African-American Military Marriages: An Exploration of Gender in Relationships

Background and Purpose: The nature of military service supports the traditional structure of heterosexual marriages in which the service member’s job, typically the husband, determines the where the family will live, who must take care of the home and children and whose career aspirations must take a backseat to the needs of the family. However, comparative studies that examine racial differences have found that black families are typically more egalitarian than white families in regard to decision-making patterns.  Yet despite this characterization of African American marriages, the majority of black military couples in this study conforms to military structure and challenges that prevailing argument by subscribing to a more traditional patriarchal structure evident through decisions about childrearing, career progression and educational attainment.

Methods:  Forty joint and individual in-depth interviews were conducted with ten African-American active duty and retired military couples over the course of a year.  Five couples were dual-military marriages meaning both spouses were in the military at the time they got married.  Photo elicitation was incorporated during the initial joint interview.  Participants ranged between twenty-nine and fifty-nine years old and each couple had two to four children.  The length of marriage also varied widely from three years to thirty-seven years.  Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were imported into a qualitative data analysis software program (MAXQDA) and analyzed based on the principles of grounded theory.

Findings:  Since half of the couples interviewed had at one time been in dual-military marriages, the issues involved in this type of relationship emerged prominently in the interviews. One such issue is the choice of wives to separate from the military to preserve their relationship and meet the needs of their children.  Some spouses also have had to defer their educational goals because of the job-related responsibilities of their military husbands.  Finally, there were many similarities in how spouses viewed their roles in the relationship.  It was not uncommon to hear the phrase “head of the household” when each person described the involvement of the other spouse in managing the household, a perspective derived from their interpretation of Biblical scripture. 

Conclusion and Implications:  Similar to military couples studied in the current literature, the role of the wives presented in this study is deeply rooted in traditional gender expectations.  As with any relationship dynamic, there are underlying beliefs about gender that affected how decisions are made in the relationship. These qualitative data demonstrate how these expectations influenced both the mundane aspects of daily life and, even more significantly, major life decisions. However, while these traditional roles may be viewed by some women as outdated and even damaging to the progress of women, it is these clearly defined roles that many of the couples interviewed cited as a strength of their marriage and contributed to the stability of the relationship.   African American marriages are not immune to the influence of hierarchical military culture and it is important to present a nuanced view of these relationships, even if it challenges prevailing wisdom.