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Stephanie Coontz

Just half a century ago, Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, identified a very different kind of problem than the one that plagues so many men and women today. Friedan described the sense of emptiness that women and men felt when they had too few pressures – or too few opportunities – to juggle work and family (Friedan 1963).

During the heyday of the male breadwinner family in the 1950s and 1960s, women were pressured to put aside any aspiration beyond the home and to seek complete fulfillment in being good wives and mothers. But, Friedan reported, many women who did this experienced a gnawing, guilt-ridden discontent that she called “the problem with no name.”

Millions of women identified with Friedan’s description of the pain caused by their constricted lives, and they made The Feminine Mystique an international bestseller. But there was a less-discussed masculine counterpart to this ideology about womanhood – the equally limiting idea that men derive all their meaning and satisfaction in life through breadwinning and that men are not concerned with, or competent at, the care-giving aspects of family life.

Just as the feminine mystique deprived women in the 1950s and 1960s of any source of meaning other than family, the male breadwinner mystique deprived men of any source of meaning other than earning a wage. In interviews and oral histories, women who lived through that era often talk about their disappointment at not being able to pursue their aspirations for higher education or interesting careers. And just as often, men report tremendous regret, at least in retrospect, that they did not participate more in the daily routines of childcare and family life (see Coontz 2011).

If the male breadwinner family was not as idyllic as we sometimes imagine, it was also not as traditional as many people believe. The notion that males must specialize in providing material necessities for the family while females take charge of care-giving, emotional work, and the maintenance of family solidarities was unknown in ancient, medieval, and even early modern times.

For thousands of years, work and family life were organized on the assumption that both men and women needed to provide for the family materially and that both were responsible for weaving bonds of emotional and practical support with other families and between family members. Through most of history, workers didn’t “balance” work and family but instead combined them. Men and women worked together on farms and in household enterprises where the rhythms of labor had to take into account the rhythms of birth, illness, death, and neighborly obligations.

Wives were not seen as non-producing dependents but as “yoke-mates.” Cultural arbiters did not tell a wife that she should not “worry her pretty little head” about matters beyond the nursery and kitchen. A good wife was expected to know arithmetic and surgery, be a skilled brewer, cheese-maker, tailor, and farmer, and have a shrewd head for bargaining when she took her wares to market.

Conversely, men were not seen solely as economic actors who could count on their wives to take care of all social engagements and emotional relationships. Men had to balance their political and economic pursuits with a wide range of interpersonal obligations. Most men did the kind of kin- and social-networking chores that were later assigned primarily to women. They arranged visits with relatives and neighbors, agreed to train relatives’ children in their home, kept tracks of births, deaths, and who was marrying whom, and often offered their support to arrange marriages.

Men established lines of emotional as well as financial credit in ways that would later become the provenance of women. For wealthy or socially-prominent men, an important part of daily life involved dispensing patronage and socializing with or “treating” social inferiors. Men of more modest resources knew that their reputation was linked to participation in community gatherings and mutual aid associations, as well as attendance at social events sponsored by elites. The dependent poor offered personal services and deference to those above them in exchange for charity and favors (Tadmor 2001, Gillis 1985, Coontz 1992).

People did not expect a man to single-handedly support his “own” family, or a woman to focus exclusively upon her own children. Child care was often delegated to older siblings or to poorer neighbors working as apprentices or servants in the households of the propertied members of society. Men and women alike took part in the acts of socializing and mutual aid that established complex systems of reciprocity with other households.

This does not imply that men and women were equal in the past. Male dominance was the rule throughout most of history. But one reason male dominance was so widespread in ancient agricultural societies was that men were utterly dependent on the labor of their wives and children and therefore needed to exercise strict control over their behavior. Patriarchy, unlike the paternalism that developed later in history, was not based on women and children deferring to men because men were supporting them. Patriarchy involved men’s direct extraction of labor, services, or wealth from their families.

