The fading breadwinner role and the implications for young couples

It is a commonplace that the past few decades have been a time of increasing importance in the role of women as income providers, both within and outside of marriage. Drawing on data from the 1964 and 1993 March Current Population Surveys (CPS), we document the changing division of income provision within marriage and the association between changing marital income-provision roles and younger couples' economic welfare over the past thirty years. We find that the proportion of marriages in which husbands are primary breadwinners has declined dramatically, with a corresponding rise in "co-provider" marriages. Regression analyses show that (1) co- provider marriages are economically advantaged compared to other income-provision-role arrangements in both the early 1960s and the early 1990s; and (2) a relatively substantial part of the total improvement in younger couples' economic welfare over time stems from the shift towards co-provider marriages.

The Relentless Search for Effects of Divorce: Forging New Trails or Tumbling Down the Beaten Path?

In his integrative review in this issue of JMF, Amato accomplishes an important task by providing sorely needed theoretical focus for research on children of divorce. He develops numerous linkages between theoretical frameworks, explicit hypotheses, and empirical generalizations. The deliberate emphasis on identifying specific mechanisms through which parental divorce enters into and influences children's everyday lives is a rare quality in this research area and provides very useful guidance for future investigation. In these ways Amato forges potentially promising paths

The Forgotten Victims

The attention and hand-wringing lavished on race relations by Aleinikoff and many others obscures the fact that by every measurement of formal equality, and by many measures of substantive equality, white women are further behind than black men (black women, unsurprisingly, are on the bottom). It leads us to focus our energies, our remedies, and our scarce resources on race discrimination, often at the direct expense of women. I hope to do three things in my brief remarks today. First, I will suggest that Professor Aleinikoff\u27s paper exaggerates the problem it addresses. Second, I will explain what I mean when I say that women are worse off than blacks. Third, I will give examples of how attempts to portray racism as the more serious problem directly and indirectly disadvantage women. No one doubts that racism and race discrimination are still a problem today. But much of Professor Aleinikoff\u27s discussion exaggerates the problem. While his statistics relying on testers to measure job or housing discrimination are probably reliable, his discussions of black and white attitudes leave much to be desired

Kin Support and Women’s Labor Force Experiences in Midlife

Women in midlife continue to assume the roles of "caregiver" and "mother" in contemporary American society (Hagemann-White, 1984). These traditional roles often clash with new roles arising from ongoing demographic change, especially the increase in educational attainment and the rise in labor force participation. Public policy designed to encourage the care and assistance of kin as a familial obligation thus has the potential to significantly affect midlife women’s labor force experiences and strain familial relationships

The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited & Revised

I published The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions thirty-two years ago, in 1978. Given the furor and controversy over the book immediately following its publication, I did not anticipate that it would go on to become a classic. Indeed, the book’s impact on the field of race and ethnic relations–its arguments have been discussed in nearly eight hundred empirical research articles, not to mention the non-empirical studies–lends credence to the idea of productive controversy and to George Bernard Shaw’s famous dictum: “[I]t is better to be criticized and misunderstood than to be ignored.” My motivation for this essay is to reflect on responses to the book that claim to provide an empirical test of my thesis. In the process, I indicate the extent to which important findings have influenced my thinking since the book’s publication

Employment status and the attitudes and behavior of higher status women volunteers, 1975 and 1992: A case study

This study examines the relationships between employment status and women's attitudes toward and participation in a higher status voluntary service organization. Data were gathered in 1975 and 1992 from a sample of chapters of the International Association of Women (a pseudonym). The 1992 sample included three percent who reported a racial or ethnic identification other than white. Drawing on several theoretical perspectives, we expected to find differences in the attitudes and level of participation of employed versus non-employed members that would have important effects on organizational functioning. However, few differences in the attitudes of members employed full time, part time, and not in the labor force were found in either 1975 or 1992. There were, however, differences in behavior. Employed members reported spending much less time on organizational activities and were less likely to assume leadership roles, but these differences diminished between 1975 and 1992 as employed women became numerically dominant in the organization, suggesting that the growing presence of employed women in IAW led to the development of informal norms and new policies about the amount of time members should devote to the organization and a corresponding loss in the total number of volunteer hours devoted to it

Racial Variations in Males' Commuting Times in Atlanta: What Does the Evidence Suggest?

Using a sample from the comparatively most privileged group of black males, those married and living with a working spouse, this article investigates how race-based residential locations and the spatial structure of labor markets affect commuting experiences. This research uses the most sophisticated commuting data available at the time the research was conducted, the 1990 5 percent Public-Use Microdata Samples for the Atlanta Metropolitan Area, and again confirms severe spatial mismatch problems for central-city blacks, regardless of socioeconomic status, household formation, and access to automobiles. However, the situation with black males living in suburban areas differs significantly as those in the southern (predominantly black) suburbs show considerable evidence of spatial mismatch, whereas the northern (predominantly white) suburbs show no such evidence

Parent-Child Relations: Assessing Recent Changes

Profound structural changes in American marriage and family life over the past three decades have transformed "traditional" living arrangements for children and stimulated an enormous amount of popular and scholarly interest regarding the consequences for children's well-being. Of greatest concern have been the impact of divorce, single-parent families, maternal employment, dual-earner marriages, and a general erosion of parental commitment and support. A systematic review of the research indicates that although parents and children spend very little time together, they remain generally satisfied with their relationships, largely due to a pattern of consistent, but detached, parental support. I argue that the consequences of maternal employment, divorce, and single-parent family structure have been greatly exaggerated, and that researchers need to investigate processes more directly influencing children, notably economic hardship and high levels of marital and family conflict

Economic Restructuring and the Retreat from Marriage

Our objective is to link recent U.S. marriage trends to changes in the employment and earnings of the marriage-eligible population, welfare benefit levels, and macroeconomic performance, which are played out differently across states. Specifically, we link pooled cross-sectional data from the 1986–1997 annual demographic supplements of the March Current Population Survey to state-year-specific indicators of economic performance from the Regional Economic Information System. We use these data to estimate reduced-form models of the economic, institutional, and demographic determinants of individual marriage outcomes. We also estimate endogenous switching regression models of marriage which take into account women’s expected incomes inside and outside of marriage. Our results provide several conclusions. First, the ?retreat from marriage? continued unabated during the economic recovery period of the 1990s. Second, our reduced-form results reveal that the recent economic recovery has, on balance, dampened the downward trend in marriage; the percentage married would be roughly three points lower in 1997 if state employment and earnings had remained at their 1986 levels. Third, the effects of state economic restructuring were highly differentiated, with negative effects on marriage, especially among the younger, less educated, and racial minority women. Fourth, results from our endogenous switching regression models provide only modest evidence for the economic model of marriage and call into question the appropriateness of strictly economic explanations of declining marriage

History and Current Status of Divorce in the United States

This article explores the remarkable shift in marriage and divorce practices that has occurred in the last third of this century in the United States. Initially, information is presented on trends in divorce and remarriage; commonalities and differences between family patterns in the United States and in other industrialized nations are discussed. The author then identifies some of the factors that have transformed marriage practices in the United States and describes how changes in these practices have altered the family experiences of children. Finally, the author suggests trends in family patterns that might occur in the near future and discusses various policy initiatives and how they may influence the future of the family