Susan Walzer

Accounting for Divorce: Gender and Uncoupling Narratives

Past research about uncoupling processes has focused on the differing narratives people offer to explain the end of their marriages, depending on whether or not they perceive themselves to have initiated the ending. This article extends previous work by adding gender to the analysis, exploring intersections between accounts of divorce and accountability to cultural assumptions related to gender. In this inductive study, we examine qualitative interview data—particularly discrepancies in the narratives of some men and women—and suggest that gender mediates how people talk about the process of uncoupling as well as their motives for divorce.

Redoing gender through divorce

Much theoretical and empirical scholarship suggests that in heterosexual marriage, norms for work and love are differentiated by gender. Grounded in an inductive analysis of archival interview data from the 1980s, this article suggests that gendered processes, relatively unrecognized as married people enact them day to day, are identified and revised in retrospective accounts of divorced people. I describe four areas of gender differentiation institutionalized in marriage — breadwinning, housework, parenting, and emotional expression — and offer the concept of “redoing” gender to capture the process of repudiating previous forms of gender accountability. If marriage is a site for “doing” gender, for some people, divorce generates “redoing” in the sense that they change their expectations for masculine and feminine behavior in families.

Managing Conflict After Marriages End: A Qualitative Study of Narratives of Ex-Spouses

This paper addresses the dilemma of how formerly married couples negotiate their ongoing relationships. Drawing on interview data collected from divorced people, we explore various ways in which the stories that people tell about their marriages retrospectively relate to the management of interpersonal conflict. Along with examining intersections between postmarital narratives and experiences of conflict, we describe social obstacles to positive postmarital redefinition that emerge in divorced peoples accounts. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for clinical work.