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Parental Adaptations to Maternal Employment
Parental Adaptations to Maternal Employment
Elva Poznanski, M.D., Annette Maxey, M.A., and Gerald Marsden, Ed.D.
Research on maternal employment has been undertaken primarily from the vantage point of its more or less immediate impact on child behavior and socialization. In many studies, social class and family stability variables were found more intimately related to facets of child development than maternal employment per se. Maternal employment, however, has been positively correlated with school achievement and intellectual attainment, with increased dependency, and with problems of sexual identity (Poznanski et al., 1970). Little has yet been done to explicate the processes and mechanisms which account for these findings. This deficiency is, in part, attributable to the kind of questions which have been asked about maternal employment and to the methods by which investigators have attempted to answer them. Most studies of maternal employment have used techniques of data gathering (e.g., questionnaires) that facilitate the inclusion of large numbers of subjects. These methods have the virtue of producing results that are measurably reliable, broadly descriptive, and normative in nature, but they are not well adapted to exploring issues of mechanism and process. While the search for correlations between maternal employment and aspects of the child's personality development is important, it is, by itself, a narrow and incomplete approach. After all, one cannot be certain that any of the relations mentioned above reflect simple causal factors unless one has also considered more complex relationships. One possible indirect relationship between maternal Dr. Poznanski and Dr. Marsden are in the Department ofPsychiatry, Children's Psychiatric Hospital, Ullimmity of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Annette Maxey is in the Department of Social Work, Georgia lnstuute ofMental Health, Atlanta. The authors wish to thank Daniel Chapman, M.D., a pediatrician whose psychological interest and assistance made this study possible. Reprints may be requestedfrom Dr. Poznanski.
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employment and its apparent effects on children is the attitude of the father toward the wife's work, its meanings for the family, the dynamic impact of these meanings on other aspects of parents' per. sonality functioning and thus on their behavior, and finally the ad. justments made within the family in response to these attitudes and meanings. In this light, it is unfortunate that the existence of the father and the logic of using the family as the unit of study have been virtually ignored in maternal employment research. Since previous work has not related maternal employment to the intimate and individual complexities of marriage and family life. we believed that an elaborate, hypothesis-testing study was prerna ture. This paper is a preliminary descriptive report which we hope will provide a crude but helpful map of the territory, pointing toward useful hypotheses for examination by more rigorous meth ods. We chose to study maternal employment in some depth as it occurs in a few presumably well-functioning and typical families. And we sought a group of families which was relatively homogeneous with respect to race and social class to minimize the complex. ity of data 'interpretation. Because our study was based on interview data, and because the children in these families were too young to be interviewed (for reasons detailed below), we were not able to secure information from the children themselves. Thus, our study, too, falls short of being a true family study. METHOD
We required that families included in the study be intact, that both spouses be regularly employed outside the home for 30 or more hours a week, and that the wives had worked at their jobs for a minimum of 6 months prior to participating in the study. Families in which one or more spouses were students were also eliminated, since maternal employment in the pursuit of an academic degree or in temporary support of a husband working for a degree is al most certainly a psychologically different enterprise from maternal employment in other circumstances. We also required that all sub jects be Caucasian and that they fall in the range from middlemiddle to upper-middle socioeconomic class, as assessed by the Hollingshead scale (1957). Finally, we required that each couple have a child by their current marriage who was 5 years old or less. This criterion served to insure that spouses' current adjustments to maternal employment would have been made under the psyche logical pressure imposed by the presence of a young child, thai
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these adjustments would still be fresh and available to study, and that all subjects would have had to deal with certain common problems in achieving whatever adjustments they had made. Families were selected from the patient roster of a pediatrician in private practice, thus insuring that they were not chosen on the basis of referral for problems with their marriages or their children. When information from the roster indicated that a family might meet our criteria, the pediatrician's nurse called the family to inquire if they were willing to have us call them. If so, one of the interviewers telephoned to explain the research, to check the selection criteria, and to arrange for the first interview. From approximately 500 families on the roster, 29 appeared to be potentially eligible. The pediatrician requested that we not involve 2 of these families, 3 others had moved out of the area, and 5 were not interested in participating (a refusal rate of only 17%!). Thus we could proceed with 19 families. None of these refused participation, but most failed to meet either our socioeconomic criterion or the criterion that the woman have worked for a period of 6 months prior to the study. Indeed, throughout the screening we were struck by the high incidence of very brief and sometimes repetitive periods of employment of women with preschool children. We were left with six couples for study. Each couple was seen in three interviews for a total of approximately 6 hours, the first a joint interview with both spouses and the two (female) authors. Then, at a later date, one interviewer saw each spouse individually. On completion of the interviewing, the authors met to review the material on each couple and to formulate categories for a more systematic sifting of the data. When the yield of this impressionistic analysis seemed exhausted, we went over all the material again in terms of the categories that seemed to capture important dimensions of the relation between maternal employment and family life for these subjects. The results of this analysis are reported below in tJ:e form of a general discussion liberally supplemented by clinical vignettes. FINDINGS
The six couples had been married from 2 to 7 years, and only one spouse had had a previous marriage. The fathers' ages ranged from 22 to 30, and all the mothers were in their 20s, with the exception of one woman. Five of the couples had but one child, the other had two, and the children ranged in age from 9 months to
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3 years. Of the couples, four men and four women had held their first significant jobs in high school and had been more or less can. stantly employed when not in school since that time. The other two women, and one of the remaining men, had begun to work while in college. Thus, all the women had substantial work histories pre· dating their marriages; employment was a long-standing part of their life style, and not solely a response to pressures arising after marnage. An Extension of the Marital Arena
Our subjects' predominant and rather offhand explanation of rna ternal employment was its augmentation of family finances. Butir was clearly more than that, and perhaps the most striking genera\' finding was that from the viewpoint of the marriage and famih life, maternal employment constituted an extension of the marits, arena. It sometimes served to cement and integrate a marriag' relation by draining off latent frustrations otherwise likely to fester dangerously within the confines of the more narrowly domestic sit· uation. Or it focused and magnified existing schisms or tended to fracture an already brittle marital relationship. For the Westmans, maternal employment served to enhance in· timacy. The Westmans were a recently married couple in their early 20s. Their only child, a 12-month-old son, was an appealing. well-formed child who vigorously played with toys appropriate to his age during the interviewing. Both worked at the same hospital and shared similar administrative responsibilities. They drove to and from work together and provided each other with genuine emotional support on problems related to their jobs. And their togetherness extended to a pattern of going as a family on week ends to shop and pay their bills. But Mrs. Westman's employment in a job so similar to her hus band's also afforded them an opportunity to hone the edge of their mutual competitiveness. Mrs. Westman had an R.N. degree, while Mr. Westman did not, having taken a general 2-year college course. Because he lacked an R.N. degree, Mr. Westman held a somewhat lower job classification at the hospital, and this differen tial in job status crept into their argumentative banter during our interviews. Mr. Westman observed, "There's no R.N.'s allowed 011 my ward," and Mrs. Westman commented, "I feel I should make more money [than he] because I deserve more because I went to school." Mrs. Westman used her employment to cast aspersions on her husband's capacity to provide for the family in other ways, too
