Description
In a dual-earner marriage, why is a wife’s paid employment much less likely to be defined as breadwinning than her husband’s? This book uses data from a study of 153 dual-earner couples to examine the allocation of responsibility for breadwinning and the social construction of gender in their marriages. The author carefully distinguishes breadwinning from paid employment and uses the insights of gender construction theory to illuminate that distinction. Gender construction theory sees gender as a system of social relations that is continually and actively created in the social interactions of daily life. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, this book demonstrates that despite the prevalence of dual-earner marriages, breadwinning is still widely used as a boundary that creates gender by distinguishing the meaning of men’s employment from that of women’s.