Consider the charming but misleading 16^th-century wedding ritual where the man pledged that “with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” The reality was that upon marrying, a husband assumed control of everything a woman brought with her to the marriage – her dowry, personal property, even her jewelry – and anything she inherited or earned after marriage.

With the emergence of a more mobile labor force and wider markets, these patterns gradually changed. Households became less economically and socially dependent upon their neighbors. Within the family, a distinction developed between the traditional tasks needed to keep the farm, household, or shop going, including the exchange of goods and services with neighbors, and the new ways of earning cash, without which it was increasingly difficult to survive. As the division between a husband’s wage-earning activities and a wife’s household activities grew, so too did the sense that men and women lived in different spheres, with the male a stranger to the workings of domesticity and the female a stranger to the workings of the “economy.” This was the beginning of the male breadwinner/female homemaker divide.

A historian of the German Enlightenment, Marion Gray, writes that in earlier centuries, when economic production was still centered in the household, “domesticity was a virtue shared by males and females, a shorthand term for thrift, hard work, and order.” (Gray 2000: 301f.). Advice books at the end of the 17^th century urged husbands as well as wives to practice domesticity. However, “a century later, domesticity had tumbled out of the constellation of masculine virtues.” (Gray 2000: 301f.), and, for women, domesticity had ceased to be equated with economic productivity.

The husband, who had once been the supervisor of the family labor unit, came to be viewed as the person who, by himself, provided for the family’s subsistence. The traditional tasks of wives that remained in the home – growing food for the family table, dairying, cooking, and making clothes – were no longer viewed as economic activities but rather as care-taking. Historian Deborah Simonton argues that throughout Europe there was a transition from housekeeping to homemaking in the period from 1780 to 1840. The older notion of housekeeping recognized women’s labor as a vital contribution to the economic survival of the family. Homemaking, by contrast, was seen as an act of love rather than of family provisioning, and the material value of women’s activities became less visible (Simonton 1998, Davidoff 1987, Wunder 1998, Coontz 2005).

It is important to remember that the growing specialization between the activities and locations of husbands and wives arose out of a temporary stage in the history of the market economy – a transitional period when households could no longer get by primarily with things they made, grew, or bartered, but could not yet rely on mass-produced consumer goods available for purchase. For example, many families no longer produced their own homespun cloth, but ready-made clothing was not yet available, at least at prices most families could afford. Women still had to sew clothes, but now from cloth that men purchased with their pay rather than fabric made within the family. Somebody had to earn cash in order to purchase the things the family needed; but somebody else had to stay home and turn the things that were bought into things the family could actually use.

Given the pre-existing legal, political, and religious traditions of patriarchal dominance, husbands (and youth of both genders) were usually the ones assigned to work outside the home. Wives assumed exclusive responsibility for domestic matters that they had formerly shared with husbands or delegated to older children and apprentices.

Many women supplemented their household labor with income-generating work that could be done at or around the home – taking in boarders, doing extra sewing or laundering, keeping a few animals, or selling garden products. But this often arduous work was increasingly seen as secondary to the “real” work done by husbands, and wives’ roles were usually described in terms of their domestic chores and nurturing activities.

The changing division of labor between husband and wife removed much of the rationale for the hierarchal relations that had governed the old household workplace. Although women’s economic work was devalued, the psychological ministering she did to her husband and children was accorded a new sentimental reverence. But even as women gained a sense of moral superiority as mothers and wives, they lost their former confidence in themselves as economic producers and family co-providers. In England and the United States, women’s diaries in the early 19^th century reflected a new self-doubt about the worth of their contributions to the household economy, even while recording the huge amounts of unpaid work they continued to do – tending livestock, carding wool, sewing clothes, churning butter, hauling wood, and making preserves (Cott 1977, Kelly 1999).