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When she spoke of working not because she wanted to, but because of financial need, Mr. Westman looked hurt. Perhaps because of his concerns about this issue, Mr. Westman routinely arose weekend mornings with the baby and allowed his wife to sleep late. We concluded that Mrs. Westman's financial-need rationale for her employment was only part of the story. She appeared chronically depressed, and her depression seemed rooted in her early separation from her mother. Her mother had "given her away" to a childless sister when she was 10 or II months old "because she had too many children," and Mrs. Westman had grown up in a small rural community where she was well acquainted with her biological mother and the siblings who continued to live with her. It was true that she was unhappy with her job, that the demands and responsibilities of her work allowed little satisfaction of her dependency needs and may have intensified her depression. Both her R.N. degree and her job title provided a basis for needed self-esteem, and she took satisfaction in these tangible representations of her success in rising above her lower-class origins. In contrast, the Johnsons' marital relationship was beset by difficulties with intimacy, and Mrs. johnson's employment neatly helped them to dilute what might otherwise have been a volatile and intolerable aspect of marriage. The Johnsons presented themselves at our offices with a courtship air. They walked hand in hand, and Mr. Johnson frequently put his arm around his wife. During the joint interview, too, he was solicitous of her in an uncommonly gallant fashion. The Johnsons had agreed prior to their marriage that Mrs. Johnson would continue working after the arrival of children. Mrs. Johnson, a youthful-appearing 46-year-old woman, had three children, now young adults, by a previous marriage. This was Mr. johnson's first marriage. The Johnsons had two young sons, age 18 months and 36 months, and hoped for more children. We were surprised to learn that in both the jobs Mrs. Johnson had held since her marriage to Mr. Johnson, a constant feature of her work had been night employment. Mr. Johnson had held three different jobs, and in each he had worked during the day. They explained this arrangement of their work lives in terms of the children needing one parent constantly at home. Yet we soon realized that there were other important reasons, reasons rooted in their own needs. Mrs. Johnson remarked that "it seems natural to ~\'o~k in the evening if the husband works during the day" (our italics}. Mr. Johnson commented that it was "nice to come home and not be bugged," and we learned that he found it a relief to
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come home from work slightly late each day so that his wife would already have left for work. Thus, Mrs. johnson's night employment served to minimize the marital intimacy typically regarded as a Cor. nerstone of a healthy marital relationship, and of course it also de. nied the children an opportunity to observe normal heterosexual interaction. One might conclude that this peculiar arrangement reflected, in part, the fact that these two people simply no longer had active sex ual interests. But our data do not support this view. Mr. johnson needed to see his wife as sexually attractive to other men, and Mrs. johnson was concerned that she was still an attractive woman, despite being 15 years her husband's senior. Mrs. johnson's employ. ment as a waitress in a fashionable restaurant admirably served these needs outside the marriage proper. Mrs. johnson had her own clientele at the restaurant, and she enjoyed the social camara· derie of the other waitresses and bartenders (the latter having sexual overtones). Mr. johnson commented understandingly that his wife "needed an opportunity to socialize" and "she needs the atten tion she gets from work, both from males and from co-workers." But he also mused uneasily that his wife might have had an affaira few months prior to our interviews. Nor was this arrangement peculiar to this marriage. It had characterized Mrs. johnson's first marriage, too. While our information about this marriage is sketchy, it appears that when Mrs. johnson's first husband had obtained a substantially higher paying job, she left her job and remained at home for two years. But during this, period there were marital difficulties which led to the husbands] changing jobs again, to Mrs. johnson's returning to night emplcv ment, and to a divorce shortly thereafter. Mr. johnson's gallant public courting and his suspicions about his wife's sexual liaisons at work exist in stark contrast to their domestic arrangement. Maternal employment appears to han served as a cohesive factor in this couple's marriage, providing both partners with a mechanism for resolving strains implicit for them in certain aspects of married life. For the Marshalls, a couple in their early 20s with a 2Y2-year-old daughter, maternal employment seemed an implicit part of the marital contract. Mrs. Marshall found she was pregnant before her marriage when both she and Mr. Marshall were students. This dis covery precipitated an earlier marriage than the couple had planned and interfered with the educational aspirations of both. Our interviews revealed that Mrs. Marshall bore an awesome burden of guilt based on her sense of responsibility for having encum
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bered her husband with a family and for prolonging the completion of his education. She seemed to regard her employment as a matter of simple, obvious, and appropriate repayment to her husband for his having "done the right thing." Mr. Marshall, a cold, rigid man who seldom showed emotion, appeared to feed Mrs. Marshall's overwhelming guilt by making such comments as, "It would be much easier if we didn't have the children." At the time of the interviews, Mrs. Marshall was nearing completion of a second pregnancy, and we wondered at their decision to have another child. Both felt their first child needed a sibling, but we had the strong impression that Mrs. Marshall had not resolved her own feelings about the "bargain" she had made since, within the content of this discussion, she inquired about the possibility of psychiatric help. Maternal employment provided the Deans with a means of dealing simultaneously with two important issues. For Mrs. Dean, working was a socially acceptable way of escaping the maternal role. The Deans had one daughter, age 2Y2, and did not wish to have any more children. She was a tiny woman in her late 20s whose appearance and self-presentation were "cute" in an early adolescent way, and whose talk was studded with stereotypes ("the grass is greener on the other side of the fence," "bite off more than you can chew," "she had her cake and ate it too"). Behind this banal facade lived a woman who taught school late into her pregnancy by misrepresenting her due date, and who returned to teaching as soon as possible following childbirth. She said she enjoyed teaching, but just as she could not wholly identify with the role of mother, she could not function comfortably as an adult teacher of children, identifying instead with the children. Although our information is scanty, her relationship with her daughter appeared as ambivalent as her commitment to her job. Mrs. Dean enjoyed dressing her daughter in attractive clothes, but would brusquely put her child aside if she asked a question at a time which was mildly inconvenient for her mother. The Deans' mutual need to demonstrate their material success was also facilitated by Mrs. Dean's job. Both indicated with some pain that they had been the least favored siblings in their respective families. Mr. Dean's father had provided the younger brother a measure of financial support on several occasions, making possible a more prestigious career for him than Mr. Dean had attained. When the Deans sought financial assistance from Mr. Dean's father, he refused and they were disappointed, hurt, and angry. They were able to gain bank financing, however, and with Mrs.
