Relative Employment, Gender Beliefs, and Intimate Partner Coercion and Violence Against New Mothers Across Marital and Residential Contexts

Abstract

This research builds on prior studies of intimate partner victimization by examining the impact of women’s and men’s relative employment, gender traditionalism, and gender distrust on coercive control and physical victimization among married, cohabiting, and noncohabiting couples with infants. It merges feminist approaches that emphasize the gendered meaning of work, power, and violence with prior insights regarding differences in levels of intimate violence across family forms. Specifically, this research recognizes that there is variation across married, cohabiting, and dating contexts in the symbolic meaning of work, the salience of traditionalism, and the tenuous status of relationships that may activate gender distrust in the production of compensatory violence and control. Logistic regression models using baseline and Year 1 Fragile Families and Child Well-Being data ( n = 2,337) indicate that the predictors of coercive control differ across couple types, with the relative odds of coercion higher among couples in which only the woman is employed, but only when cohabiting. Consistent with expectations, men’s gender traditionalism increases coercive control, but only in the context of marriage. Relative employment and gender beliefs did not predict physical victimization among any couple types, but a moderating effect of men’s gender distrust on women’s sole employment was identified, such that status inconsistency in employment increases the relative odds of physical victimization only when the male partner is distrustful of women.