College Women’s Plans for Different Types of Egalitarian Marriages

This study examined college women's plans for egalitarian marriages. One hundred and forty-four heterosexual undergraduate women completed surveys about their preferences for different life scenarios and their attitudes about work and family life. The pattern of their preferences showed a distinction between home-centered, balanced, and job-centered egalitarian families. Regressions showed that gender ideology, ideas about parenting and motherhood, career orientation, and family dynamics were associated differentially with the three types of egalitarian families, which reflected the different values that underlay the pursuit of each. The results also cast doubt on whether outsourcing is truly an egalitarian path. Outsourcing domestic labor may simply be a means for women to pursue careers without achieving real equality in families. Key Words: child care, fairness and equality, housework/ division of labor, unpaid family work, work/family balance. The employment of women, especially mothers, has increased dramatically in the last 30 years (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004). During that period, men have increased their participation in household labor a bit (Bianchi, Milkie, Sayer, & Robinson, 2000), but regardless of whether women are working for pay outside the home, they still do much more housework and child care than their husbands do (e.g., Coltrane & Adams, 2001). Women suffer this inequity by either working a double day when employed (Hochschild, 1989) or by scaling back on their career ambitions (Becker & Moen, 1999). Despite the ubiquity of women's disproportionate share of domestic labor, however, some couples do buck the trend and divide work equally at home (e.g., Risman & Johnson-Sumerford, 1998; Schwartz, 1994). Equally sharing couples vary in how family and child-care responsibihties are managed and balanced with career/job demands. Research that compares the dichotomy of role sharing to traditional family life (e.g., Hallett & Gilbert, 1997), or compares families with employed versus unemployed wives misses the complexity of different types of egalitarian families. In Hochschild's rich descriptions of couples' lives in The second Shift (1989), variations in emphasis on home life versus paid work were apparent, as were the different forms that equality and inequality may assume. Although she expanded the typology of couples to egalitarian, transitional, and traditional, she did not explicitly define different types of egalitarian families. Deutsch's (1999) study of equally shared parenting implicitly identified three patterns in egalitarian families: home centered, balanced, and career/job centered. In home-centered equally sharing families, both mothers and fathers make significant compromises in their paid work fives by cutting back to part-time work or taking time off while their children are young. They may both cut back to part-time work simultaneously, or sequentially act as stay-at-home parents during the early years of their children's lives. Like more traditional families, these home-centered egalitarians often believe that parental care is best for young children. But in these families, both mothers and fathers cut back substantially on paid work, whereas in traditional families only mothers sacrifice their careers/jobs. The ideology of "intensive mothering," which Hays (1996) described as "child centered," "emotionally absorbing," and "labor intensive," is transformed by these egalitarian parents to a guide for parenting rather than specifically for mothering. In balanced families, both mother and father continue to work full time after their children are born (perhaps for a short time off for maternity/paternity leave), but both adjust, compromise, and arrange work schedules to allow for shared parenting. They differ from more traditional families in that fathers as well as mothers juggle work/family responsibilities and share career compromises. These families rely on paid child care and/or kin when their children are young, but adjust their work schedules when possible to make themselves available for parenting even when it may interfere with maximal career success. …