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Dean's income and Mr. Dean's craftsmanship, they succeeded in building a large and beautiful home. Like many couples who are eager to show pictures, the Deans had pictures, too-not of their children, but of their home. Masculinity and Feminity: An Uneasy Sense of Identity
All 12 spouses supported maternal employment intellectually. The wives viewed their working status, though sometimes not their pre· sent jobs, as a source of satisfaction. Some spoke of the welcome break it afforded in the routine of homemaking. Others looked more to the challenge it posed or to the contribution they were making through their work to some larger social unit. H usbandi' too, were often articulate in citing reasons for their support. The stressed the reduced financial pressure, their greater freedom to take ample time in selecting new jobs, and the more rapid achieve ment of materialistic goals made possible by a second income. And several husbands' support extended beyond these relatively super· ficial values to an appreciation of their wives' need to work outside the home for reasons of their own psychological well-being. Despite this conscious commitment to maternal ernploymen there was striking evidence that maternal employment was not a comfortable arrangement for any of these families. The traditional stereotypes of husband-as-provider and wife-as-homemaker were deeply imbedded, and to the extent that these stereotypes could nOl be reconciled with the fact that both spouses were employed and' were providers, new (and we believe not fully conscious) strain and stresses were introduced. These came to focus in issues of sex I ual identity and the sex-role patterning of domestic activities. The Watsons vividly illustrate one manifestation of this concern. When Mr. Watson completed his graduate degree, he obtained a well-paid business position. The Watsons had one daughter, age2, and anticipated a larger family in the future. Mrs. Watson had worked while her husband was a student and, because she enjoyed her work, continued part-time after their first child was born, de spite mild objections from Mr. Watson. After 8 months of emplor' ment, Mr. Watson's company suffered severe financial losses and he lost his job. He reacted to this forced alteration in his role al provider with intense shame and embarrassment, and a series 01 further changes occurred within their marital relationship. The couple's sexual life had been uneasily satisfactory, but after Mr Watson lost his job, it was "shot to hell," and the difficulties a~ peared to come from Mr. Watson's side. During this period offi.1
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naneial hardship, too, Mr. Watson made an open attempt to domesticate his wife by giving her a sewing machine for her birthday-a gift she did not know how to use and had not requested: When. Mr. Watson .found another job, ~e insisted that h~s wife quit working for a period of 6 months, which roughly duphcated his own period of unemployment. He did not object to her engaging in ladies club or volunteer work; the issue was clearly not how much time she spent away from home, but whether she earned money. With his new employment, Mr. Watson's capacity for sexual functioning returned, and he reasoned that if his wife were not working, she would not be as tired and he would have the "right" to be more sexually demanding. Nearly all these couples shared a distortion of the economic value of the wife's income. As noted above, the income provided by the wives was positively valued, and with good reason. Five of the six men had completed college, but for a variety of reasons earned less than most college-educated men. With one exception, these men earned about $8,000 per year, an income typical of the average working-class family. These couples' materialistic ambitions could not easily be met by the income provided by the husbands alone; their style of life was predicated on a joint income. Still, most of these couples handled their finances in ways that tacitly suggested that the wife's employment was somehow superfluous, a special bonuslike income that was not necessary in meeting day-to-day needs. And there was the further implication that these needs were, in any case, the proper responsibility of the husband alone. For example, two couples saved the wife's entire paycheck specifically for the costs of a new home, while another used the wife's earnings to pay for special trips and vacations. All other living expenses, including the costs of the wives' employment (baby-sitting, clothes, transportation), were paid out of the husbands' earnings. In none of the couples did both partners accept the wife's work as a permanent arrangement. Two couples rationalized that older children need their mothers more, and therefore when their children were older, the wives would leave their jobs. Three others felt the wife would stop working when the family was more financially s,table. Yet, in light of their standards of living and their aspirations, a more likely outcome will be continued maternal employment. In all six couples communication about the wife's work was str.angely blocked. These were articulate people, many of whom prided themselves on the open and full discussion on which all
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decisions were based. Yet among only two couples was the wife's employment discussed prior to her securing a job. In one of these couples the spouses never truly leveled with each other-the hus, band indicated his sense of this in his comment, "Maybe she's onh fooling me when she says she likes to work." In tl~e other four couples, open discussion of the wife's work appeared tacitly taboo, Among them was a couple who paradoxically insisted that they dis· cussed all decisions together. In another, the husband had assumed his wife would not resume her work after their child was born, while the wife assumed that she would as a matter of course. A frequent manifestation of concern about appropriate sex roles in these couples occurred in their exaggerated and inflexible label ing of household tasks as "his" and "hers." Mr. Dean, who was engaged in part-time college studies while holding a full-time job, rigidly defined tasks at home as masculine or feminine. He did the yard work and any maintenance or repairs. She did the cooking and the housework, with the exception of floor waxing. Any additional help provided by Mr. Dean in times of crisis was explicitly labeled as a non precedent-setting, emergency move into the femi nine domain, and both spouses said that such an event reflected Mrs. Dean's poor management. Mrs. Westman, who worked a full 8-hour day, spent her evenings doing all the laundry and housework in addition to the necessary evening child tending, so that her weekends could be left entirely free. The monumental effort this must have required may represent a restitutive activity, helping her to manage her chronic depression, but it may also have been an attempt to deny her working status by underscoring her heavy coni mitment to domestic chores and to a domestic schedule as similar as possible to that typically maintained by the nonworking housewife. The Johnsons were a partial exception. We have already noted Mr. Johnson's supermasculine gallantry during the interviews. He moved quickly to light his wife's or an interviewer's cigarette, with the comment that he was the "fastest light in town," and his speech was punctuated with tough words such as "zap" and "wham," which impressed us as an attempt to reinforce a masculine image, On the other hand, within the context of their marriage, the Johnsons had a wide range of attitudes and behaviors whichl crossed traditional sex-role lines, but with which both seemed com: fortable. For example, Mrs. Johnson said that if she had extra time at home, she would like to move one of the walls. She said it was easy for her to strip plaster and move the joists. She also spoke of laying a new floor in one of their rooms. Mrs. Johnson's own