Over the course of the 19^th century, unpaid domestic work became less physically demanding for middle-class women, as the spread of market relations, commerce, and industrialization created improvements in household technology and new consumer goods. The same changes also created a growing class of individuals who had no choice but to work as laborers in factories or in the homes of other people. Both these trends increasingly relieved middle-class housewives of the most arduous productive tasks for which they had formerly been responsible, allowing them to devote more time to child care and to making the home comfortable for their husbands.

The cult of true womanhood, which defined wives and mothers as the emotional core of the family, was the 19^th-century forerunner of the 20^th-century feminine mystique. In popular magazines and sermons, the wife was no longer described as a yoke-mate but as “A Being to Come Home to,” or the “Source of Comfort and the Spring of Joy.” The old wifely skills of surgery and accounting were not only less necessary now, in the new view of woman, but they might also be too taxing for her. American gynecologist Dr. Charles Meig summed up the prevailing middle-class view of female nature in 1847, when he observed that woman “has a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love” (see Coontz 1988).

The ideal of a family based upon a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, in sum, was a relatively late arrival on the historical scene, developing only in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. As a family form in which most people actually lived, the male breadwinner family is even more recent. The male-provider model of marriage remained beyond the reach of most families throughout the 19^th century. On farms and in small businesses, men and women continued to work together as co-providers for their families. And, in the early days of industrialization, many women and children had to leave the home to work for wages in mills and factories, because male wages alone could not support a family.

Even as more wives withdrew from paid employment in the late 19^th century, children continued to go out to work to contribute to the family income. It was not until the 1920s that a bare majority of American children lived in a home where the father was the sole wage-earner and the mother was a fulltime homemaker.

The Depression and World War II set back the actual numbers and the cultural hegemony of male breadwinner families. But the intense hardships and the instability of family life and gender relationships in those times set the stage for a cultural reaction in favor of marriage and male breadwinner families after the war. Children who grew up in the 1930s were sharply aware of the psychological pain their fathers felt when they lost their jobs and could not provide for their families. Often, they had seen their mothers forced to take work that was difficult and demeaning. In consequence, this generation of youth was more inclined than the preceding or following generations to re-establish clear gender roles when they started their own families. Their desire for stability was reinforced by the wave of divorces that swept across Europe and North America immediately after the war.

In the immediate postwar era, men and women became especially eager to embrace marriage and parenthood. By 1950, American women were marrying at a younger age than any time in the previous half century, and the age of marriage continued to fall for the rest of the decade. By 1960, half of all U.S. marriages involved women below age 20. There was a similar trend in England, where the average age of marriage dropped by almost two years for both sexes in the 10 years following World War II (Historical Statistics of the United States 1975, Weiss 2000, Owram 1998, Braybon/Summerfield 1987, Goode 1963, Ponzetti 2003, Gillis 1985).

In both West and East Germany, the rate of marriage rose so much during the 1950s that by the early 1960s, even women of the World War II generation, who had experienced the massive loss of men in their age categories during the war, were as likely to be married as women of the same age had been in the prewar period. Furthermore, younger women were much more likely to be married than their prewar counterparts. In France, the marriage rate peaked between 1946 and 1950 and remained at historically high levels until the mid-1960s. By 1952, the percentage of 24-year-old French men who were married was twice as high as it had been in 1890. Italy and Switzerland were among the few European countries that did not see a rise in marriage rates during the 1950s (Heinemann 1999, Duchen 1994).

Despite what many people believe, the postwar surge in marriage was not a return to “tradition.” Both the prevalence of marriage and the form that those marriages took were both unprecedented features of what some historians call the “long decade” of the 1950s, a period that began in 1947 and lasted until the early 1960s in the United States and until the close of the 1960s in much of Europe. Belgian demographer R.L. Cliquet calls the marriage pattern that flourished during the 1950s and 1960s historically “unique” (Festy 1980, Saraceno 1991, Kamerman/Kahn 1997, Cliquet 1991).

