Marital conflict and men's leisure: how women negotiate male power in a small mining community

Abstract

Against a background of unequal power relationships between men and women, and utilising Lukes' three dimensions of power, this paper examines how the wives of shift workers in a small mining town deal with the conflicts that arise over their male part ners' use of leisure time. It looks at the range of influence strategies women use to actively negotiate men's manifest power and the coping strategies/forms of resistance which they fall back on when these strategies fail, or when men's latent or hidden power prevents any overt challenge. The data suggest that women not only use a wide range of influence strategies with varying degrees of success, but that they are creative and resilient in finding alternative ways to resist the structures of male power. However, the outcomes of their agency at an individual level are limited by the social, economic and ideological structures of male power at the community level.