Taking a life-cycle approach to marital power relations, the paper
compares
the attitudes of married men close to retirement with those who are retired.
An
integrative model based on Resource Theory was designed to analyse the
effect of several variables on the husband's perceptions of power
relations:
perceived resources, attitudes toward gender roles, emotional commitment
to
his wife and anticipated dependence on her. The model was tested on a sample
of 348 Israeli men – 137 pre-retired and 211 retirees. Contrary to
expectations
of a decline in the retired husband's perceived power, no differences
were
found between the two groups except for a reported increase in social power
among the older group. Major differences were found, however, regarding
the
overall impact of variables: perceived economic resources had the strongest
explanatory power for pre-retired respondents, whereas it was psycho-social
factors (anticipated dependence on the wife for satisfaction of emotional
needs,
psychological resources, and emotional commitment to the wife) that best
explained variance among retirees. The increased dependence of retired
husbands on their wives' expressive resources seems to contradict
their reports
of greater social power, suggesting that their perceptions of marital power
relations may be coloured by feelings of status anxiety.