Families, Dual-Career

Over the past 100 years, both the workplace and the home have undergone substantial changes. One such issue, which has received considerable attention, is the dual-career family. A term first coined in the late 1960s, the “dual-career” or “dual-earner” family was originally characterized as a peculiar or revolutionary type of dual-wage, heterosexual family born of complex social and political transformations (Gilbert, 1994). However, a closer look at the history of dual-career families in America reveals that diverse races and cultures have been differentially involved in and affected by dual careerism. According to Lois Hoffman and F. Ivan Nye, in 1960, median socioeconomic African American and White families were disparate in their participation in the labor force. To illustrate, within these families, 48% of African American mothers participated in the paid labor force, compared with 16% of White women (Hoffman & Nye, 1984). These statistics reveal not only workforce participation rates but also the bias contained in much of the literature featuring dual-career families. Much of the literature on dual-career families, which focuses primarily on White, middle to upper-socioeconomic status families, discusses the “rise” of the dual-career family as occurring during the 1960s. Such an interpretation of the onset of this phenomenon is slanted and narrow in scope, as dual careerism was not a new concept for a variety of ethnic groups in America.

A review of the literature, which focuses primarily on median-socioeconomic White mothers and therefore will be the focus of this entry, reveals the surge of these women into the paid workforce beginning in the early 1960s and the changes these families underwent. Traditionally, home and work-related labor were relatively clear-cut for these families, with the female partner consistently tending to matters of the home and child care, while the male partner participated in the paid labor force. Women's increased participation in the paid labor force has obscured these clear-cut boundaries. Accompanying these women's burgeoning participation in the paid labor force are new family issues and concerns, such as the division of labor within the home and the effects of dual-career families on the positive development of children.