Women's Confidants Outside Marriage: Shared or Competing Sources of Intimacy?

Abstract

This paper is concerned with describing confidant relationships outside the marital relationship in a small sample of married women at the intensive stage of the family cycle. Such confidant relationships were by no means universal: only one third of the women in this study having at least one such relationship. In the context of an ideology which extols the couple as the locus of intimacy, such relationships can be seen as potentially threatening. In fact, such a view does not appear to be warranted. These relationships had very little to do with the level of intimacy in the marital relationship. Rather, they appeared to reflect the security of the respondents' base in the local community and their financial resources to create and maintain such relationships.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.