The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America

by Kathleen Gerson

In a rapidly changing world, their efforts to let go of rigid, fixed roles—and replace them with more flexible forms of providing emotional and financial support—made the crucial difference.1

Josh and his peers are children of the gender revolution.2 They watched their mothers go to work and their parents invent a mosaic of new family forms. As they embark on their own journeys through adulthood, they take for granted options their parents barely imagined and their grandparents could not envision, but they also face dilemmas that decades of prior change have not resolved. Shifts in women’s place and new forms of adult partnerships have created more options, but they also pose unprecedented conflicts and challenges. Is it possible to meld a lasting, egalitarian intimate bond with a satisfying work life, or will gender conflicts, fragile relationships, and uncertain job prospects overwhelm such possibilities?

Coming of age in an era of more fluid marriages, less stable work careers, and profound shifts in mothers’ ties to the workplace shaped the experiences of a new generation.

On the job, workers continue to experience enormous pressures to give uninterrupted full-time, and often overtime, commitment not just to move up but even stay in place. In the home, privatized caretaking leaves parents, especially mothers, coping with seemingly endless demands and unattainable standards.

Regardless of their own family experiences, today’s young women and men have grown up in revolutionary times. For better or worse, they have inherited new options and questions about women’s and men’s proper places.13 Now making the transition to adulthood, they have no well-worn paths to follow. Marriage no longer offers the promise of permanence, nor is it the only option for bearing and rearing children, but there

Work and family shifts have created an ambiguous mix of new options and new insecurities, with growing conflicts between work and parenting, autonomy and commitment, time and money. Amid these social conflicts and contradictions, young women and men must search for new answers and develop innovative responses.

Even more surprising, while a majority of children from intact homes think this was best, two out of five feel their parents might have been better off splitting up.

They care about how their families unfolded, not what they looked like at any one point in time. Their narratives show that family life is a film, not a snapshot. Families are not a stable set of relationships frozen in time but a dynamic process that changes daily, monthly, and yearly as children grow.

By changing the focus from family types to family pathways, we can transcend the seemingly intractable debate pitting “traditional” homes against other family forms.

importance of processes of family change, the ways that social contexts shape a family’s trajectory, and people’s active efforts to cope with and draw meaning from their changing circumstances.

What explains why some family pathways remain stable or improve, while others stay mired in difficulty or take a downward course? Gender flexibility in breadwinning and caretaking provides a key to answering this question.

gender flexibility in earning and caring provided the most effective way for families to transcend the economic challenges and marital conundrums that imperiled their children’s well-being.

create lasting, egalitarian partnerships, but they are also doubtful about their chances of reaching this goal. Whether or not their parents stayed together, more than nine out of ten hope to rear children in the context of a satisfying lifelong bond. Far from rejecting the value of commitment, almost everyone wants

Their affirmation of the value of commitment does not, however, reflect a desire for a relationship based on clear, fixed separate spheres for mothers and fathers. Instead, most want to create a flexible, egalitarian partnership with considerable room for personal autonomy. Whether reared by homemaker-breadwinning, dual-earner, or single parents, most women and men want a committed bond where they share both paid work and family caretaking.

The rise of self-reliant women, who stress emotional and economic autonomy, and neotraditional men, who grant women’s choice to work but also want to maintain their position as the breadwinning specialist, portends a new work-family divide.

New generations neither wish to turn back to earlier gender patterns nor to create a brave new world of disconnected individuals.

Most of all, my informants saw their homes as works in progress, not as static “forms.” In the long run, they focused on the longer-term consequences of parental choices, not on the specific form or type of home these choices produced at any one moment in time.

In the polarized “family values” debate, these contending views point to different causes and different solutions, but they share a common focus on family structure.

When fathers had promising work prospects and mothers did not, their children are especially likely to believe everyone benefited when a mother stayed home.