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mother did similar typically masculine things. During one of Mrs. Johnson's pregnancies, when she could not hold her usual job, she drove a rural mail route between 2:30 and 5:30 A.M. Both the Johnsons agreed ~hat Mr. J<:>hnson sh0l;l1d ~ake most of the decisions about the children. ThIS was explamed in terms of Mrs. Johnson's having already had the opportunity to raise a family (i.e., her children by a previous marriage), and now it was Mr. Johnson's chance. Their sitter was well aware of this unusual skewing of the child-rearing responsiblities, for our interview data clearly indicate that she spoke to Mr. rather than to Mrs. Johnson about the children's behavior. Thus, again it appears that while the Johnsons were concerned with sexual identity and role maintenance, these issues were focused in their relations with others. In their relationship with each other, this couple differed from the others we interviewed in being relatively free of any need to delineate roles in culturally prescribed ways. Thus, each of the couples was concerned with issues of sexual identity and sex-role maintenance, though the expression of their concern differed in detail and in disruptive potential. That husbands might be threatened by their wives' assumption of what has been culturally defined as a primary feature of their role comes as no surprise. More notable is our finding that the wives joined their husbands in this concern. Both had a common unconscious commitment to the prevailing cultural stereotypes concerning their respective roles. And out of this common commitment they evolved shared mechanisms designed to conceal from themselves the degree to which their lives departed from the stereotypes they had consciously rejected. Identifications, Guilt, and the Baby-sitter
If maternal employment was dissonant with deeply embedded marital role stereotypes, it is equally at odds with our subjects' sense of what proper parents ought to be. All six mothers and some of the fathers expressed guilt about maternal employment and its possible deleterious effects on their children. Many parents, particularly the mothers, seemed to be asking implicitly if we regarded them as "bad mothers" for leaving their children for work. . Frequently, when a parent voiced concern about what he or she viewed as a developmental lag, he made reference to maternal employment as a likely explanation. At times, these references
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were explicit acknowledgments of guilt, but occasionally they took the form of accusation and angry denial. The J ohnsons were con, cerned that their I8-month-old son was only beginning to use sen. tences, and Mr. Johnson raised the question of a relation between slow speech development and maternal employment. But Mrs. Johnson vehemently denied any such correlation. The Deans de scribed their 2 Y2-year-old daughter as crying excessively in her first year and currently being very active and demanding of attention. Mrs. Dean worried both that her daughter clung to her and that she used "my working to get more attention." When the inter. viewer asked if she had ever discussed these problems with her pe· diatrician (whom we perceived as easygoing, warm, and psycho. logically oriented), she replied negatively, adding that it would automatically imply she was a poor mother. Still another couple tenuously tied maternal employment to their child's possible "im. maturity." The act of leaving the child to go to work ind uced severe discom· fort. All the mothers except Mrs. Watson, who worked part-time, described it as a particularly painful separation, and fathers reo vealed similar feelings, though with less intensity. One mother said that leaving her child to go to work "depressed me for the first few days," but that the child's not fussing helped "because it hurt more if he did." Following this statement, she quickly changed the topic. Another mother said, "1 don't like leaving time," and indicated that it bothered her each time she left for work. She added wistfully, "I wonder if it's worth it." Two others spontaneously noted that they disliked leaving their children at a sitter's if she was still dressed in pajamas and robe. They both insisted that their sitters be dressed "like she had a job too." This emphasis on the sitter-as-worker seemed designed to minimize her role as a nurturant maternal fig· ure for mothers who were concerned lest their employment im plied maternal inadequacy. We had expected the selection of the sitter and the parents' rela tionship with her to be an important issue, but we were startled to discover how much importance and what dynamic significance sit· ters had for our subjects. Wives tended to paint approved sitters in glowing terms, and presented them not as real persons with strengths and weaknesses, but as paragons of virtue. The wives tended to seek a close relationship with their sitters, while also harboring conflicted feelings toward them, frequently giving expres sion to an undercurrent of competition with the sitter for the child's love. Sitters were, on the whole, the mothers' responsibility. Husbands
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were more objective in their evaluation of sitters, a stance acknowledged by one, who said in response to his wife's description, "I take a more clinical view," and their descriptions were more realistic, if detached. However, the extent of the fathers' noninvolvement in matters pertaining to sitters often appeared to have a punitive edge. If the sitter proved unacceptable, a husband could, and frequently did, point out that he had not selected her. Whenever the Marshalls' little girl was reluctant to stop her play immediately when her parents came to take her home, they felt threatened and insecure. Mrs. Marshall talked excessively about her fear that her daughter would come to like the sitter better than herself. For example, on occasions when she felt the sitter had been too lax about discipline, she was concerned that her little girl would love the indulgent sitter more. Somehow, for the Marshalls, these discussions of the sitter always involved the grandparents as points of reference, as if sitter and grandparents posed a common threat. Grandparents seemed identified with the sitter as quasiparental figures for themselves as well as for their child, an identification that we saw more explicitly made by other couples. Two mothers spontaneously described their sitters as skillful advisors on child rearing. These remarks were prefaced with statements about the sitters' having had greater experience with children than they. In another instance, the sitter lived in the home and routinely had a breakfast ready for the mother when she woke up. This particular sitter had the same first name as the maternal grandmother. Still another mother repeatedly called her sitter a "mother substitute," and she clearly meant for herself as well as for her child. In general, the quality of the relation between the mother and the sitter paralleled the quality of the relation the mother reported having had or continued to have with her own mother. Mrs. Dean spoke of problems in which competition was clearly an issue, and these seemed to be of multiple dynamic origin. She said her chief problem in her employment had centered initially around worrying that the sitter was doing a better job than she. Mrs. Dean's competitiveness with the sitter was an extension of her competitiveness in other areas. She was so competitive with her mother-in-law that she could not allow her to sew a snowsuit for her child. Mrs. Dean insisted that the sitter be a relative. It appeared that by keeping the sitter within the extended family, Mrs. Dean minimized her own feeling of abandoning her child by going to work. She also needed to identify strongly with the sitter. Mrs. Dean's first sitter had been an aunt who proved unsatisfactory be-
