What Do They Mean by Egalitarian? How Different-Sex Couples Make Sense of Gender Equality in their Relationships
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- March 2, 2021
- Creator
-
Martínez Echagüe, Inés
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Sociology
- Abstract
- Nowadays, most young men and women in the US want to have egalitarian relationships but they rarely achieve them. The problem is that we do not know what they really mean by egalitarian to begin with. In this paper, I analyze how men and women in different-sex couples define egalitarian relationships. I draw from 40 interviews with members of 20 different-sex couples and original survey data from 2018. I find that, despite most research defining an egalitarian relationship as one in which paid and unpaid work is divided 50/50, this is often considered too strict. Thus, many couples redefine egalitarian relationships in a more flexible way, according to which partners are free to choose which roles to enact. Since an egalitarian relationship requires labor, which often falls to women’s responsibilities, many couples “solve” the cognitive dissonance between their expectations and their reality by redefining what egalitarian means to them.
- Date of publication
- 2020
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Advisor
- Weisshaar, Katherine
- Tyson, Karolyn
- Jenkins, Tania M.
- Degree
- Master of Arts
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2020
- Language
Relations
- Parents:
This work has no parents.
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