Over the past few decades the proportion of those who live together without marriage has increased markedly, with the majority of all marriages now preceded by a period of cohabitation. Past research suggests that cohabitors have more egalitarian beliefs than those couples who marry without first living together. However, despite their relatively egalitarian attitudes, as a group, cohabiting women are disadvantaged in that they do much of the work expected of wives but receive few of the benefits that married women gain from their nuptials. Working class cohabiting women may be especially disadvantaged because they are more likely than middle class cohabiting women to be supporting children within their co-residential unions, to have relatively low incomes, and also to be in partnerships where the most traditionally gendered household burdens fall primarily upon their shoulders. While the middle class may be expected to behave in more egalitarian ways, it is unclear what might occur in a relationship if only one partner has completed a 4-year degree; the more educated partner in a “class straddling” relationship may be able to transfer his or her “liberalized” attitudes to the less educated partner.
Here, I use interviews with 61 cohabiting couples (26 working class, 27 middle class, and 8 “class straddling” couples) to draw conclusions about the class-based similarities and differences in gendered enactments of power through examining couples’
work orientations, financial arrangements and control, and divisions of household labor. I also explore how and why couples’ divisions of labor have changed or remained stable over time and the changes they anticipate undergoing in the future.
I find that cohabiting couples are doing gender in one of four primary ways. Some are replicating conventional divisions of labor in which the male partner pays the majority of the household bills, and, in exchange, his female partner often privileges his job or takes on a larger proportion of the domestic work. Among other couples, at least one partner (generally the female) is contesting a traditional division of labor, with middle class and class straddling women having more success than their working class counterparts at getting their partners to share fairly equally in the domestic and financial obligations. Still other couples have counter conventional arrangements in which the female partner pays the majority of the household expenses; this division particularly disadvantages working class and class straddling women who also do the majority of the household chores and who view their inequitable divisions of labor as relatively permanent. Finally, a few middle class couples are engaged in equalitarian exchanges characterized by an effortless egalitarianism. Results suggest that, despite the growing shares of cohabiting couples, few models exist for creating a division of labor that is somewhere between completely conventional and truly egalitarian. Instead, couples must often constantly negotiate their domestic and financial obligations to maintain a division that each partner feels is equitable enough to maintain their relationships