Redefining the Marital Power Struggle through Relationship Skills: How US Marriage Education Programs Challenge and Reproduce Gender Inequality

In 2002, the United States federal government created the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a policy that has distributed almost $1 billion in welfare money to marriage education programs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in classes for a purposive sample of 20 government-approved marriage education programs and textual analysis of more than 3,000 pages of curricular materials, I analyze how U.S. healthy marriage policy addresses issues of gendered communication and power. This case reveals the limitations of what I call interpersonal gender interventions,'' which obscure how gendered ideologies and inequalities are often maintained through institutionalized practices and state action. Specifically, I argue that by focusing on negotiation, communication, and conflict-resolution strategiesor what marriage educators call relationship skillsat the interactional level, state-sponsored marriage education masks persistent institutionalized gender inequalities, namely, latent and hidden forms of marital power. More broadly, I use this case to reveal how interpersonal gender interventions will likely have limited utility if individuals learn to develop more gender-egalitarian beliefs in the absence of institutional changes that enable them to act on these values.