Working Couples

Rhona Rapoport, Robert N. Rapoport, Rhona Rapoport, Robert N. Rapoport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000574029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1978 Working Couples deals with husbands and wives who both hold paid jobs. The editors, the late Robert N. and Rhona Rapoport, had established themselves as well-respected authorities on dual-career families, and in this study they call upon other specialists in the field to apply their research experience to the consideration of the particular problems confronting working couples at the time. They discuss how some of these issues had arisen and analyse how they were being dealt with in a number of contexts.

Working couples at the time were subject to constraints of various kinds in meeting the challenges they faced, and there were many who rejected the lifestyle on these grounds; but there were many others for whom it worked. Numerous families were attempting to operate the pattern in new ways. Both may have separate jobs, and her income may not only be separate from his, but in some cases larger and more reliable. Such a situation creates its own problems, which need to be resolved. The authors look at and clarify some of the generic issues and discover which resolutions have been satisfactory, as well as the various devices created for helping dual-worker families to function.

Key Processes

1 Finding Two Jobs¹

Michael Berger, Martha Foster and Barbara Strudler Wallston

Job-seeking is difficult for anyone who takes his or her work seriously. In addition to worrying about getting a job to meet one’s financial obligations, applicants often have to offer themselves to potential employers again and again, to be evaluated, and to risk being rejected. And in this context, rejection often leads to feelings of worthlessness and depression - the individual’s worth very often being measured by others and by herself/himself in terms of his/her marketability (Sennett and Cobb, 1972).

People take their work seriously for different reasons, and job-seeking means different things to people with different orientations toward their work. For some people, work is primarily a means of meeting financial obligations. For these people, the money is important and the work itself something which doesn’t especially matter - ‘it’s just a job.’ For other individuals, both financial payoff and the sense that one is good at one’s work matters. For still others, work is a central concern of their lives, something they must do. For these people, work is a calling; in important ways, such individuals define themselves by their work.

While job-seeking is difficult for the individual applicant, it is an even more complicated process for the dual-worker couple. Such couples face the task of obtaining two positions that will (ideally) permit them to: (1) live in the same geographical area; (2) co-ordinate their schedules so that necessary household maintenance and child-care tasks can be carried out; (3) co-ordinate schedules so that they have free time to spend with each other, and time in which each spouse is free to do the things he or she likes to do individually; (4) get what they want from the particular job; and (5) satisfy their longer range career goals. Obviously, this isn’t easy to do; the demands of work and family often conflict even in standard conventional situations, and for working couples the potential conflicts are multiplied. In the western world, dual-worker couples try to manage these conflicts within the context of a societal expectation that the careers of men are more important than the careers of women. Traditionally, men but not women are expected to be devoted to work. A man’s status is primarily defined by his occupation, a woman’s is not.

Traditionally, these conflicts were settled or diminished by a gender-based division of labor and responsibility within the household: husbands devoted themselves to their work and wives to the house and the children. This is probably still the solution most frequently found in our culture even where both parties have careers (Poloma and Garland, 1971; Oakley, 1974; Rapoport and Rapoport, 1971). But it is not a solution which meets the needs of all couples, and alternate solutions are being devised and explored.

There is need for such alternatives, since couples whose needs are not met by the traditional division of labor vary widely among themselves. Much of this chapter will be devoted to an exploration of how the experience of dual-worker couples in the job-seeking process is affected by the various factors which differentiate between such couples. We shall list and briefly discuss these factors:

1. All dual-worker couples do not share the same orientation toward work. In addition, within some dual-worker dyads, spouses share a similar orientation toward work; in others, they do not. A dual-worker couple may be composed of a spouse who views his/her work as a profession and a spouse who views his/her work as just a job. Or, both spouses may view their work as professional, in which case we call the couple a ‘dual-career’ couple.
2. The comparative status of the spouses within the marriage differs across dual-worker couples. In some couples, spouses hold equal-status position; in others, they do not.
3. Couples differ in whether, at any particular point in time, they regard the careers of both spouses as being of equal or of differing importance. For example, one couple may believe that both careers are equally important and therefore attempt to maximize the career development of both spouses. By contrast, another couple may see the husband’s career as more important and will try to further his career first.
4. Dual-worker couples vary in terms of whether both spouses enter the job market at the same or at different times, and in terms of whether spouses are at similar or different career stages. Characteristically, men enter the labor market seeking full-time continuous employment at about the same point in their lives - after the completion of schooling or other training. Among working married women, there is much greater variation both as to when they enter the labor force and as to whether they work continuously. For example, it is quite common for married women to complete professional training and then to absent themselves from the labor force for years in order to bear and raise children, returning only after the children are in school. Such a pattern is almost unheard of among men. Behind this difference in career patterns lie two widely held societal expectations: that all (or nearly all) men should work continuously and at full-time employment, while women are not expected to do so; and that child care should be carried out at home by the child’s mother (Bernard, 1971).
5. Working couples with children face more complex considerations in job-seeking than do childless working couples.

