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Breaking the Work/Family Deadlock
Stephanie Coontz, professor of history at The Evergreen State College and author of “A Strange Stirring.”
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An interview with Stephanie Coontz, professor of history at The Evergreen State College and author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.
KATHERINE BELL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Katherine Bell. I’m on the phone today with Stephanie Coontz, professor of history at the Evergreen State College, and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. Her latest book is A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. Hi, Stephanie. Thanks for joining us today.
STEPHANIE COONTZ: Oh, my pleasure.
KATHERINE BELL: So to get us started, could you give us a quick overview of how the mass entry of women into the paid workforce has changed marriage and the family?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, it’s changed it in very complex and contradictory ways. And I have to say that, having just finished a study of women in the 1960s, for all the pressures that we feel adjusting to this very new situation of dual-earner families, I have to say that it was a lot worse and a lot more pressure when men and women didn’t have to balance work and family, when women were penalized if they tried to, or forbidden from doing so, and when men were stigmatized if they tried to do so. So I think it’s important to take a deep breath and say, yes, we have real issues facing us today, but it’s better to have those choices than not.
But in terms of how it has impacted the family, when women first entered the workforce, liberals and feminists don’t like to admit this, but it did destabilize marriage. And of course, it’s no wonder it destabilized marriage, since marriage in the 1950s was structured around women’s complete economic dependence on men. And if you read the marital advice books of the day, it was considered a woman’s responsibility to keep the marriage going no matter what adjustments she had to make. If she complained that her husband was unfaithful, the therapist often asked what she had done to provoke it. The same thing with domestic violence.
So once women began to enter the workforce, just as economists had predicted, their increasing economic independence gave them the option not to marry at all, or to leave a marriage they found unsatisfactory. And divorce rates rose very sharply in the ’70s, as women got the economic opportunity to work outside the home, and as men and women began to argue over a division of labor at home that had been predicated on the idea that women would do all of the work. And now women were doing part of the income-earning.
But here’s the amazing thing, that although it’s true that that was the initial affect, over the last few years that has completely adopted. Although initially divorce rates rose as more wives went to work, that trend reversed after the mid 1980s. Now the divorce rate has been falling from a peak of 22.8 per 1,000 couples in 1979 to 16.7 per 1,000 couples today.
And the interesting thing is that the couples least likely to divorce are the ones most likely to endorse equal participation in breadwinning and childcare. It used to be in the 1960s if a woman took a job, that destabilized the marriage. Now it stabilizes the marriage. It used to be that when women entered the workforce in any particular state, you saw a rise in divorce. Today the lowest divorce rates are found in the states with the highest proportion of working wives.
So there have been lots of strains in adjusting to these changes, and there continue to be lots of strains as, essentially, we live in a work environment where two people are supposed to hold down three full-time jobs, two at work and one at home, and share them in a 24-hour day. Nevertheless, it seems to me that I think you could make a very good case that women’s entry into the workforce has been good– good for family, good for women, good for marriage, and good for children.
KATHERINE BELL: So most of what you’ve been talking about there in terms of the data has been in the US. How has that varied around the world?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, it varies in a very interesting way around the world. And that is that countries around the world have adopted and adjusted to women’s entry into the workplace, into the new demands for equality, in very different ways. The higher the degree of social inequality between men and women, the higher the chance there is that when a woman gets economic independence, that that will destabilize marriage, it will decrease fertility, and it will increase divorce rates, or it will increase the chance that the woman doesn’t marry at all. But in those countries that have gone further in accepting the equality of women, again, we are seeing that there is a stabilizing effect.
Now let me modify that. There is a stabilizing effect for middle-class couples. For those people who are in a position to earn enough income that they can establish a fairly stable living situation, I think the entry of women in the workforce has on the whole been a huge gain. But it has been a problem for low-income couples, and as you know, there has been a tremendous increase in economic inequality over the past 30 years.
Increasingly, young women in low-income communities have to balance the idea that they may be marrying somebody who will be a drag on them, rather than a support for them. Back in 1970, women earned so little that even marrying a high school dropout meant an increase in women’s economic security. Today, however, with male unemployment rates rising, low-income men and women face really difficult choices, and we’re seeing a fall in marriage in low-income communities and increased effects of economic stress on marital distress. And we’re also seeing not the same lowering of divorce rates in those communities. So there’s a lot of stress there.
KATHERINE BELL: You’ve said that when one imbalance is addressed, others are inevitably introduced. And that sounds like one of them, what you were just mentioning. What are some of the other new imbalances caused by women’s changing roles?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, one of the most obvious is one that I found when I was researching my last book. I interviewed almost 200 women and men who had read The Feminine Mystique back in 1963. And I did a lot of oral histories of women who’d been in marriages back in the days when women who wanted to work faced “help wanted female” ads. They were paid so much less that it took a college-educated woman four years of college working full-time to earn less than the average white male high school dropout. And middle-class women in particular were stigmatized if they wanted to work before their kids were grown. And these women– it is hard for modern people to understand just how insecure, how depressed, how a low the self-esteem was of these stay-at-home moms in those days.