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cause she seemed critical of Mrs. Dean's fussy housekeeping. Feelings reached such a pitch that Mrs. Dean was no longer willing to pick up her daughter after work and sent her husband on this mis. sion by himself. Mrs. Dean's relationship with this aunt as a sitter was part of her general difficulty in relating to women. She either tended to overidentify with other women or sought a safe, if somewhat hostile distance. Her overidentification was illustrated by her frequent in· appropriate winking at the female interviewer in a schoolgirlish manner, as if they were jointly engaged in a conspiracy. When the aunt proved unsatisfactory, Mrs. Dean arranged for her younger sister to do the baby-sitting. Earlier, Mrs. Dean had competed unsuccessfully with this sister, who she felt had been more favored in the family. This situation had eased somewhat in recent years. Unlike Mrs. Dean, the sister had failed to complete college (contrary to family expectation) and had become pregnant. Mrs. Dean also noted, in reference to her sister's appropriateness as a sitter, that she was a "blood relative," the implication apparently being that the sister could be mother if something should happen to Mrs. Dean. One sitter was viewed by a couple in a distinctly negative fashion and appeared to have been selected for that purpose. Both the Westmans were adopted children and, as the reader may recall, Mrs. Westman had been given to her aunt to raise. Mrs. Westman's relationship with this adoptive mother was tumultuous in her adolescence, and she had difficulty in her relationships with female teachers and later with female job supervisors. The fact that their sitter was unable to have children of her own was offered as a point in her favor, and we concluded that it represented a competitive advantage for Mrs. Westman. Mrs. Westman also described this woman as "dumb" and "immature," one who couldn't even recognize when the child was sick. Yet she made no effort to change sitters. DISCUSSION
We have attempted to delineate in a preliminary way some of the complex meanings maternal employment has within a family, and the often idiosyncratic responses marriage partners make to them. These meanings and patterns of response can be understood in terms of the intrapsychic functioning of the individuals involved, influenced by attitudes and images of the world acquired in t~e process of development. As important, we believe, is the way III
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which these intrapsychic factors come to expression and are responded to in the interpersonal spheres of marriage, neighborhood and extended family, and cultural attitudes. There are, of course, important limitations to the generalizations of our findings. They are based by design on a few families representing a narrow range of social class, geographical distribution, age, and family circumstances (length of time married, age of children, and so forth). Moreover, our data 'were derived from limited contacts confined to a brief period in the lives of our subjects. And, as is inevitably the case, our use of a single method of data gathering has undoubtedly introduced an element of bias into the data. We are keenly aware of one particular limitation. We had intended to obtain detailed information on the children's reactions to maternal employment, and on their parents' responses to these reactions. Yet we found our subjects had little to say about these matters, and we were puzzled by the conspicuous absence of the spontaneously told anecdotal stories most young parents relish telling about their children. We could not conclude that the children were of little concern to these parents; their warmth and compassion when the children were mentioned, and their guilt in relation to their children all speak against this too easy inference. Perhaps their reticence in this area was but one more reflection of guilty defensiveness. Or maybe they so welcomed an opportunity to explore the meanings and implications of maternal employment for themselves that they had little energy or inclination to examine the situation from their children's point of view. Perhaps our use of an interview format that excluded the children implicitly conveyed the message that our focus was on the parents. In any case, we believe that future research will profit from inclusion of the children. Our subjects' concern about sexual identity and sex-role typing is at odds with the findings of Rapoport and Rapoport (1969). They describe their dual-career families as having evolved a partnership type of marriage in which household tasks were much more evenly shared without overtones of rigid role typing. The discrepancy between their findings and ours may stem from any of several differences in the kind of families studied. Their families were English, of somewhat higher socioeconomic status, and the wives tended to be pursuing "careers" as opposed to having jobs. The differences may also be an artifact of method. All our couples emphasized the husband's willingness to help with domestic chores when we asked about this in a general way. Only when we asked the spouses to describe how a series of specific chores were performed, did we become aware of the relative absence of shared
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domestic tasks, and of the intensity of feeling related to "proper" role maintenance within the household. The importance of the sexual identity issues for our subjects is particularly important in light of the finding of several studies that the children, particularly sons, of employed mothers tend to have sexual identity problems (McCord et al., 1963; Poznanski et al, 1970). These sex-role confusions have often been explained in terms of atypical sex-role learning caused by the children's observation of their parents' sharing of important elements of the culturally defined masculine role. Our data raise the possibility that difficulties may derive less immediately from these observations than from the children's perception of their parents' own ambivalent, and sometimes highly charged, reactions to maternal employment. While the sexual identity concerns of many couples are likely reactive to the meanings maternal employment has for them, maternal employment itself must sometimes be a response to a more enduring, internally based, sexual identity problem existing prior to adulthood and marriage. In these instances, one would expect a different order of difficulty to be manifested in the children. This is a research problem that has not yet been addressed. Whatever its deficiencies, we hope this report has demonstrated that in-depth interviews designed to consider attitudinal, dynamic, and contextual features of the family, including the too-often-ignored father, can richly illuminate maternal employment research.
REFERENCES HOLLINGSHEAD, A. B. (1957), Two Factor Index of Social Position. New Haven: Author. MCCORD,]., MCCORD, W., & THURBER, E. (1963), Effects of maternal employment on lowerclass boys.]. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol., 67:177-182. POZNANSKI, E., MAXEY, A., & MARSDEN, G. (1970), Clinical implications of maternal employment: a review of research. Thisjournal, 9:741-761. RAPOPORT, R. & RAPOPORT, R. N. (1969), The dual career family: a variant paucrn and social change. Hum. Rel., 22:3-30.
Elva Poznanski, M.D., Annette Maxey, M.A., and Gerald Marsden, Ed.D.