The remainder of this chapter will examine the joint job-seeking process in greater detail, paying particular attention to the ways in which the factors we have just discussed affect the job-seeking process. We shall begin by describing our own research. While it has been limited to studies of job-seeking among dual-career couples, our discussion will focus upon issues relevant to all dual-worker couples.

Two separate research studies exploring the job-seeking process in dual-career couples were conducted in 1974--5. One study was a questionnaire survey of 160 couples in which one spouse had recently obtained a doctorate in either psychology or biological science and in which the other spouse also held the terminal (highest) degree in his or her own field. The second study involved interviewing 15 dual-career couples.² We required that participants in both studies had jointly looked for jobs in the three years prior to the study.

There were few prior data available to help us conceptualize the job-seeking process. We began by looking at job-seeking as a process in which couples first developed a set of guidelines as to how they would look for jobs. For example: Would they apply all over the country or only in certain geographic areas? Would they apply simultaneously or wait until the other had obtained a job ? How would they choose among the positions which were finally offered ?

For some couples, their initial strategies worked. For others, however, their initial set of guidelines failed to work; they either were unable to obtain acceptable positions or they had second thoughts about initial agreements. For example, a husband who had agreed to let his wife decide where they would move found that he was, in fact, unwilling to follow her when the situation demanded it. In such cases, couples were likely to have to develop new strategies. Given this conceptualization of the job-seeking process, we were interested in the factors couples took into account as they developed their job-seeking strategies, in the actual strategies which couples employed, in the circumstances which caused couples to change their strategies, and in the final job-seeking strategies adopted by couples who did change their guidelines.

One important factor which greatly complicated the job-seeking process was the timing of the final decision. In our thinking about the job-seeking process we had assumed that at the point where the couple made a final decision, all interesting jobs that had been available to them would still be available and the task would simply involve the choice among them. However, the job market, particularly when there are few jobs and many applicants, does not work that way. Rather, decisions about whether to accept or reject a particular job often have to be made before the relevant information about other potential opportunities is available. While the timing of job offers may well be a problem for individual applicants, it is more likely to cause difficulties for dual-worker couples who must coordinate their decisions. Indeed, over half the couples we studied indicated that this had been a problem for them.

In addition to the issues just raised, our personal experiences as members of dual-career couples seeking jobs led us to examine several other questions that we felt to be relevant. One of these was the issue of the amount and kinds of support available to dual-career couples during the job-seeking process. We were struck, during our own job-seeking experiences, by the fact that there seemed to be no norms for handling the job-seeking process as a couple. This was upsetting and stressful to us, but when we turned to know how a professional spouse fits into the picture. In particular, how respond. We had all learned during professional training that each individual should seek the best possible position. No one, however, seemed to know how a professional spouse fit into the picture. In particular, how were we to deal with conflict that arose when the choice of the best position of one spouse would preclude the other spouse’s choosing his/her best position? Additionally, we found that although the uncertainties of seeking employment created stresses and tensions that usually would be shared with one’s spouse, the experiences we were having while job-seeking made it difficult for us to seek support from each other. When both spouses are feeling stressed and a major source of the stress is the legitimate needs of the other person, that person isn’t likely to be an available source of comfort. It is hard to side with your spouse against yourself. It is also difficult to feel good about standing in your spouse’s way. So we were very concerned about the support which couples sought out and received while job-seeking, and in the effects of the job-seeking process on other aspects of the marriage.

