadily working out a resolution of marriage problems on much improved terms for her.

Although Cass had no regrets at having dealt so forcefully with her abusive husband, the subtler and more manipulative marital strategizing was the preferred method for the others. Nancy, who recounted how friends help her firmly stand her ground, analyzed its ambivalent legacy:

Men, in general, will walk over you unless you stand up to them. In talking to women, you can be reassured you're fight to stand up. But it doesn't necessarily make things go smoothly. Friends can make you think a lot about the way things really are. But often you feel you're contradicting the way you've been brought up. You're not necessarily making your marriage work easier.

Nancy is forty, a housewife married to a hardworking small-businessman, and the mother of two teenagers. She described her husband as a "good friend" and her marriage as solid. Yet her marriage was more peaceable before she began to "think a lot about the way things really are." She and a few of her friends welcomed many of the egalitarian ideas that they had recently encountered and were at times exhilarated by their attempts to assert their own needs after many years of perceived self-sacrifice for family. But Nancy

and some others I spoke to were not of one mind about these new ideas about women. Reflecting upon the mix of assertion with older, deep-rooted values can be painfully confusing.

Perhaps more troubling to Nancy than conflict of values or guilt was the discovery that an assertive or conflictive stance could be perilous. Taking combative stances after confirmatory discussions with friends, Nancy and others found they provoked husbands' rage and triggered a level of conflict they had not anticipated. Sometimes they found themselves experiencing an anger for which old tactics of emotion work no longer felt legitimate.

Most friends still helped Nancy to empathize with Mike or told her to "try harder." Yet even the maternal neighbor to whom Nancy turned anticipating the most accommodative advice, didn't "reach" her the way she used to. Increasingly, Nancy refrained from undertaking the emotion work Hochschild calls the "generous . . . self-persuasion [of] deep acting" in which an individual invests energy in trying to serve another's interests more and better than one's own.^[6] Instead, she engaged in a more pragmatic overt adjustment. In this kind of collective marriage work, friends reminded each other how tough it is to survive outside the marriage, particularly for women of their age and their level of marketable skills. And then they used humor and "laugh[ed] at the ridiculousness of the whole thing."

This is marriage work, no doubt, and it is unquestionably accommodative. But it involves less profound emotion management than radical reframing does. Troubling vistas remain in the picture. By accommodating instrumentally, without renouncing either emotions or analysis of the situation, one challenges an authoritative ideology of wifely deference.

Seen in this light, emotion work (which reframes feeling and self-concept) shores up an ideology of female subordination, whereas lax emotion management (which rejects that strategy) challenges the ideology. The picture is the same, even when the outcome is accommodation.^[7] I discuss below how collective marriage work can use pragmatic accommodation to resist subordination in marriage. Nonetheless, it is obvious why Nancy cautioned, in the epilogue to this energetic account of how friends participate in assertive marriage work: you don't necessarily make marriage go more smoothly that way.

Nancy thus provides clues to why accommodation might characterize the more pervasive forms of marriage work. In contrast to assertive situation management, the self-focused strategies require only one's own commitment to change rather than a husband's. These accommodative strategies do not risk incurring the recalcitrance, hostility, or resentment of another person, as do the strategies of talking it out, manipulating, or battling. In fact, emotion work may resolve a problem without even arousing a spouse's suspicion that a problem exists. Even though capitulation or adaptation may require the expenditure of voluminous resources of will, intelligence, imagination, and energy, these are resources that the relatively powerless retain at their disposal (depending more or less upon their level of subjection). This use of resources may be costly to women, given the alternate uses of these resources; but when marriage work is a primary goal, such choices seem logical enough.

