Uncertainty and the Rise of the Work‐Family Dilemma

Abstract

Existing research argues that women's wages, consumerism, and changing attitudes dismantled the male bread‐winner system. Families' economic need is dismissed with the suggestion that mothers' rhetoric of “need” was a smoke screen to defend against social stigma for working mothers. Drawing on biennial data from 1965 to 1987, I suggest that consumptive certainty of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to economic uncertainty in the 1970s and beyond. Economic uncertainty provided impetus, legitimacy, and justification for young families to adopt new work‐family arrangements. Hence, economic uncertainty is conceptualized as a real circumstance that substantiates families' reasonable perceptions of need.

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