Becoming a Two-Job Family.
Hood, Jane Cushman
1980
Abstract
Thus far, most studies examining the impact of wives' employment on role sharing have used cross-sectional surveys taken at one point in time, or descriptive studies of professional couples. Although the concept of role bargaining has been used to explain how marital roles might change when wives enter the labor force, very little work has been done on the process of role bargaining itself. This research attempts to get beneath the survey results and document changes which took place in marital roles when 16 working and middle class wives with school aged children reentered the labor force in nonprofessional jobs. The final product is a theoretical framework for underst and ing the process of role renegotiation. The data were intensive tape-recorded interviews done over a one-year period with both husb and s and wives. They include both spouses' retrospective accounts of: (1) the division of labor and marital relationship before the wife's return to work, (2) the changes that followed, (3) how new arrangements were negotiated and (4) the couple's descriptions of their situation at the time of the last interview. A detailed analysis of these data yielded a system of empirically grounded categories. These, in turn, serve as building blocks for a theory which explains why some couples begin to share parenting and /or housekeeper roles after the wife returns to work while others do not. Before the wives returned to work, the 16 families differed with regard to: (1) the relative strength of the husb and -family, husb and -wife, and parent-child bonds, (2) the reasons for the wives' return to work (3) the husb and s' orientations to their work and (4) the husb and s' work/family priorities. These pre-existing differences both defined the terms of the original bargain husb and s and wives made when the wives first returned to work and shaped the subsequent bargaining process. It is argued that husb and s will assume additional responsibility for housework and parenting in exchange for their wives' market work only if they also relinquish to their wives part of the responsibility to provide. Thus, wives who are defined as co-providers are more likely to share roles with their husb and s than are those who are considered secondary providers. It is also argued that wives will be most likely to relinquish some of their responsibility for parenting and housework when: (1) they have a role overload, (2) have work schedules which conflict with child care and cooking schedules, and (3) have a strong work commitment. In this study, 12 of the 16 husb and s began to help more with either child care or housework or both after the wives returned to work. In addition, 13 couples developed a more symmetrical companionship. However, only 5 of 16 husb and s assumed responsibility for parenting and only 2 were actually sharing the responsibility for housekeeping at the time of the last interview. It is argued that job-oriented husb and s with young children and wives making 33% of the family income or more will be most likely to share roles, while career-oriented men with older children and wives making 25% less of the family income will be least likely to do so. The former are most likely to be working and lower-middle class couples while the latter will more often be upper-middle class. A number of testable propositions are derived from the theory developed in this study, and some criticisms are leveled at family policies based upon the assumption that all families are supported by one male provider.Types
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