ABSTRACT
It will be apparent from all the chapters in this book that marriage and marital relationships touch on many other aspects of social life, such as family and kinship, social class, employment and unemployment, housing, leisure and lifestyle, and in particular that marriage holds a place within wider debates about gender. It is surprising therefore that there have been relatively few studies in Britain which have focused specifically on the social construction of the marriage relationship, describing in detail the ways in which the intimate worlds of marriage connect with the more public territories of social structure. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Marriage can be a subject which makes sociologists uncomfortable: too much attention to it may be interpreted as being ‘pro-marriage’ in some ideological sense, or as being insensitive to the several ways in which marriage serves to disadvantage wives in favour of husbands. At the same time, the discipline, at least in its ‘malestream’ form, has not been particularly sensitive to ways of tapping into and exploring the internal worlds of marriage. Thoughts, feelings and emotions have tended to be off-limits to many social rescarehers, who have been either indifferent to them as a valid domain for enquiry or lacking in the appropriate skills to make the attempt. It has there only been since the mid-1970s that a number of studies have emerged which both focus on marriage and treat the accounts of husbands and wives as the primary source of data, paying special attention to the use of qualitative methods. In a comparatively short period of time, however, these studies have made a significant impact upon our understanding of marriage in British socicty, if only of mainly white groups within it.
