The Future of Dual-Career Marriage

In view of the complex struggles in which these couples engage—with each other as well as with employers, children, relatives, and employees—it is remarkable that dual-career marriages even exist. But do they have a future? This study in itself cannot adequately answer this question; only intact couples were interviewed, and only past and current experiences could be analyzed. However, several findings can be put together to generate some hypotheses for future research.

In contrast to the normative model of the traditional marriage, the majority of couples in this study did not base a family division of labor on separate spheres of activity and experience. The traditional role of bread-

winner and, by extension, husband is shared by both men and women. Neither can claim that status solely, by virtue of equivalent career demands, and neither can be relegated to the position of nonproductive spouse. Thus, the traditional implicit exchange between husbands and wives—he supports the family economically and in exchange she maintains the home—is abrogated. The couples in this study demonstrate that an independent income brings to the surface questions of equity and symmetry that are largely unheard of and often actively discouraged in the traditional family. The keeping of separate financial accounts makes the equity issue more visible. Husbands can no longer legitimate their authority over financial and political matters on the basis of their greater experience with or knowledge of the outside world. In dual-career marriages, both partners have intimate knowledge of that world.

Following the logic of the traditional model, the dual-career marriage has no future. Aside from the stresses of two careers, the disruption of the traditional exchange between husbands and wives and the radical break with a "complementarity of roles" (Parsons and Bales, 1955) should be enough to subject the marriage to unbearable pressures. When the function of the wife as provider of childcare and early childhood socialization is diminished as substantially as it is in the families interviewed here, then the fate of the dual-career marriage would seem bleak.^[4]

[4] A number of readers and audiences to whom this research has been presented reacted quite negatively to the strategies some of these dual-career couples adopt in dealing with money, household affairs, and children. Many of these people, including some partners in academic dual-career marriages, objected that separate accounting systems reflect "crass materialism" and a step toward marital dissolution. The vehemence of their reactions reveals first, I would suggest, their understandable ignorance of the circumstances of corporate employment. As the dual-career couples convincingly argue in Chapter 2, separate accounts are a standard business practice for higher-levelcorporate employees—for clothing, entertainment, travel, and so on—and it seems logical to extend this practice into the home. Second, such reactions reveal that money and financial decision making are touchy issues in most marriages. The departure from traditional practice that having separate accounts represents cannot help but highlight the question of money and equity in even the most liberal of households. Finally, such negative reactions demonstrate how deeply the normative model of marriage is ingrained in our consciousness. While not exactly knee-jerk in nature, the facile rejection of the dual-career/separate accounting/hired-labor model of marriage reveals how much we are all influenced by socialization and how difficult it is to question ideological (magical) assumptions and processes (misdirection).

I propose an alternative hypothesis. Rather than assuming that the traditional material exchange between husbands and wives is a necessary element of marital longevity, we might posit that the dissolution of separate spheres ought to give the marital bond a more creative and supportive foundation and encourage those same elements that traditional theories present as essential to marital longevity: intimacy, trust, and nurturance. When the underlying material exchange disappears, these elements no longer disguise in reverent tones the economic dominance of husbands over wives but come to have fuller meaning. In short, a dual-career marriage has the potential to be a more rather than a less durable relationship than the normative model.

Lest this proposition be interpreted as utopian, the framework of this question must be emphasized. First, dual-career couples are a special and contingent category of families. They are part of a social and economic elite within a capitalist society, and as such do not represent a modal form of marriage.

Second, the concern of dual-career couples for the marital bond—something that family traditionalists certainly would not have expected with women's employment—in some ways shares the contractual character of other kinds of careers. Couples, for example, deal with their individual and shared incomes in a way more remi-

niscent of a business partnership than of communal enterprises. Although they clearly do not calculate profit and loss, neither do they place as great an emphasis on "ours" as has been the case in traditional marriages. These couples also "subcontract" more and more family services in an effort to sustain the family unit and with it the careers they cherish. Thus, they convert more and more of their lives into commodities (goods and labor), while trying to protect the relationship they have with each other from being dissolved into a monetary exchange. The private purchase and consumption of those commodities allows a degree of intimacy and personal control, which is the saving grace offered by the first two careers. Thus, the dual-career family remains a "haven in a heartless world" (Lasch, 1977) only because it has been sufficiently successful in the heartless world to financially afford a haven.