Almost everywhere in Europe and the English-speaking countries of the world, the age of marriage fell and the rate of marriage rose. In consequence, by the end of the 1960s, marriage had become nearly universal in Western Europe and North America, with 95 percent of all persons marrying, and doing so at younger ages than at any time over the previous 500 years. This was accompanied by a sustained rise in birth rates in North America, Western Europe, New Zealand, and Australia.

The prevalence of male breadwinner families was equally unprecedented. Women who had worked during the war effort left the labor force in droves, willingly or unwillingly, with the return of peace after the war. In the United States, more than 3 million women had been laid off from their wartime jobs by 1947. In West Germany, only one-quarter of all married women were in the labor force by 1950, the lowest percentage in the entire 20^th century. The disappearance of child labor and lengthening time children were beginning to spend in school also contributed to the rise in families supported by a single male earner.

Although the employment of wives began to increase again during the 1950s, this was mainly accounted for by wives who joined the paid labor force after they completed their child-rearing, which was now taking place at a younger age than ever before. Despite the increase in married women’s employment during the 1950s, writes researcher Chiara Saraceno, “Western industrialized countries had the highest proportion ever of full-time housewives among the adult female population.” (Saraceno 2002: 207). And in this era before rising divorce rates had counteracted falling death rates, more children than ever before or since had both parents in the home throughout their childhood.

The material basis for the spread of youthful marriage, increased childbearing, and male breadwinner families was the astonishing postwar economic recovery and establishment of a consumer society in developed countries. Although there were several years of hardship and shortages in Europe following the war, the postwar economy soon began bringing to market an extraordinary array of new products that dramatically enhanced the quality of home life. Between 1945 and 1963, the gross domestic product grew by almost five percent a year in France and the Netherlands, 6 percent in Italy and Austria, and 7.6 percent in West Germany. A recent survey of European history concludes that “never before or since” did real income grow so substantially for so many people. In Britain in 1959, Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan organized his successful reelection campaign around the slogan “You’ve never had it so good.” (Kaelble 2001, Coffin et al. 2002).

In the United States, the number of people with substantial discretionary income – money left over after the basic bills were paid – doubled during the 1950s. By the mid-1950s, nearly 60 percent of the population had what was labeled a “middle-class” income level, compared to only 31 percent in the “prosperous twenties”, before the Great Depression. By 1960, nearly two-thirds of all American families owned their own homes, 87 percent had a television, and 75 percent owned a car (Coffin et al. 2002, Coontz 1992, Hurley 2001, Chafe 1986).

Progress was slower in war-ravaged Europe, but there too each year brought measurable gains. By 1963, two-thirds of the households in Belgium and the Netherlands and almost half the households in Great Britain and Switzerland owned washing machines. Most homes in Europe had vacuum cleaners by that date. While only a third of West German households had washing machines, almost 60 percent had refrigerators (Simonon 1998, Loehlin 1999).

In the transition to a modern consuming household, an international industry of women’s magazines teamed up with television producers and advertisers to encourage families to equate progress and modernity with the presence of a fulltime homemaker in the house. “Are You a Modern Woman?” asked Elle in 1956, listing the appliances and household comforts that would allow a housewife to answer yes. A 1954 article in Marie-Claire described modernity as “abundance, emancipation, social progress, airy houses, healthy children, the refrigerator, pasteurized milk, the washing-machine, comfort, quality and accessibility” (Fergusson 1983: 31, Coontz 2011).

Government laws and social policies also promoted male breadwinner families. In 1948, the U.S. changed its federal income tax code to favor married couples who had a single or primary earner. Married couples were now allowed to file jointly and split their income, even if only one was employed. As a result, the high earner in the family – usually the husband – could reduce his tax rate by attributing half of his income to his wife even if she had earned little or nothing. They were then taxed as two low-to-moderate income individuals rather than as one high-income person. A man who supported a homemaker wife often paid only half the taxes of a single man making the same amount of money but without a wife to split the income (Surrey 1948, McCaffery 1997).

