Conjugal Power and Spousal Resources in Patriarchal Cultures

Current sociological theory regarding the antecedents of conjugal power suggests that resource theory can be successfully employed in the prediction and explanation of marital power distributions only in “transitional equalitarian” cultural systems. Anthropologists, however, have employed variations of resource theory in cultures which are clearly patriarchal, and have observed patterns of power distributions which conform to resource theory. In this study, a hypothesis derived from resource theory is tested on ethnographic data from a sample of 113 patriarchal cultures. The hypothesis is supported. Implications of this finding for the further development of explanatory theory with regard to conjugal power are explored.