In our research, the various initial job-seeking decision rules which couples used were classified by the researchers into three categories: (1) traditional; (2) non-traditional; and (3) egalitarian. Strategies in which the wife followed the husband, that is, in which husbands first located a position and then wives looked in the same area, we classified as traditional. Strategies in which husbands followed wives we considered non-traditional. Several different strategies were considered to be egalitarian. For example, in some marriages each spouse independently looked for jobs and then the couple accepted the best joint option. In others, the spouses applied as a unit to the same employers or in the same geographic area. And still other couples alternated as to whose career would take precedence, following a strategy of ‘this time, we will go where you want to go and next time we’ll go where I want.’

Slightly over half the initial decision rules were classified as egalitarian. Among those couples who did not adopt egalitarian strategies, women were much more likely to follow men than the reverse. However, only a quarter of the final decision rules were egalitarian. For their final decision, most of the couples chose the traditional strategy. What had happened during the job-seeking process to cause this change?

The major cause of this change seemed to be the character of the job market. Many of the couples who ultimately chose a traditional decision said that they had done so because only the male had been offered a job at the time they had to make a decision. These couples attributed their decision not to their own desires but to situational factors. Had the job market permitted it, they would have maintained their egalitarian strategy. Other data support the validity of this interpretation of their behavior. As part of the questionnaire, we included several simulated job-seeking incidents which required the spouses to choose among several possible decisions. In response to the simulated incidents, a high proportion (three-quarters) of the subjects chose egalitarian strategies. When they changed to non-egalitarian strategies, they did so in response to the situational pressures of time and the nature of the job market.

Couple responses to the simulated incidents seem consistent with their actual job-seeking behavior. Couples might want to follow an egalitarian strategy but found themselves with only one job offer, usually for the male. Thus, they were forced to choose between adopting a traditional strategy or facing the possibility that neither spouse would find a job. However, to outsiders who would be aware only of the choice made and not of the process by which the choice was made, it might look as if the couple had preferred the traditional decision. The issue of how the decision looks to others is important beyond the relevance to the couples themselves. Employers, observing such behavior, have often justified the non-employment or under-employment of married women on the grounds that these women are not as devoted to their own careers as men and will sacrifice them to follow their husbands. Our data suggest that, in part, it is the nature of the job market which gives credence to this employer belief: given a tight job market in which men are more likely to get jobs, married women who strongly value their own careers may nevertheless end up following their husbands, despite the fact that they are as committed to their careers as their husbands are, and that they do not make the sacrifice so readily, but only under duress.

Let us examine the stresses involved in this joint job-seeking process for dual-worker couples. One such stress is the likelihood that couples may need to deal with issues of competition and power within the marriage. The very need to work out a job-seeking strategy, to decide how the differing demands of the two work-careers are to be reconciled, is likely to make the issue of power within the marriage salient. Power conflicts are especially salient for couples in which both careers are seen as being of equal importance and in which both spouses are devoted to their work. For these couples, unless it is possible to obtain positions which advance the careers of both spouses, the success (career advancement) of one spouse is likely to be at the expense of the other. Both our studies and previous studies of dual-career couples (Holmstrom, 1972) have found this to be a common predicament.

Moreover, since both spouses are heavily invested in their careers, giving in to one’s spouse and giving up on one’s own career advancement is likely to be viewed as a loss of professional status. People seem to assume that if one is a real professional, one will not give up on one’s career advancement. Individuals in dual-career marriages have commented that deciding to limit their own career advancement by following their spouse has meant that their colleagues take them and their work less seriously. And for individuals who define themselves through their work, the loss of work-related status is a serious matter. The difficulties of this situation were well put by one woman in our study: ‘I question the viability of (traditional) marriages when two individuals have a strong career commitment. In our case we decided not to live apart since how can a relationship be maintained with one member 3,000 miles from the other? So, I went with my husband. Yet, I felt a high degree of resentment and hostility having to “give up everything” and seek a job elsewhere.’

This situation is even further complicated for couples in which the wife’s career is given precedence. It is rare for this to happen, and even rarer for the couple to acknowledge that they have chosen to do this (Poloma and Garland, 1971). Indeed, several women in the questionnaire study noted that one satisfying aspect of the job-seeking process for them was in discovering that their husband ‘really was egalitarian.’ No man in our study made a similar comment about...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: Why a Book on Working Couples?
• Key Processes
• Prospects
• Index