Research on maternal employment has been undertaken primarily from the vantage point of its more or less immediate impact on child behavior and socialization. In many studies, social class and family stability variables were found more intimately related to facets of child development than maternal employment per se. Maternal employment, however, has been positively correlated with school achievement and intellectual attainment, with increased dependency, and with problems of sexual identity (Poznanski et al., 1970). Little has yet been done to explicate the processes and mechanisms which account for these findings. This deficiency is, in part, attributable to the kind of questions which have been asked about maternal employment and to the methods by which investigators have attempted to answer them. Most studies of maternal employment have used techniques of data gathering (e.g., questionnaires) that facilitate the inclusion of large numbers of subjects. These methods have the virtue of producing results that are measurably reliable, broadly descriptive, and normative in nature, but they are not well adapted to exploring issues of mechanism and process. While the search for correlations between maternal employment and aspects of the child's personality development is important, it is, by itself, a narrow and incomplete approach. After all, one cannot be certain that any of the relations mentioned above reflect simple causal factors unless one has also considered more complex relationships. One possible indirect relationship between maternal Dr. Poznanski and Dr. Marsden are in the Department ofPsychiatry, Children's Psychiatric Hospital, Ullimmity of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Annette Maxey is in the Department of Social Work, Georgia lnstuute ofMental Health, Atlanta. The authors wish to thank Daniel Chapman, M.D., a pediatrician whose psychological interest and assistance made this study possible. Reprints may be requestedfrom Dr. Poznanski.
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employment and its apparent effects on children is the attitude of the father toward the wife's work, its meanings for the family, the dynamic impact of these meanings on other aspects of parents' per. sonality functioning and thus on their behavior, and finally the ad. justments made within the family in response to these attitudes and meanings. In this light, it is unfortunate that the existence of the father and the logic of using the family as the unit of study have been virtually ignored in maternal employment research. Since previous work has not related maternal employment to the intimate and individual complexities of marriage and family life. we believed that an elaborate, hypothesis-testing study was prerna ture. This paper is a preliminary descriptive report which we hope will provide a crude but helpful map of the territory, pointing toward useful hypotheses for examination by more rigorous meth ods. We chose to study maternal employment in some depth as it occurs in a few presumably well-functioning and typical families. And we sought a group of families which was relatively homogeneous with respect to race and social class to minimize the complex. ity of data 'interpretation. Because our study was based on interview data, and because the children in these families were too young to be interviewed (for reasons detailed below), we were not able to secure information from the children themselves. Thus, our study, too, falls short of being a true family study. METHOD
We required that families included in the study be intact, that both spouses be regularly employed outside the home for 30 or more hours a week, and that the wives had worked at their jobs for a minimum of 6 months prior to participating in the study. Families in which one or more spouses were students were also eliminated, since maternal employment in the pursuit of an academic degree or in temporary support of a husband working for a degree is al most certainly a psychologically different enterprise from maternal employment in other circumstances. We also required that all sub jects be Caucasian and that they fall in the range from middlemiddle to upper-middle socioeconomic class, as assessed by the Hollingshead scale (1957). Finally, we required that each couple have a child by their current marriage who was 5 years old or less. This criterion served to insure that spouses' current adjustments to maternal employment would have been made under the psyche logical pressure imposed by the presence of a young child, thai
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these adjustments would still be fresh and available to study, and that all subjects would have had to deal with certain common problems in achieving whatever adjustments they had made. Families were selected from the patient roster of a pediatrician in private practice, thus insuring that they were not chosen on the basis of referral for problems with their marriages or their children. When information from the roster indicated that a family might meet our criteria, the pediatrician's nurse called the family to inquire if they were willing to have us call them. If so, one of the interviewers telephoned to explain the research, to check the selection criteria, and to arrange for the first interview. From approximately 500 families on the roster, 29 appeared to be potentially eligible. The pediatrician requested that we not involve 2 of these families, 3 others had moved out of the area, and 5 were not interested in participating (a refusal rate of only 17%!). Thus we could proceed with 19 families. None of these refused participation, but most failed to meet either our socioeconomic criterion or the criterion that the woman have worked for a period of 6 months prior to the study. Indeed, throughout the screening we were struck by the high incidence of very brief and sometimes repetitive periods of employment of women with preschool children. We were left with six couples for study. Each couple was seen in three interviews for a total of approximately 6 hours, the first a joint interview with both spouses and the two (female) authors. Then, at a later date, one interviewer saw each spouse individually. On completion of the interviewing, the authors met to review the material on each couple and to formulate categories for a more systematic sifting of the data. When the yield of this impressionistic analysis seemed exhausted, we went over all the material again in terms of the categories that seemed to capture important dimensions of the relation between maternal employment and family life for these subjects. The results of this analysis are reported below in tJ:e form of a general discussion liberally supplemented by clinical vignettes. FINDINGS
The six couples had been married from 2 to 7 years, and only one spouse had had a previous marriage. The fathers' ages ranged from 22 to 30, and all the mothers were in their 20s, with the exception of one woman. Five of the couples had but one child, the other had two, and the children ranged in age from 9 months to
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3 years. Of the couples, four men and four women had held their first significant jobs in high school and had been more or less can. stantly employed when not in school since that time. The other two women, and one of the remaining men, had begun to work while in college. Thus, all the women had substantial work histories pre· dating their marriages; employment was a long-standing part of their life style, and not solely a response to pressures arising after marnage. An Extension of the Marital Arena
Our subjects' predominant and rather offhand explanation of rna ternal employment was its augmentation of family finances. Butir was clearly more than that, and perhaps the most striking genera\' finding was that from the viewpoint of the marriage and famih life, maternal employment constituted an extension of the marits, arena. It sometimes served to cement and integrate a marriag' relation by draining off latent frustrations otherwise likely to fester dangerously within the confines of the more narrowly domestic sit· uation. Or it focused and magnified existing schisms or tended to fracture an already brittle marital relationship. For the Westmans, maternal employment served to enhance in· timacy. The Westmans were a recently married couple in their early 20s. Their only child, a 12-month-old son, was an appealing. well-formed child who vigorously played with toys appropriate to his age during the interviewing. Both worked at the same hospital and shared similar administrative responsibilities. They drove to and from work together and provided each other with genuine emotional support on problems related to their jobs. And their togetherness extended to a pattern of going as a family on week ends to shop and pay their bills. But Mrs. Westman's employment in a job so similar to her hus band's also afforded them an opportunity to hone the edge of their mutual competitiveness. Mrs. Westman had an R.N. degree, while Mr. Westman did not, having taken a general 2-year college course. Because he lacked an R.N. degree, Mr. Westman held a somewhat lower job classification at the hospital, and this differen tial in job status crept into their argumentative banter during our interviews. Mr. Westman observed, "There's no R.N.'s allowed 011 my ward," and Mrs. Westman commented, "I feel I should make more money [than he] because I deserve more because I went to school." Mrs. Westman used her employment to cast aspersions on her husband's capacity to provide for the family in other ways, too