Many scholars have observed the superior "emotional skills" women acquire to compensate for the material power and social privilege of men—or, alternatively, to equilibrate family life by functional specialization.^[8] Their emotional skills include greater interpersonal observational acuity ("sensitivity"), faster interpersonal inductive calculation ("intuition"), more practiced indirect influence strategies ("feminine wiles," "maternal style"), and so on. Women may actively apply all of them to influencing others. Yet when the stakes are high—as they are in many marital conflicts— a woman may use more precise calculation of outcome and assume less risk by applying these skills to herself. Unlike outright and explicit capitulation, emotion work offers a reward beyond preserving marriage: a woman achieves an "improved" feeling about the situation, known in sociology of the family as "marital satisfaction."

In The Future of Marriage, Jessie Bernard summarizes several decades of family research to show, on the one hand, that women often perceive more marital problems than men do while both men and women report that wives make more marital adjustments and, on the other hand, that women nonetheless very often report themselves satisfied with their marriages.^[9] The concept of accommodative emotion work may help explain such findings, once we clarify the impetus to accommodate.

Can I rely on women's self-reports of accommodation? It is possible, of course, that women emphasized accommodative marriage work in their reports and deemphasized manipulative or combative strategies. Perhaps more aggressive marriage work is more stigmatized and thus underreported. But, given that women did not hesitate to report that they gossiped and shared stigmatized feelings—like jealousy—with friends, it seems probable that the accommodative bias does predominate.

All this may begin to explain why the twenty women who recalled changed attitudes or feelings about their husbands virtually all gave accommodative accounts. Responding to another set of questions, sixteen of twenty-one women could think of times friends specifically had "talked them into feeling better" about their husbands; encouraging empathy with or ennobling the husband were the predominant methods they reported. Nine could think of times when friends had "talked them into feeling worse" about their mates. But those who recalled negative persuasion said it had occurred rarely—far less often than positive strategies. Significantly, except for one woman who said that the friend who talked her into feeling worse about her husband "didn't really bother me" and another who said she liked it because "they are being supportive of my interests," the rest of the women uniformly disliked such negative exchanges.

It's never happened. I probably wouldn't tolerate it.

Sometimes Wanda is very negative about Hal. Like, "He'll never change," and, "Oh, what you're going through!" And she'll comment on some of the stupid things he'll do. It's true, you know, but she doesn't have to tell me. I really don't like her coming back at it, though, because she really doesn't know.

If there was anything she disapproved of, she never said so. She was very wise. She never interfered.

When Carol criticizes Tom for his gambling, I get a little angry: "How dare you? I never say anything about your husband." She just doesn't hold anything back. I don't like it, but I just tell myself she doesn't understand.

No, nobody ever tried it. She probably wouldn't be that close a friend if she did.

Several of the women just quoted had marital problems—a few, quite serious—that they talked about with their friends (the seven who replied that they had marital difficulties all discussed these problems with close friends). These women were especially likely to report that they found themselves defending mates they had just been complaining about.

I'll be complaining to Lily about Dwight being gone most of the time, out with the guys, and she'll say, "He shouldn't be leaving you alone so much.' I listen, but it just goes in one ear and out the other. I'd say I end up feeling more positive. Because she's telling me that and I'm defending him.

If anyone said anything against him, I'd say, "Well, it's not so bad." I might be really angry with him, but I'm real defensive as well.

Just before we got married, Marie would listen to my troubles and tell me I probably needed to find someone else. I didn't like that at all. When you complain to people, you really want them to find a solution for you. If they're negative, you start defending him.

Frances put it in classic terms: "I can call him a bastard, if I want to; but nobody else can."

The women who reported serious marriage problems and those who described their marriages as stable and untroubled all relied on friends to help build acceptance and optimism.

She makes me feel it's going to be all right. She reminds me that things take time.

If I'm down about him, they'd never down him too.

No more than "Stick it out. It'll blow over."

Sometimes I think she doesn't much care for him, but she's always encouraging.

They tell you you'll live through it, and you do.

A few times women reported feeling resentment that friends had not supported their assertiveness toward their husbands:

I think Margie has been uncomfortable with some of the changes in me. So, if I ever tell her about a conflict, she'll take his side. She's always afraid I'm going too far.