Despite the popular fear that employed mothers deprive their children of essential maternal attention, no one cited a mother’s job as a cause of neglect.

Young women and men reared by work-committed mothers generally perceive clear benefits, which outweigh vague, hypothetical losses.

Looking back over the course of their parents’ marriages, children are more concerned with the quality of the bond their parents forged than whether or not their parents stayed together.

Since even stable marriages face unexpected challenges, the effort to remain steadfastly committed to earlier patterns can bring its own unavoidable but unfortunate consequences.

These narratives show how families can take divergent pathways even when they appear to share a similar form. Although static concepts such as “homemaker-breadwinner,” “dual-earner,” and “single-parent” tend to dominate the debate about family and gender change, children can have different experiences and different responses to growing up in families with apparently similar “structures.” Over time, similar “types” of households can follow different paths, and children reared in different types of homes can share a similar outlook on how well or poorly their families fared. Children take account of the context in which family relationships unfold, and the lessons they ultimately draw from their experiences depend on the longer-term consequences of their parents’ and others’ choices. In the long run, children view their families as pathways, not as static types.

Across all of these family types, children focused on whether or not their families provided emotional and economic support, mutually respectful relationships, and caring bonds.

If family form provides such limited clues about how children view their family experiences, what does? Across different family forms, the work-family strategies of parents (and other caretakers) are central to shaping the direction of their family pathway.16 Most families faced unanticipated events that undermined rigidly divided ways of organizing breadwinning and caretaking. Gender flexibility gave all types of families a wider array of options and resources to respond to these challenges. The ability and willingness to cross and blur the boundaries between earning a living and caring for others provides the key to understanding why some homes became more supportive and others less so.

Like fathers who found it hard to live up to the “good provider” standard, some of my interviewees had mothers who were unhappy at home and frustrated by the pressures of “intensive mothering.”

Employed wives did more than make demands; they also enabled fathers to seek new options if their work circumstances deteriorated. When

IT TAKES A VILLAGE While some argue it takes a marriage—and only a marriage—to raise a child, many children are certain it helped to have a village as well.12 Support from real and fictive kin expanded their material and emotional resources. In the short run, care networks provided a safety net amid rough times. In the longer run, they offered sustained contributions of time and money. At moments of crises in the relationships or economic fortunes of parents, these additional breadwinners

Children from middle-class homes also relied on other caretakers, although they were more likely to be paid workers.16 When these arrangements fostered close, reciprocal relationships, they were as important as the support of kin.

Rather than feeling deprived of a “normal” home, they felt fortunate to receive care and attention from people who loved them genuinely and generously. Since contemporary nuclear families increasingly experience unpredictable (and unavoidable) economic and caretaking squeezes, they are not—and cannot be—self-sufficient entities. When all goes well for families, the wider supports on which they depend may be invisible; but when families encounter economic, practical, and interpersonal difficulties, the crucial contributions from those who dwell just outside this small circle become more apparent. The children who experienced improving family pathways treasured the help given by real and fictive extended kin. It made little difference if care came from grandparents, other relatives, or paid helpers. What mattered is that these “villages” cushioned the blows of unexpected change, provided children with a sense of stability in uncertain times, and helped families overcome the crises parents could not resolve on their own.19

Yet rising family fortunes did not depend on luck, but rather on how new social conditions allowed parents and other caretakers to reorganize their households in more flexible ways. By blurring the boundaries between breadwinning and caretaking, mothers could seek an economic base at work, fathers could become more involved in caring for their children, and partners could establish more independent lives and more sharing, equitable relationships.

The same dynamic contributing to overinvolvement among mothers could leave fathers estranged and insufficiently involved.

In the long run, reluctant traditionalism held unforeseen consequences for parents and their children. Though few doubted their parents tried to do the right thing, they witnessed the ways good intentions can backfire when they conflict with more deeply felt but unacknowledged wishes. When mothers were pushed or pulled away from the workplace despite their desires, and fathers were pressured to work too much, the result could be declining parental morale, rising domestic strains, and eroding family cohesion.

