Hsiu-Chu Tung
Department of Social Work Taipei City Psychiatric Center
Lien-Chien Yang
Department of Psychiatry ,Taipei City Psychiatric Center
Wan-I Lin
Department of Social Work National Taiwan University
Based on information involving 4 couples for whom wives earned more than their husbands and wanted their partners to make changes, this article analyzed how the normative gender ideology and economic resources co-operate in and shape the marital power.
We found wives could exercise more power only when husbands wanted economic help from them. Spouses often demonstrated a joint effort to ensure the unconventional did not feel too unconventional. The costs of being perceived as deviant from the gender-norm were minimized by gender strategies. Gender ideology and gender strategies which neutralizing deviance usually made wives more disadvantaged. This article also demonstrated what Komter called the hidden power in marriage and highlighted how these couples used gender strategies in ways that reinforced the husband’s power. And we found that these resources were gendered sufficiently so that they were less important or less powerful when contributed by wives.
Keywords：gender ideology, gender strategy, economic resources, marital power