Karla B. Hackstaff How Gender Informs Marital Fragility (summary) In her article, Hackstaff looks at how the unreflected sociocultural framework of gender continues to undermine heterosexual marital relationships. This is best uncovered, she argues, by examining the way in which we construct gender and gender roles in society, a fact not usually taken into account in sociological studies on marriage. The research this article is based on compares couples married in the 1950s to couples married in the 1970s. The difference between the two is that there has been a change in mentality from a dominant marriage culture – one that sees marriage as inevitable and enduring, and that shuns divorce – to a divorce culture – one that sees marriage as optional and contingent, and divorce as a viable gateway to other options. While some critics believe that increased individualism is a factor in the high divorce rate, the author believes that a careful analysis of gender's role will reveal that the traditional family ideal makes allowance for male individualism while expecting female altruism and subordination. In modern family roles the wife adopts standard (male) attitudes of individualism that claim to be gender-neutral but which have merely veiled underlying concepts of traditional gender roles. In order to be socially equitable these roles must be reconstructed and not simply assumed. While the availability of divorce may seem to weaken the marital commitment, in the long term its role in the egalitarian redefinition of marriage, shining light on the gendered expectations and interactions that inform social reality, may serve to reinforce personal commitment to marriage. Hackstaff details one case study that reveals a couple's adoption of modern egalitarian language while blindly continuing to live according to traditional gender roles. Gender and the exercise of power – the manifest, latent, and especially hidden exercise of power – are an invisible yet central motor of the micro-dynamics of a relationship. Left unaddressed, even the economic and emotional distress of divorce come to be seen as a less painful alternative. If, as research documents, what women want "is not power but the absence of domination", then a first step to overcoming the divorce culture will be to recognize the vestiges of traditional gender roles that remain active in modern relationships.