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When she spoke of working not because she wanted to, but because of financial need, Mr. Westman looked hurt. Perhaps because of his concerns about this issue, Mr. Westman routinely arose weekend mornings with the baby and allowed his wife to sleep late. We concluded that Mrs. Westman's financial-need rationale for her employment was only part of the story. She appeared chronically depressed, and her depression seemed rooted in her early separation from her mother. Her mother had "given her away" to a childless sister when she was 10 or II months old "because she had too many children," and Mrs. Westman had grown up in a small rural community where she was well acquainted with her biological mother and the siblings who continued to live with her. It was true that she was unhappy with her job, that the demands and responsibilities of her work allowed little satisfaction of her dependency needs and may have intensified her depression. Both her R.N. degree and her job title provided a basis for needed self-esteem, and she took satisfaction in these tangible representations of her success in rising above her lower-class origins. In contrast, the Johnsons' marital relationship was beset by difficulties with intimacy, and Mrs. johnson's employment neatly helped them to dilute what might otherwise have been a volatile and intolerable aspect of marriage. The Johnsons presented themselves at our offices with a courtship air. They walked hand in hand, and Mr. Johnson frequently put his arm around his wife. During the joint interview, too, he was solicitous of her in an uncommonly gallant fashion. The Johnsons had agreed prior to their marriage that Mrs. Johnson would continue working after the arrival of children. Mrs. Johnson, a youthful-appearing 46-year-old woman, had three children, now young adults, by a previous marriage. This was Mr. johnson's first marriage. The Johnsons had two young sons, age 18 months and 36 months, and hoped for more children. We were surprised to learn that in both the jobs Mrs. Johnson had held since her marriage to Mr. Johnson, a constant feature of her work had been night employment. Mr. Johnson had held three different jobs, and in each he had worked during the day. They explained this arrangement of their work lives in terms of the children needing one parent constantly at home. Yet we soon realized that there were other important reasons, reasons rooted in their own needs. Mrs. Johnson remarked that "it seems natural to ~\'o~k in the evening if the husband works during the day" (our italics}. Mr. Johnson commented that it was "nice to come home and not be bugged," and we learned that he found it a relief to
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come home from work slightly late each day so that his wife would already have left for work. Thus, Mrs. johnson's night employment served to minimize the marital intimacy typically regarded as a Cor. nerstone of a healthy marital relationship, and of course it also de. nied the children an opportunity to observe normal heterosexual interaction. One might conclude that this peculiar arrangement reflected, in part, the fact that these two people simply no longer had active sex ual interests. But our data do not support this view. Mr. johnson needed to see his wife as sexually attractive to other men, and Mrs. johnson was concerned that she was still an attractive woman, despite being 15 years her husband's senior. Mrs. johnson's employ. ment as a waitress in a fashionable restaurant admirably served these needs outside the marriage proper. Mrs. johnson had her own clientele at the restaurant, and she enjoyed the social camara· derie of the other waitresses and bartenders (the latter having sexual overtones). Mr. johnson commented understandingly that his wife "needed an opportunity to socialize" and "she needs the atten tion she gets from work, both from males and from co-workers." But he also mused uneasily that his wife might have had an affaira few months prior to our interviews. Nor was this arrangement peculiar to this marriage. It had characterized Mrs. johnson's first marriage, too. While our information about this marriage is sketchy, it appears that when Mrs. johnson's first husband had obtained a substantially higher paying job, she left her job and remained at home for two years. But during this, period there were marital difficulties which led to the husbands] changing jobs again, to Mrs. johnson's returning to night emplcv ment, and to a divorce shortly thereafter. Mr. johnson's gallant public courting and his suspicions about his wife's sexual liaisons at work exist in stark contrast to their domestic arrangement. Maternal employment appears to han served as a cohesive factor in this couple's marriage, providing both partners with a mechanism for resolving strains implicit for them in certain aspects of married life. For the Marshalls, a couple in their early 20s with a 2Y2-year-old daughter, maternal employment seemed an implicit part of the marital contract. Mrs. Marshall found she was pregnant before her marriage when both she and Mr. Marshall were students. This dis covery precipitated an earlier marriage than the couple had planned and interfered with the educational aspirations of both. Our interviews revealed that Mrs. Marshall bore an awesome burden of guilt based on her sense of responsibility for having encum
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bered her husband with a family and for prolonging the completion of his education. She seemed to regard her employment as a matter of simple, obvious, and appropriate repayment to her husband for his having "done the right thing." Mr. Marshall, a cold, rigid man who seldom showed emotion, appeared to feed Mrs. Marshall's overwhelming guilt by making such comments as, "It would be much easier if we didn't have the children." At the time of the interviews, Mrs. Marshall was nearing completion of a second pregnancy, and we wondered at their decision to have another child. Both felt their first child needed a sibling, but we had the strong impression that Mrs. Marshall had not resolved her own feelings about the "bargain" she had made since, within the content of this discussion, she inquired about the possibility of psychiatric help. Maternal employment provided the Deans with a means of dealing simultaneously with two important issues. For Mrs. Dean, working was a socially acceptable way of escaping the maternal role. The Deans had one daughter, age 2Y2, and did not wish to have any more children. She was a tiny woman in her late 20s whose appearance and self-presentation were "cute" in an early adolescent way, and whose talk was studded with stereotypes ("the grass is greener on the other side of the fence," "bite off more than you can chew," "she had her cake and ate it too"). Behind this banal facade lived a woman who taught school late into her pregnancy by misrepresenting her due date, and who returned to teaching as soon as possible following childbirth. She said she enjoyed teaching, but just as she could not wholly identify with the role of mother, she could not function comfortably as an adult teacher of children, identifying instead with the children. Although our information is scanty, her relationship with her daughter appeared as ambivalent as her commitment to her job. Mrs. Dean enjoyed dressing her daughter in attractive clothes, but would brusquely put her child aside if she asked a question at a time which was mildly inconvenient for her mother. The Deans' mutual need to demonstrate their material success was also facilitated by Mrs. Dean's job. Both indicated with some pain that they had been the least favored siblings in their respective families. Mr. Dean's father had provided the younger brother a measure of financial support on several occasions, making possible a more prestigious career for him than Mr. Dean had attained. When the Deans sought financial assistance from Mr. Dean's father, he refused and they were disappointed, hurt, and angry. They were able to gain bank financing, however, and with Mrs.
