The experiences, challenges and coping resources of working wives and stay-at-home husbands : a social work perspective

Abstract

The transition from traditional to non-traditional marital roles was brought about by changes in the political, social and economic spheres. Within this transition, a new family arrangement has emerged in which traditional marital roles of breadwinning husband and care-giving, nurturer-wife are replaced by a breadwinning wife and a care-giving, nurturer-husband, the so-called stay-at-home husband. Various factors contributed and necessitated this change in marital roles, such as, but not limited to, the feminist movement, the economic recession, changes in legislation, retrenchments and so forth. However, making this transition is not easy. These couples, fulfilling non-traditional marital roles, are faced with stigmatisation and negative attitudes that make them want to conceal their marital roles from family, friends, the community and society as a whole. This state of affairs results in a situation where these couples stay in the closet and as consequence the topic is ill-researched and ripe for further investigation. Using a qualitative, phenomenological approach, this study explored and described the challenges, experiences and coping resources of couples fulfilling non-traditional marital roles in order to propose practice guidelines to support these couples from a social work perspective. A total of ten couples participated in the study. Independently, the working wives and stay-at-home husbands provided separate accounts of realities related to fulfilling the non-traditional marital roles within their respective marital relationships. Themes that emerged from the in-depth description of their experiences reflected the benefits accrued, the challenges experienced, their needs and coping resources. From the information provided suggestions were derived for social workers to assist couples in a similar working wife and stay-at-home husband marriage set-up to deal with situations encountered. In consulting extant literature, research on this phenomenon appeared to be totally neglected both internationally and nationally. Hence this study sought to address this lacuna by specifically investigating the situation in South Africa. It also appeared that existing research tended to focus on either the stay-at-home mother or the dual career family. Research on the experiences of stay-at-home husbands was thus severely lacking as were ways in which such couples in these roles could be supported. Therefore, making use of the ecological and role theory perspectives, attention is given to exposing their experiences, challenges and coping resources with a view to developing practice guidelines for helping social work practitioners to adequately support these couples practising non-traditional marital roles.