Paula took his side. Said I ought to stay home with the kids. She made me feel all the more guilty. I finally just quit the job. It was just too hard to defend it alone.

Rita and Kay are speaking above. Each believed she had changed in recent years, in ways some old friends could not understand or support. Both had enrolled in community college courses, seeking and finding new competencies in social and intellectual experiences. Both had explored ideas and opinions they had previously felt too timid to engage. They had also formed strong friendships with other "returning" women at school. Both of their closest friends were women they had met in school. For Rita and Kay and for other women I interviewed, the return to school meant disruptive shifts in marital power and sometimes long-lasting conflicts. (My sample reflects the educational opportunities that California's massive community college system has offered mature women; increasing numbers of working-class women have joined middle-class women in attending college classes.)

Like Nancy, whose "new ideas" questioning wifely submissiveness interfered with her typical practices of emotion work, Rita and Kay were less and less inclined to certain deferential forms of marriage work. They had acquired skills that translated into resources of marital power, and they had formed new friendship networks that circulated values favoring individual achievement and marital assertion as well as information about jobs and support for personal change. Rita and Kay could risk somewhat less deferential marriage work; they resented pressures from old friends to defer. Likewise, Thea's higher-income occupation and egalitarian ideals freed her to profess her dissatisfaction with friends' attempts to talk her into feeling less critical of her husband's faults; she could view friends' criticisms of him as supportive of her. Nevertheless, the accommodative balance of my responses reflects a sample that is not weighted toward the small privileged sector of American women.

Considering the moral rights and obligations of friendship, most women I spoke to felt a friend might appropriately criticize a friend's husband. Eighteen of twenty-one (and the same proportion of the married women) answered at least "Sometimes" to the question of whether friends had a right to do so. They believed in self-

restraint, though. The hypothetical situations they suggested as warranting criticism were ones in which the wife suffered physical or psychological abuse. These extreme circumstances are of course, the most likely to come to mind. But the women's answers also reflected a respect for the moral autonomy of their friends.

I'd ask myself, "How does she see it?" You don't have a right to create a situation that doesn't exist.

Unless it's something like abuse, I'd let her open the conversation.

If the situation was so extreme and the person was so blind, [I would say something]. I would hope I wouldn't otherwise, though. Really.

They advocated a nonjudgmental and uncoercive delivery of criticism, so that the friend who received it would maintain her integrity. "You've got to do it carefully, not judging, not telling her what to do." Another explained, "I might say, 'If it were me, I think I would. . ..'"

In sum, women talked about marriage problems with friends to be able to think aloud; to let off steam; to reassess their perceptions and dissatisfactions; to plan communication with spouses; to reestablish empathy and appreciation for spouses; to effect changes in their own behavior, attitudes, and emotions; and to figure out how to change their husbands. From the accounts I heard, it appears that these women used marriage work to solidify and reinforce their own commitments to their marriages far more than to change their marriages to satisfy their own needs and wants. In a number of different ways, they expressed a desire that friends help them "work things out" in their minds. Presumably, marriage work could have the opposite effect. Women could ask for, and receive support for, more uncompromising stances in marital conflicts. Even in a society whose dominant expectation of wives is accommodation, friendships could form countercultural resistance. My general observation and a few segments of my interviews indicate that they sometimes do.

Thus, as I discuss the character and impact of marriage work, I must not repeat the error of network theorists who causally link the structure of friendship patterns to the content of normative exchange. This kind of mistake appears, for example, in the work of Elizabeth Bott. In her pioneering study of family and social net-

work, Bott assumed the structure of a family's social network causes the marital role division, overlooking the variable practices a close-knit network might enforce in other circumstances (in an egalitarian kibbutz, for example).^[10] In order to explain why their marriage work with friends is predominantly accommodative, we must understand the circumstances under which women seek or consent to this particular normative exchange. Once we have analyzed the aims of their marriage work, we will be better positioned to appreciate the impact of its collective form.