‘Under the Wife's Feet’: Renegotiating Gender Divisions in Early Retirement

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Abstract
There has rightly been much recent sociological concern with the effects of recession and the restructuring of the economy on family relationships. One important aspect of recent economic changes has been the pressure on older people to leave the workforce before the age of conventional retirement. Male early retirement has been a significant factor in accounting for the dramatic fall in the economic participation rates of older male workers over the last decade. Yet early retirement has been a relatively neglected topic in social scientific literature. Studies of unemployed and redundant males have tended to suggest that there is little renegotiating of the domestic division of labour within the home due to the ways in which traditional notions of masculine identity are called upon to protect the position of the unemployed male. This paper reports findings relating to these issues from a study of men from West Yorkshire who had taken early retirement from the local chemical industry. These findings suggest considerably more renegotiation than studies of unemployed and redundant males but neither the amount or type of such renegotiation seemed to be related to either marital disharmony or quality of life in retirement.

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