U.S. welfare and redistribution policies also favored male breadwinner families, distributing benefits to women mainly as dependents of men. Men’s benefits were attached to their work, while women’s benefits were attached to their marital history. Britain adopted a more universal welfare policy than the American model, but one that was similar in its gender distinctions (Offen 2000).

France, in contrast to the United States and Britain, provided women with social entitlements not as wives but as workers and as mothers, whether married or not. As workers, women could take advantage of a comprehensive system of nursery schools that allowed them to return to their jobs while their children were still young. As mothers, single or married, women received universal family entitlements such as free maternity care, birth premiums for each child born, and prenatal allowances to cover extra expenses during pregnancy (Offen 2000, Lewis 1992).

In East Germany, facilitating women’s work was an explicit social goal of the Communist government in the postwar period and beyond. In line with that policy, the state provided inexpensive child care for working mothers. In West Germany, women’s employment was seen as a temporary necessity given the massive loss of men in the war, but most welfare entitlements and legal rights were designed to encourage male breadwinner families whenever possible (Heinemann 1999, Torstendahl 1999).

In all these countries, despite significant progress in democratizing political systems during the 1950s and 1960s, legal codes and social policy continued to reinforce male authority in the household and male advantage in the workplace, giving women few attractive alternatives to rooting their identity in their sociallydesignated roles as housewives and mothers. In West Germany, under a law that remained in force until 1977, a wife could not work outside the home if her husband objected that it interfered with her primary duty, which was to run the household. In France, a wife needed her husband’s permission to work outside the home until 1965; the man remained the officially designated “head of the family” until 1970; and until 1975 the husband had the sole right to determine where the family would live. Reviewing the history of family law in England and the United States, legal scholar John Eekelaar concludes that the provisions of marriage law in those countries during the 1950s had more in common with the legal codes of the 1890s than the 1990s (Loehlin 1999, Eekelaar 2003).

In the Netherlands until 1971, the minimum wage for men was set at a level that would support a married man, his wife, and two children under the age of 16 while the minimum wage for women workers was set at 60 to 80 percent of the male rate. The British and Australian states also regulated wage rates to ensure that male workers, but not females, received an income sufficient to support a family (Lewis 1992, Knijn/Selten 2002, Orloff/Monson 2002, Wilson 1980).

When some British trade unions and women’s rights activists campaigned to institutionalize equal pay for men and women, a Royal Commission explicitly rejected the idea that this should be a guiding principle of British postwar workforce policy. The majority report concluded that “individual justice” had to take a back seat to the “social advantage” of preserving jobs for men and making sure that motherhood remained a desirable occupation for women (Lewis 1984).

The overwhelming consensus of opinion-makers in the 1950s and 1960s was that the male breadwinner family was the best form of family ever devised, representing the high point – and the end point – of all the developments in family life over the ages. Academic researchers, psychiatrists, legislators, and employers almost invariably assumed that this would be the family form of the future.

In Canada, says historian Doug Owram, “every magazine, every marriage manual, every advertisement … assumed the family was based on the … male wage-earner and the child-rearing, home-managing housewife.” (Owram 1998: 22). In the United States, France, Great Britain, and West Germany, women’s magazines told their readers that being a housewife was the ultimate source of fulfillment for a woman and that harboring any other aspirations indicated the presence of serious psychological problems (Owram 1998, May 1988, Ehrenreich 1983, Duchen 1994, Ferguson 1983, Moeller 1993).

The influential American sociologist Talcott Parsons and other social scientists of the 1950s and 1960s believed that the division of labor between male breadwinner and female homemaker was vital to the proper functioning of modern industrial systems. Workers needed to be more mobile and more focused on career paths than traditional family systems allowed, but they also needed something to compensate for the impersonal demands of the modern workplace – and that something was a homemaker wife who would focus on meeting the emotional and physical needs of her worker husband and the future workers she was raising (Parsons 1954, 1965, Parsons/Bales 1955).

