Jennifer M. Randles

Shows how U.S. government-supported marriage education programs’ focus on interpersonal relationship skills reinforces the invisibility of latent and hidden forms of marital power and gender inequality.

Traces the goals and strategies of the U.S. marriage education movement and discusses how the focus on individual-level interventions has undermined the marriage promotion and poverty-prevention goals of marriage policy. 

Analyzes how low-income parents benefited most from relationship skills programs when class lessons normalized their relationship problems as shared challenges of parenting in poverty and minimized parents’ tendency to individualize relational and financial strain.

Theorizes marital masculinity by revealing how healthy marriage policy shapes ideas of successful fatherhood and paternal identity by teaching couples that marriage provides low-income men the greatest social incentive to become invested in a middle-class breadwinner ethic.

Discusses the challenges feminist ethnographers face when respondents’ perspectives clash with feminist theoretical explanations and political commitments.

Explains the logic and strategies of healthy marriage policy and why it fails to address the social and economic inequalities that often undermine individuals’ efforts to create stable intimate relationships, marriages, and families.