O ne out of five men in this study were as actively involved in the home as their wives—some were like Greg Alston, work­ing the same hours as their wives but sharing in a more t(male” way, doing such things as carpentry; others, like Art Winfield, shared the cooking and being a primary parent. In […]

Over the last thirty years in the United States, more women have gone out to work, and more have divorced. According to the so­ciologist William Goode, working women have a higher divorce rate than housewives in the former Soviet Union, Germany, Swe­den, and France. Indeed, in France, working women have twice the divorce rate of […]

Couples who are not affected by the first two sources of tension can still be vulnerable to a third—the assimilation of women to the values of the dominant male culture. I have focused a great deal on how much working fathers have been able to cross the “gender divide” and pitch in with work their […]

Even if this first tension between faster-changing women and slower-changing men is resolved, a second one may remain. There were families like the Delacortes whose ideas were “behind the times” in the sense that their ideals were more suited to the eco­nomic realities of the past. Both agreed on what each should do at home, […]

Two-thirds of couples in this study, most of them married for seven to ten years, shared a gender ideology. Two-thirds were both traditional, both transitional, or both egalitarian. But a third of the couples I talked to had important differences of feeling—espe­cially about who should do how much work at home. (And note that couples […]

T he two-job marriages I came to know seemed vulnerable to three types of tension. One tension was between the hus­band s idea of what he and his wife should do at home and work, and his wife’s idea about that. This was the tension between cou­ples whose gender strategies clashed—as did those of the […]

Many men seemed to alternate between periods of cooperation and resistance. When they were resisting, they often did tasks in a distracted way, dissociating themselves from the domestic act at hand. In this manner, Evan Holt forgot the grocery list, burned the rice, didn’t know where the broiler pan was. Such men with­drew their mental […]

Some 20 percent of men expressed the genuine desire to share the load at home, and did. A few men expressed the genuine desire to share but were prevented from doing it because their wives “took over” at home. As a teacher, and mother of two, put it, “My hus­band does all the baking. Heti […]

In part, mens strategies parallel womens, and in part they differ. Some men are superdads, the full or near equivalent to super — moms—John Livingston, for example. When their children were young, other men cut back their emotional commitment or hours at work—like Michael Sherman and Art Winfield. Many men let the house go more, […]

A less disturbing strategy, and one compatible with any other, is seeking outside help. Some couples who could afford to hired a housekeeper. When they could, working-class women called on their mother, mother-in-law, or other female relatives for child­care though in many cases these women worked as well. Surpris­ingly few parents in this study called […]