Similarly, British sociologists Peter Willmott and Michael Young argued that the rise of the male breadwinner, home-centered, affectionate family was the culmination of an evolutionary process that had gone through three stages. In stage one, the pre-industrial family had been the basic unit of production, and marriage was an economic partnership, although wives were subordinate to their husbands. Stage two, they said, was the “stage of disruption,” when early industrialization pulled men, women, and children out of the home into factory work. In stage three, however, the present era, the unity of families was “restored.” But now the central focus of family life was leisure and consumption rather than work, and that was organized primarily through the activities of the housewife (Young/Willmott 1973).

Few social scientists anticipated that significant numbers of women would ever reject being assigned exclusively to these home-based activities. In the early years of the 20^th century, many observers had feared that feminism would pull women away from family life, but these fears receded in the 1950s. In the middle of that decade, German psychologist Joachim Bodamer spoke for many family experts in Europe and North America in claiming that struggles for “women’s emancipation” were “history.” Today’s “woman question,” he wrote, is how to “give woman back” to the family, where she really wants to be. A 1955 study by German sociologist Helmut Schelsky concluded that, after a period of “exceptional danger” during and immediately after the war, marriage and family life were now “safe from catastrophe.” With the notable exception of Simone de Beauvoir, French social commentators in the postwar period also insisted that women were completely committed to marriage and motherhood (Schissler 2001, Duchen 1994, Frevert 1989, Carter 1997, Loehlin 1999, Moeller 1993, Wilson 1980).

In his influential 1963 work, World Revolution and Family Patterns, American sociologist William Goode reviewed surveys from across Europe and North America and concluded that men and women on both continents wanted wives to stay home rather than pursue careers. Despite winning the vote and other legal rights, women in Europe and the United States had not become more “career-minded” since 1900, he contended. In his 380-page survey of world trends, Goode did not record even a single piece of evidence to suggest that women might become more career-minded in the future.

Given the unanimity of scholarly opinion and popular belief on this question, it is no surprise that most governments and employers fashioned their social policies and work practices on the assumption that most people who earned paychecks would have wives who would take care of family life.

I do not have space here to discuss the many factors that overturned the male breadwinner family model. But it is clear that beneath the placid surface of 1950s and 1960s family life, women’s discontent was simmering. Long before the economic setbacks of the 1970s and 1980s pulled even more wives into the labor force, educated women in particular had begun to reclaim their more traditional functions as co-providers for their families, only this time on the basis of more equality within marriage and more options to live independently outside marriage. Many women sought careers to provide more meaning and excitement in their lives while others wanted jobs that brought in extra money for the family and allowed them to get out of the house and meet new people. Still others were pushed into the labor market by their husbands’ declining real wages or stagnant employment options, or by the experience of divorce or unwed motherhood.

Today, few family researchers believe that the increased labor force participation of women, including wives and mothers, will be reversed. In the United States, 70 percent of children now live in households where every adult in the home is employed. And nearly 25 percent of American workers have elder care responsibilities. Yet the United States continues to organize its work policies, social programs, healthcare practices, and school hours on the assumption that every worker can be constantly available to the employer and will have someone else available to shoulder all care-giving responsibilities.

Other countries have instituted limits on the workweek and on the demands that employers may make of workers. But the United States continues to promote and exalt, what Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling call the “career mystique” the idea that a successful worklife requires employees to devote “all their time, energy, and commitment throughout their ‘prime’ adult years” to their job, and that employers have every right to require this.

The “career mystique” is especially strong among professionals and managers in the United States. This has created a historic reversal in the nature of occupations. To the extent that work undermined family life in the past, that was the mark of a bad job, not a good one. A century ago, the most prestigious and remu-nerative careers were those that required the least amount of time away from home. In those days, blue-collar workers envied the “bankers’ hours” that allowed managers and professionals to come to work later and leave earlier than less wellpaid employees.

