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Changes in the nature of contemporary marriage have spurred a debate about the consequences of shifts to more egalitarian relationships, and public interest in the debate was aroused by a recent report by the Council on Contemporary Families (2008). While the report contained a variety of information, media attention focused on the claim that men who participated in housework 'got' more sex. To our knowledge, there is relatively little systematic or representative research that supports this claim, and, although there are a variety of theoretical reasons to expect that egalitarian marriages are higher quality, other research suggests the continued importance of traditional gender roles and gender display in marriage. Using data from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, we investigate the links between men's participation in core ("traditionally female") and non-core ("traditionally male") household tasks, gender ideology, and sexual frequency. We find that couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency, particularly when they also have conservative gender ideologies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article enlists social exchange theory to develop hypotheses about the consequences of the division of labor and other features of marriage for perceptions of fairness, and about how these perceptions in turn affect the likelihood of divorce. The idea that spouses differ in their tendency to base perceptions of fairness on comparisons of their situation with that of the marital partner vs. that of a generalized same-sex other, and that these propensities are conditional on the couple's breadwinning arrangement, found little support in the results. However, perceptions of fairness does not effect a couple's risk of divorce.

We examine whether the Great Recession of 2007-2010 has been unusually destabilizing for marriage by estimating the county-level effects of changing unemployment, household income, and property values on divorce filings in Washington State. We use detailed administrative data at the county level to differentiate between the dissolution filings of couples with and without dependent children. We use updated census estimates and other county-level data to test whether unemployment, income and wealth, and socio-demographic characteristics of the population affect the filing rates of both types of families. We find that, in general, unemployment is associated with filing rates for both types of families, especially for families with children during the recession. We provide evidence that family stability is susceptible to both economic and demographic change - though, not always in the predicted directions. In addition, the direction, magnitude and significance of many of the effects vary depending on the presence of children in the household. Finally, our results suggest that some of the county-level effects are conditioned on the macro-economic context of the periods examined. We conclude that family relations and decision-making does not occur in a vacuum, and divorce might be better understood in the larger economic and social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]