Scaling Back: Dual-Earner Couples' Work-Family Strategies

Abstract

Recent work has focused substantially on one subset of dual-earners, the high-powered two-career couple. We use in-depth interviews with more than 100 people in middle-class dual-earner couples in upstate New York to investigate the range of couples' work-family strategies. We find that the majority are not pursuing two high-powered careers but are typically engaged in what we call scaling back-strategies that reduce and restructure the couple's commitment to paid work over the life course, and thereby buffer the family from work encroachments. We identify, three separate scalingback strategies: placing limits; having a one-job, one-career marriage; and trading off. Our findings support and extend other research by documenting how gender and life-course factors shape workfamily strategies. Wives disproportionately do the scaling back, although in some couples husbands and wives trade family and career responsibilities over the life course. Those in the early childrearing phase are most apt to scale back, but a significant proportion of couples at other life stages also use these work-family strategies. Key Words: dual-earner families, life course, scaling back, work-family strategies. In a recent review of the literature on dual-earner couples, Spain and Bianchi (1996) note that the of the dual-eamer couple typically has been framed as a woman's problem of balancing work and family. Some studies of dual-earner couples have focused on the second shift because women retain the primary responsibility for housework and child-care (Brines, 1994; Gerson, 1985; Hertz, 1986; Hochschild, 1989). Other studies emphasize the higher stress and reduced occupational advancement for women in dual-earner marriages or, conversely, examine the positive effects of employment for such women's emotional and physical health (Barnett, 1994; Barnett & Rivers, 1996; Wethington & Kessler, 1989; and see reviews by Moen, 1992; Spain & Bianchi, 1996). Another body of theory and research has focused on adaptive strategies in managing the experiences of family life for both men and women. Building on Hill (1970), this work emphasizes the processes through which family members actively construct and modify their roles, resources, and relationships (cf. Goode, 1960; Moen & Wethington, 1992). Researchers in the 1980s and early 1990s identified a broad range of coping strategies and repertoires, including gender and life-stage differences in individual coping styles (e.g., Gilbert, 1988; Schnittger & Bird, 1990; Skinner & McCubbin, 1991). How do these insights apply to couple-level strategies used to manage the work-family interface? Recent studies paint conflicting pictures of workfamily strategies in dual-earner couples. The 7-ime Bind (Hochschild, 1997) is an ethnographic account of couples with one partner working at Amerco, a 11 greedy workplace that demands long hours of work and face (Coser, 1974; Nippert-Eng, 1996). Hochschild finds employees identifying home as a place of stress and unending demands, and identifying work as a pleasant place of friendships and support (cf. Nippert-Eng). Hochschild finds that, instead of resisting the time bind, some people use a couple-level strategy of overcommitment to work that reproduces it (cf. Robinson & Godbey, 1997; Schor, 1992). Hochschild examines the strategic choices of some dual-earner couples, but cannot identify the entire range of strategies that working couples employ. Barnett and Rivers' (1996) work seems to indicate that the strategy of working more to avoid stress at home is not a typical one. In their study of Boston-area two-earner couples in which both spouses work full-time, they find that respondents have warm and loving relationships with their children, satisfaction in their marriage and parenting, and more stability in their incomes due to the buffering that two jobs provides in an uncertain economy (cf. …