From Dual-Earner to Dual-Career Families and Back

HISTORICAL data indicate that dual-earner families are not a new phenom-enon. Reasons for the apparent failure to take this tradition into account in the literature, as well as the interest in the dual-career segment among these families are discussed. Women’s continuing commitment to family roles, as shown by their lesser attachment to the labor market in terms of full-time employment, is shown. The implications of this commitment to the issue of household division of labor is examined, along with the contributions the following articles make to the literature. Journal issues devoted to dual-earner or, more commonly, dual-career families, tend to suggest that there is something relatively new about the phenomenon of wives joining their husbands as breadwinners. Such an interpretation of the labor force participation data, however, can be misleading. There has been an increase in the proportion such families constitute of all families. By 1978, a majority (31%) of all married couples, Hayghe (forthcoming) reports in his informative summary, were of this type, with a third (33%) having the husband as only earner. A decade earlier, 45 % of married couples, still a high proportion, were of this type, with an equal proportion having the husband-only breadwinner structure. The remaining cou-ples were without earners, or the husband was not an earner. Thus, the big change in recent decades is in the proportion of traditional economic arrangement families, not in the propor-tion of dual-earner families. It is true that earlier U.S. Census figures present a picture of wives devoted to domestic concerns. In 1890, the first year fo