A debate still rages in social science research between two camps. One, represented by Gary Becker in his Economic Approach to Human Behavior, claims that wives do more housework because couples reason that “its good for everybody” if husbands focus on work, since they generally earn more. Womens greater work at home is thus part […]

I divided the fifty husbands I studied into three groups: those who shared the housework and child care (i. e., did 45 to 55 percent), those who did a moderate amount (30 to 45 percent), and those who did little (30 percent or less). Of all the traditional men, 22 percent shared, 44 percent did […]

Initially we contacted couples by distributing a short questionnaire on work and family life to every thirteenth name drawn from the personnel list of a large corporation. Fifty-three percent returned the questionnaire. At the end of this short questionnaire we explained what we were inter­ested in and asked if respondents would be willing to volunteer […]

Of the men we interviewed, the mean age was thirty-three, of the women, thirty-one. Forty-seven percent had one child, 38 percent had two, and 15 percent had three; no couple had more than three. As a whole, those we interviewed were disproportionately middle class. Twelve percent were blue-collar workers (craft workers, operatives, service workers), 17 […]

Anne Machung and I interviewed 145 people altogether, two-thirds of them several times over. We interviewed 100 husbands and wives (50 two — job couples) and 45 other people, including baby-sitters, day-care workers, schoolteachers, traditional couples with small children, and divorcdes who had been in two-job couples. I did the in-depth observations of 12 fami­lies, […]

When I read Gwendolyn Salisbury Hughes’s description of women factory workers in Philadelphia after World War I doing laundry and washing their front steps on Saturday mornings, I was reminded of the stories I was hearing from women over sixty years later. But in 1918, when Gwendolyn Hughes was collecting her information, no one would […]

Since the publication of The Second Shift, Greg Alston no longer plays scary jokes on his son Daryl to toughen him up. But the Liv­ingstons have separated and the Judsons have divorced. Cary Liv­ingston, now three, lives mainly with her mother, though her father wants desperately to remain involved. Ray Judson sees Erik and the […]

Brought to America by the tradition of the European Enlighten­ment, the belief in human progress easily fit the open American frontier, the expanding national and international economy, and the movements for racial and gender equality. Like most Ameri­cans over at least two centuries, most of the men and women I in­terviewed for this study said […]

As I drive from my office at the University of California, Berkeley, across the Oakland Bay Bridge to my home in San Francisco, I of­ten compare the couples I have been studying to the students I teach. Who will step into the biography of Nancy Holt? Who will be the new Nina Tanagawa? The Jessica […]

T he woman with the flying hair offers a picture of what it should be like to work and raise a family: busy, active, fun. But the female mannequin in the apron, wide-eyed and still, arms folded, peering outside my neighbor s bay window, a picture of the falsely present mother is often a more […]