Today, however, the greatest amount of overwork is found among professionals. A recent study by Joan Williams and Heather Boushey found that 38 percent of high-earning professional men, and almost one-quarter of middle-income men, work more than 50 hours a week. Professional women are less likely than their male counterparts to work such hours unless they are single, but even as wives they are twice as likely as other women to do so.

In many cases, these workers would prefer to work fewer hours, but cannot do so, either because they would lose their jobs if they did, or because the financial penalties for cutting back would be far greater than the actual reduction in their hours. At the other end of the occupational hierarchy, however, we find another large group of workers who cannot work enough hours to meet their financial needs.

Work-life conflict is high among both these groups of workers. In the highhours group, workers lose access to family life, while their partners, usually the wives, must organize their own lives around the demands of the other’s career, often losing access to desired work. Workers who are underemployed or underpaid in their main job must often take a second job in order to earn enough to get by. Additionally, low-wage workers in the United States are frequently forced to work evening hours, weekends, or rotating shifts, all of which can wreak havoc with family life.

United States law does not provide subsidized parental leaves or mandate flexible workplace policies. There is no nationally-regulated child care program. Workers are not even guaranteed the right to request workplace flexibility without retaliation. One result is that 90 percent of mothers and 95 percent of fathers in the U.S. report work-life conflict, a far higher proportion than in other industrialized countries (Williams/Boushey 2010).

The adoption in the United States of a number of policies that are already implemented in many parts of Europe would do much to lessen work-life conflict. Such policies include: the establishment of proportional wages for part-time work, limits on mandatory overtime and erratic scheduling of workers’ shifts, and prohibitions against employers requiring workers to be constantly available during non-work hours.

But much remains to be done in Europe as well. Subsidized parental leaves are essential, but in some European countries, these have become a substitute for high-quality, accessible child care and after-school care. Some European protective laws for workers, such as mandatory limits on store hours, create problems for dual-earner families, who find it difficult to shop, schedule household repairs, and take care of other activities since they do not have one partner at home during the work week. And while the United States has much to learn from Europe in developing more effective anti-poverty measures and protections for low-income workers, in many European countries “guest workers” end up in the same second-class status that America’s low-wage citizen workers occupy.

Work-family policies need to be designed in ways to ensure that reductions in the barriers to spending time with family do not involve increases in the barriers to participating in paid work. As U.S. researchers Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson point out, a comprehensive work-life program for the 21^st century must combine policies that facilitate time with family with policies that also make it easier to enter and stay in desirable jobs. Such a program must also incorporate equal opportunity policies to make sure we do not recreate gender inequities in the process of solving work-family ones (Jacobs/Gerson 2004, see also Henneck 2003).

One hundred years ago, the emerging male breadwinner family faced every bit as much stress as today’s dual-earner and single parent families. In the struggle to earn enough to support their families, male breadwinners had to work long hours under dangerous working conditions. Even if they avoided the dangers of being maimed or killed on the job, workers were often physically spent before they were out of their 30s and 40s. In the absence of unemployment and disability insurance, they were then forced to rely on the earnings of their children. Women who did not have an able-bodied man who was willing to support them had to deal with pay rates and hiring policies that made it almost impossible for them to support themselves, far less a family.

Accordingly, two pressing work-family issues occupied 20^th-century activists. The first was occupational health and safety. Activists demanded that governments create new regulations limiting the hours of work and mandating new safety equipment and standards. And as they won these reforms, they turned their attention to establishing equal access to work and equal pay for equal work for everyone, regardless of race, color, or gender.

The overwhelming occupational health and safety issue for the 21^st century is finding enough time for family needs and obligations. The equity issue that accompanies it is providing both men and women the opportunity to meet their care-giving responsibilities while building a rewarding work life. The challenge today is to do for 21^st century families what the labor movement began to do for factory safety issues and the feminist movement began to do for work equity issues in the last century. Our workplaces and career paths must be made compatible with family life, and our family lives must be made amenable to a true sharing of breadwinning and nurturing between men and women.

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