Resources and decision-making in households

Question 1

What do Barrett and McIntosh (1991) note?

Answer 1

• Men gain far more from women’s domestic work than they give back in financial support
• The financial support that husbands give to their wives is often unpredictable and comes with ‘strings’ attached
• Men usually make the decisions about spending on important items

Question 2

What did Kempson (1994) find among low income families?

Answer 2

• Women denied their own needs, seldom went out, ate smaller portions of food or skipped meals all together to make ends meet

Question 3

What are the 2 main types of control over family income identified by the feminists Pahl and Vogler (1993)?

Answer 3

1. The allowance system
   - Men give their wives an allowance out of which they have to budget to meet the family’s needs, with the man retaining any surplus for himself
2. Pooling (now the most common money management system)
   - Where both partners have access to income and joint responsibility for expenditure; for example, a joint bank account

Question 4

What did Hardill find in her study of 30 dual-career professionnal couples?

Answer 4

• The important decisions were usually taken wither by the man alone or jointly
• The man’s career normally took priority when deciding whether to move house for a new job

Question 5

Similar to Hardill, what did Edgell’s (1980) study of professional couples find?

Answer 5

1. Very important decisions
   - Include those involving finance, moving house…
   - Taken by the husband alone or taken jointly but with the husband having the final say
2. Important decisions
   - Include those about children’s education, where to go on holiday…
   - Usually taken jointly and seldom by the wife alone
3. Less important decisions
   - Such as choice of home decor, children’s clothes, food purchases…
   - Usually made by the wife
   - Edgell argues that the reason men are likely to take the decisions is as they earn more

Question 6

What is the evidence of a limited move towards greater equality in financial decision-making?

Answer 6

• Laurie and Gershuny (2000): found that by 1995, 70% of couples said they had an equal say in decisions

Question 7

Why do we need to understand the meaning of money for couples?

Answer 7

• Nyman (2003): money has no automatic, fixed or natural meaning and different couples can define it in different ways

Question 8

What is the ‘personal life’ perspective on money?

Answer 8

• It focuses on the meanings couples give to who controls the money
• For example, while we might assume that one partner controlling the money is a sign of inequality in the relationship, for some couples it may not have this meaning
• Smart (2007): some gay men and lesbians attached no importance to who controlled the money
• Weeks et al (2001): the typical pattern was pooling some money for household spending, together with separate accounts for personal spending. This reflects ‘co-independence’
• Smart: there is greater freedom for same-sex couples to do what suits them as they don’t enter relationships with the same historical, gendered, heterosexual baggage of cultural meanings about money