These “lost fathers” did not—and often could not—fulfill traditional breadwinning responsibilities, but they were also unable or unwilling to develop new ways of providing care.

And while the gender revolution makes it possible to achieve a more egalitarian balance between home and work, demanding workplaces and lagging child care supports leave many parents overwhelmed and stressed on both fronts.

These shifts also make flexibility in paid work and care work not only desirable but essential. The erosion of single-earner paychecks, the rising expectations for modern marriages, and the expanding options for and pressures on working women all require partners to invent new ways of combining caretaking and breadwinning. In this irrevocably changed social context, flexible approaches to work and parenting help all types of families overcome economic uncertainties and interpersonal tensions. On the other hand, inflexibility in the face of new social realities leaves all sorts of families ill prepared to cope.

The direction of a family’s pathway reflects how well—or poorly—parents and other caretakers were able to develop flexible gender strategies to cope with unexpected but increasingly pervasive changes in relationships, jobs, and child rearing. By creating more harmonious and egalitarian bonds, a more satisfying balance between work and home, or an expanded network of care, parents and other caretakers enhanced a child’s sense of support. When caretakers held onto fixed gender arrangements that no longer provided personal satisfaction, marital cohesion, or sufficient economic resources, a child’s support eroded.

Most strongly hope to create a lasting relationship and to balance home and work. Whether reared in a single-parent, dual-earner, or more traditional home, the vast majority want a permanent bond, but they do not wish for that bond to be defined by rigid gender distinctions. Instead, they seek a third path that combines aspects of the past, such as respect for lifelong commitment to an intimate partner, with arrangements that better fit modern contingencies, such as flexibility and gender equality. They want to create enduring and egalitarian partnerships that allow them to strike a personal balance between earning and caregiving.

Young women and men face three intertwined questions about their futures. Do they wish to create a permanent bond with one intimate partner or retain the option to switch partners or remain on their own? What kind of balance would they like to strike between paid work and family life? And how would they like to share the challenges of earning a living and rearing children with a partner or others?

FIGURE 5.1 Work and family ideals, by gender and parents’ family destination.

For my interviewees, “egalitarian” does not mean a rigidly organized division of everything all the time. It refers instead to a long-term commitment to equitable, flexible, and mutual support in domestic tasks and workplace ties.7

Younger workers are more likely than members of the boomer generation to be family-centric or dual-centric (that is, to place their priorities on both career and family) rather than work-centric.

Although women in particular desire equality, most men agree. In fact, a recent survey found “sharing household chores” now ranks third in importance on a list of items generally associated with successful marriages (with 62 percent saying sharing housework is very important to marital success, compared to 47 percent fifteen years ago), well ahead of adequate income (53 percent) and even having children (41 percent). Equally important, there are no significant differences in the views of men and women, whether single or married.13

the percentage of first-time marriages preceded by cohabitation has risen substantially, from about 10 percent in the mid-1970s to over 50 percent by the mid-1990s, with an even higher percentage for remarriages. Among women, the percentage who cohabited by the time they reached their late thirties rose from around 30 percent to close to 50 percent in the same time period. These “trial marriages,” as Sheldon Danziger calls them, are more socially accepted than ever.9

If women worry about the economic, social, and psychological risks of depending too much on someone else, men are more apprehensive about their financial ability to support others.

Their aspirations are converging, even if their strategies do not.

Men’s fallback positions reverse rather than mimic women’s. Though women disproportionately favor self-reliance, men favor more traditional patterns. They are prone to stress their own economic responsibilities and prerogatives, even if a marriage contains two earners.4

With few exceptions, neotraditional men do not believe mothers are inherently more qualified than fathers to care for children; but they do believe parents are inherently more qualified than other caregivers.

Yet almost every young man rejected the idea of staying at home, even if it were possible.18