Well, now that women have the opportunity to enter the workforce, we’re seeing a lot of benefits not just for working moms but for stay-at-home moms who have really benefited from the same things. They have benefited from the increased pressures on men to do housework. So women in general are much better off in terms of their sense of self-confidence and self-esteem.
On the other hand, they have faced the opposite problem of too little choice. And that is the problem of too many choices, too many pressures to be doing too many things at once. And interestingly enough, we’re finding the same thing with men, that nowadays men actually report higher levels of work/family conflict than women, in large part because they have finally begun to internalize the sense that they ought to be good partners and fathers, and they ought to be much more active at home.
That’s a good thing. It corrected an old imbalance. When men who wanted to do housework at home– this is a direct quote from a sociologist of the late 1950s– were to be suspected, he said, of having a little too much fat on the inner thigh. So it’s great that men are now expected and expecting themselves to participate at home. But again, the new imbalance is that we have a workplace that is constructed on the assumption that every employee will have a full-time person at home to take care of life, that every child will have somebody at home to take care. In fact, today, 70% of American children grow up in households where every adult in the household has to work.
KATHERINE BELL: So those pressures you’re talking about, for both women and men, are feeling increasingly impossible for people, especially in the economy we have right now. So it’s a huge systemic problem. What do you think the first step should be towards improving the situation for people?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, other countries in the world have managed to figure this out. That’s why Americans report higher work/family stress than any of our Western European or Scandinavian neighbors. And it’s not in the interests of employers or employees to have these rigid work policies.
There was a poll taken some years ago of union workers, and they said that it was easy to call in sick for a day than it was to ask for two hours off to attend a student/teacher conference. We also find that turnover rates customarily are much higher in companies that do not provide family-friendly work policies and in societies that do not mandate such policies. And of course, customer service and worker loyalty is greatly affected by the extent to which they feel that there is an inflexibility in their ability to balance, to juggle, or to just even combine work and family.
KATHERINE BELL: And based on the research you’ve done, what would be your advice to individual working men and women on how they could better arrange their own family lives and working lives to make things easier?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, it always depends upon the family situation. In some families, for example in professional families who are really burdened by overwork– you know, it’s ironic. We used to talk about banker’s hours. The good jobs in America used to be the jobs where people worked the fewest hours. Now, of course, the good jobs in America are those where workers face the longest hours. So that group of workers has a different kind of problem. How do you balance family life when both of you are being asked to work more than 50 hours a week, for example? And we find that, in fact, one of the highest predictors of a woman dropping out is not so much having a baby per se, but how many work hours her husband has.
So for this kind of couples, I think that you have to really think about how much money you want to earn versus how much you want to perhaps find jobs that allow both couples some flexibility in this. The tempting thing, of course, the easiest fallback position, given our history of gender relations, is for women to drop back. But there are some good arguments against that, and in fact, making the extra effort to have the man cut back as well or cut back even more.
First of all, men whose wives work longer hours tend to have much higher parental knowledge of their kids, which is very important in raising, especially as the kids go into teenage-hood, whereas women don’t lose that parental knowledge when they’re working long hours. We also find that when Ellen Galinsky asked children what they wanted most from their working parents, working parents expected that the kids’ answer would be that they wanted more time. But that was not the main answer. When did want more time, it was with Dad, not with Mom. Mostly they wanted their parents to feel guilty and stressed.
So I think it’s important for couples to really think through their job options, to not accept the kind of speedup– we’ve had a speedup not only of work life in America but of parenting expectations. And I think that we need to resist this. There’s a kind of arms race. Let’s see how early you can get your kid into the most competitive preschool and spend as much time as you can chauffeuring them, running from one activity to another. It turns out that that’s not really necessary for kids. So I think it’s important to sit back.
I think it’s very important for couples to take care of their relationship. One of the best predictors of how you parent and how well your kid turns out is how strong the couple relationship. And unfortunately, couples in America have taken so seriously their expanded ideals of full-time parenting that they’ve cut back on their time together and their time socializing with other couples. And I know that seems like it’s the easiest thing to go, but it’s actually one of the best predictors of happiness. When we look at happiness studies, we find two very big predictors of happiness among couples.
One is having sex, so maybe instead of staying home with the family, you should send the kids out somewhere else for an evening. The other is socializing with other people. So again, maybe instead of staying home with the family, you should get a baby sitter, and don’t make it a date night, make it a double date night. Those are things that individuals can do. But employers and government have some responsibility here too.
