ROOTS OF CHANGE

A majority of women work. Can the family manage the caring tasks while attaining equity among its members? Can women find equity in the workplace? Social work faces both issues as it deals with women clients and internally as a female-intensive occupation. Dimensions of the problems and an action agenda are presented. The model of the patriarchal family-the man working outside the home for pay, the wife working inside the home not for pay-was promoted and idealized in the second half of the nineteenth century, but it began to erode in the middle of this century. By 1988, 68.5 percent of husband-wife families had two earners and two thirds of all mothers of children under age 13 worked outside the home, 4 million of them with children under age 1. Only one family in four fits the traditional patriar-chal model (Sorrentino, 1990). The consequences of this revolution have yet to be addressed. Who will take on the work in the domestic sphere, which was once the domain of women, now that women are ever increas-ingly in the labor force? What are the consequences for the family as both power relationships and the division of labor are shifted? And what needs to be addressed to make the work-place more equitable in the treatment of women compared with men? Can the traditional family model survive these strains? And what must social work do, both as a largely female occu-pation and one that deals with a largely female clientele