Kinkeeping and Friend Keeping Among Older Women: The Effect of Marriage

Based on interviews with widows and wives, this article analyzes the effects of marriage and widowhood on older women's help to kin and friends. Although married women provide more help to kin than do widows, most of these differences can be explained in terms of the greater material resources marriage provides. In contrast, even controlling for other social characteristics, widows spend more time and give more practical help, in particular, to more friends than do wives. In two senses, then, marriage privatizes women's help to others--it provides them with both the resources and opportunity to help those related, while it reduces help--both its breadth and intensity--to those not related.