KATHERINE BELL: So we’ve talked about some of the enormous improvements for working women in the last 40 years, but the wage gap between men and women still persists.
STEPHANIE COONTZ: It does. It persists in a different way than it did back in 1970, when race and gender was a much bigger determinant of how much you got paid than either your talent or your education. Today, education outweighs race and gender. And in fact, we know that in many metropolitan areas, women in their 20s and early 30s actually out-earn men, because they tend to have more education. So the wage gap today tends to kick in at parenthood, rather than just on the basis of gender per se.
Of course, it’s connected to gender, because the assumption is that women are the default parents. They’re the ones who will cut back on work, change their jobs, reduce their hours, take less challenging jobs, if the family needs it. And that’s another good reason to push back a little bit against that assumption in your life, because women, once they start that, fall behind in ways that they can never catch up on. And if they do drop out, when they want back in, they’re less likely to be able to get the kind of jobs that offer family flexibility. So I think that’s a very important consideration.
I think that we live increasingly in a society where it’s family obligations, rather than gender, that is the first line of discrimination and disadvantage for working people, because it’s not just, of course, parents who have family obligations. 25% of all workers are giving some care to an aging parent, and half of them expect to do so within the next five years. And yet our economy, our health care system, and our work policies really penalize people for that and make it very difficult to combine. And unfortunately, then, what happens is that it’s women who tend to do the caregiving, and women whose wage gap multiplies each year once they start doing that.
KATHERINE BELL: Right. So we’ve talked a bit about how men are taking on more family responsibilities and more of the family stress. Are there other ways in which we should be worried about men specifically, based on all these changes that have been going on?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, I think that men in some ways are caught in a real bind, very similar to that that was described by Betty Friedan back in 1963 for women, the feminine mystique. At that time, the feminine mystique was that to be a woman you can’t be good at anything else, and if you want to be good at the things that men traditionally do, there’s something deviant about you, something neurotic about you. Half of all college students, almost half, back in the 1950s said that they played dumb to catch a man. Women often pretended that they weren’t good at sports.
Nowadays, when you look at young women, they feel none of those pressures. I think that they have one real serious pressure they feel, and that is the pressure that if you’re going to do all the things that guys do, you also have to have what I call the hottie mystique. You’ve got to be sexually attractive and seem sexually available at all times.
But men have changed far less than women here. If you look at middle school culture and teenage culture, it’s OK for girls to aspire to things that used to traditionally be thought of as male, but it’s still not OK for men to aspire to or like activities that used to be thought of as female. And when men do step up to the plate, as so many of them are doing, at home, they report that they are looked upon askance in parents’ groups. When they go to the hospital, it’s the wife that the nurses turn to. When they go to pick their kids up at school, the teachers don’t treat them as serious parents who are really involved parents.
So men are facing these tremendous mixed messages, that, yes, they should be more involved at home, yes, they want to be more involved at home, but they also– in a way that is not true for women, it’s not expected that a man will really put family first in the way that they expect it of women. They put women down for it, but at least they do expect it.
And I’ve had so many men tell me that they will often lie at work. They’ll say they’re going to a doctor appointment, instead of saying that they’re going to pick their child up because it’s their turn. So they’re facing these pressures to get more involved at home, but also to be the primary breadwinner and to have that traditional, ambitious, career-oriented, career-first attitude.
KATHERINE BELL: So will you indulge us with a prediction?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: I’m a historian, not a futurist, but lay it on me and we’ll see what I can do.
KATHERINE BELL: OK. So we’ve talked a lot about how things have changed over the last 40 years. I won’t ask you 40 years, that seems too much to ask, but what do you think will transform both the family and the workplace over the next 10 to 20 years?
STEPHANIE COONTZ: I think that really depends on us, what we do, people listening to this podcast who are real leaders in the field, the men and women who are trying to work this out. We know that it is possible to have really, really vibrant families, that people who have access to challenging work and to family life actually have better sex lives, have better relationships, are less likely to be depressed, and are more productive workers.
But we’ve got to figure out the kind of parameters that we want to make about how to make that possible, whether we want to have policies such as they have in Sweden, where you can drop down to 3/4-time work with a cut in pay but not losing benefits if you need extra time for caregiving, or if we need to invest in the kind of childcare and elder care centers that can make it a win-win situation for families, and for kids and for elders, when people are working.
And we need to think about our health care, because the United States spends more on health care of its national product than any of our peers around the world. And most of the time we get less for it. And so it becomes so difficult for people to switch jobs or to cut back on their hours, when they’re going to lose their health insurance.
KATHERINE BELL: Thanks so much for being with us today, Stephanie.
STEPHANIE COONTZ: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
KATHERINE BELL: That was Stephanie Coontz, professor of history the Evergreen State College. For more on managing your life and work, please go to hbr.org.