Family Ways

Nick Gillespie from the October 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

She Works/He Works is interesting for two basic reasons. First, it explores some of the adaptive functions of changing family structures. Drawing on a National Institutes of Mental Health-sponsored study conducted by Barnett, the authors suggest that "the dual-earner family offers economic stability, protection against financial disaster, and often offers both adults and children a close-knit cooperative family style in which all members take an active part in keeping the household running."

They argue that the "collaborative" style--in which spouses share household tasks and responsibilities--common in two-earner households might lead to increased interdependence, not fragmentation. (One sign of this is the steady increase in traditionally female household duties performed by men.) While such claims have a ring of truth, they remain highly arguable, especially when it comes to divorce.

Barnett and Rivers present a convincing rebuttal to Mack's claim that women don't really want to work and that parents "say that...pressures on women to work are killing family life." For instance, research from a variety of sources, including a national longitudinal study, shows mothers who work outside the home report better physical and emotional health than their nonemployed counterparts. Apparently, such gains do not come at the expense of children. A meta-analysis of 14 studies of maternal bonding in children attending day care (the normal situation, one assumes, for kids with working mothers) and children reared at home found no difference between the two groups. As interesting, studies consistently show that working mothers spend as much time as their nonworking counterparts in direct interaction with their kids.

The second notable aspect of She Works/He Works is its refusal to indulge in even implicit utopianism about the family. Barnett and Rivers constantly chart the success of their "new family" in relative, realistic measures. "No family style plays out on one vast plain of joy and light," they write. "No lifestyle offers nirvana." Such realism is particularly welcome, and it extends to their discussion of larger social and economic forces affecting the family. Although the authors are clearly conventional liberals, they seem very much at home in a world characterized by creative destruction: "Change is the way of the world; it is in the nature of things for the old ways to die and the new to be born." Even as they call on "the corporate culture" to accommodate two-income families, they acknowledge change is already under way.

Where The Divorce Culture and The Assault on Parenthood see in social change only the end of something, She Works/He Works charts a more interesting and ultimately more relevant path: how social institutions change, evolve, and grow over time to meet the needs of the individuals who make them up. As any number of technologies--including those affecting work, home, fertility, and health--proliferate and give people more and more choices in how to structure their family lives, recognizing and understanding that process will become all the more important.

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