Dual-Career Families
- Author:
Rhona and Robert
Rapoport Pelican, 45p
As the Rapoports point out, any study of husbands and wives following separate careers is really a study of wives with careers, since they are the unusual ones.
Around this subject the unresearched myths crowd thick and fast ? working wives are overstrained, are more fulfilled, less fulfilled, are worse mothers, better mothers, inevitably feel ‘guilty’ and (the least questioned myth of all) have undergone a moment of conscious choice when they ‘decided’ to work.
To all these ‘young wives’ tales’ Dual Career Families makes a refreshing antidote, since it is as a pragmatic, unprejudiced and as little inclined to generalise as are the couples it is studying.
Essentially, in spite of some hopeful talk in the introduction about possible patterns for the future, it is not a study of how people in general might or ought to combine the demands of marriage with those of two careers, but how six couples did in fact do so, with their own idiosyncratic concepts of roles within the home.
One couple, both architects (and so, in practice, less ‘dual’ than others), had a slightly self-conscious vision of themselves as something rather special, a ‘star turn’, but the others seemed to take their lives for granted, with the wife’s career not a matter of ‘choice’ but of basic identity. Both husbands and wives, but particularly the latter tended to be only children and thus not brought up to the idea of a famiiy as a central justification for life. Evidently, in this as in many other spheres, early concepts remain crucial throughout life. Gillian Tindall
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