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Dean's income and Mr. Dean's craftsmanship, they succeeded in building a large and beautiful home. Like many couples who are eager to show pictures, the Deans had pictures, too-not of their children, but of their home. Masculinity and Feminity: An Uneasy Sense of Identity
All 12 spouses supported maternal employment intellectually. The wives viewed their working status, though sometimes not their pre· sent jobs, as a source of satisfaction. Some spoke of the welcome break it afforded in the routine of homemaking. Others looked more to the challenge it posed or to the contribution they were making through their work to some larger social unit. H usbandi' too, were often articulate in citing reasons for their support. The stressed the reduced financial pressure, their greater freedom to take ample time in selecting new jobs, and the more rapid achieve ment of materialistic goals made possible by a second income. And several husbands' support extended beyond these relatively super· ficial values to an appreciation of their wives' need to work outside the home for reasons of their own psychological well-being. Despite this conscious commitment to maternal ernploymen there was striking evidence that maternal employment was not a comfortable arrangement for any of these families. The traditional stereotypes of husband-as-provider and wife-as-homemaker were deeply imbedded, and to the extent that these stereotypes could nOl be reconciled with the fact that both spouses were employed and' were providers, new (and we believe not fully conscious) strain and stresses were introduced. These came to focus in issues of sex I ual identity and the sex-role patterning of domestic activities. The Watsons vividly illustrate one manifestation of this concern. When Mr. Watson completed his graduate degree, he obtained a well-paid business position. The Watsons had one daughter, age2, and anticipated a larger family in the future. Mrs. Watson had worked while her husband was a student and, because she enjoyed her work, continued part-time after their first child was born, de spite mild objections from Mr. Watson. After 8 months of emplor' ment, Mr. Watson's company suffered severe financial losses and he lost his job. He reacted to this forced alteration in his role al provider with intense shame and embarrassment, and a series 01 further changes occurred within their marital relationship. The couple's sexual life had been uneasily satisfactory, but after Mr Watson lost his job, it was "shot to hell," and the difficulties a~ peared to come from Mr. Watson's side. During this period offi.1
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naneial hardship, too, Mr. Watson made an open attempt to domesticate his wife by giving her a sewing machine for her birthday-a gift she did not know how to use and had not requested: When. Mr. Watson .found another job, ~e insisted that h~s wife quit working for a period of 6 months, which roughly duphcated his own period of unemployment. He did not object to her engaging in ladies club or volunteer work; the issue was clearly not how much time she spent away from home, but whether she earned money. With his new employment, Mr. Watson's capacity for sexual functioning returned, and he reasoned that if his wife were not working, she would not be as tired and he would have the "right" to be more sexually demanding. Nearly all these couples shared a distortion of the economic value of the wife's income. As noted above, the income provided by the wives was positively valued, and with good reason. Five of the six men had completed college, but for a variety of reasons earned less than most college-educated men. With one exception, these men earned about $8,000 per year, an income typical of the average working-class family. These couples' materialistic ambitions could not easily be met by the income provided by the husbands alone; their style of life was predicated on a joint income. Still, most of these couples handled their finances in ways that tacitly suggested that the wife's employment was somehow superfluous, a special bonuslike income that was not necessary in meeting day-to-day needs. And there was the further implication that these needs were, in any case, the proper responsibility of the husband alone. For example, two couples saved the wife's entire paycheck specifically for the costs of a new home, while another used the wife's earnings to pay for special trips and vacations. All other living expenses, including the costs of the wives' employment (baby-sitting, clothes, transportation), were paid out of the husbands' earnings. In none of the couples did both partners accept the wife's work as a permanent arrangement. Two couples rationalized that older children need their mothers more, and therefore when their children were older, the wives would leave their jobs. Three others felt the wife would stop working when the family was more financially s,table. Yet, in light of their standards of living and their aspirations, a more likely outcome will be continued maternal employment. In all six couples communication about the wife's work was str.angely blocked. These were articulate people, many of whom prided themselves on the open and full discussion on which all
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decisions were based. Yet among only two couples was the wife's employment discussed prior to her securing a job. In one of these couples the spouses never truly leveled with each other-the hus, band indicated his sense of this in his comment, "Maybe she's onh fooling me when she says she likes to work." In tl~e other four couples, open discussion of the wife's work appeared tacitly taboo, Among them was a couple who paradoxically insisted that they dis· cussed all decisions together. In another, the husband had assumed his wife would not resume her work after their child was born, while the wife assumed that she would as a matter of course. A frequent manifestation of concern about appropriate sex roles in these couples occurred in their exaggerated and inflexible label ing of household tasks as "his" and "hers." Mr. Dean, who was engaged in part-time college studies while holding a full-time job, rigidly defined tasks at home as masculine or feminine. He did the yard work and any maintenance or repairs. She did the cooking and the housework, with the exception of floor waxing. Any additional help provided by Mr. Dean in times of crisis was explicitly labeled as a non precedent-setting, emergency move into the femi nine domain, and both spouses said that such an event reflected Mrs. Dean's poor management. Mrs. Westman, who worked a full 8-hour day, spent her evenings doing all the laundry and housework in addition to the necessary evening child tending, so that her weekends could be left entirely free. The monumental effort this must have required may represent a restitutive activity, helping her to manage her chronic depression, but it may also have been an attempt to deny her working status by underscoring her heavy coni mitment to domestic chores and to a domestic schedule as similar as possible to that typically maintained by the nonworking housewife. The Johnsons were a partial exception. We have already noted Mr. Johnson's supermasculine gallantry during the interviews. He moved quickly to light his wife's or an interviewer's cigarette, with the comment that he was the "fastest light in town," and his speech was punctuated with tough words such as "zap" and "wham," which impressed us as an attempt to reinforce a masculine image, On the other hand, within the context of their marriage, the Johnsons had a wide range of attitudes and behaviors whichl crossed traditional sex-role lines, but with which both seemed com: fortable. For example, Mrs. Johnson said that if she had extra time at home, she would like to move one of the walls. She said it was easy for her to strip plaster and move the joists. She also spoke of laying a new floor in one of their rooms. Mrs. Johnson's own
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mother did similar typically masculine things. During one of Mrs. Johnson's pregnancies, when she could not hold her usual job, she drove a rural mail route between 2:30 and 5:30 A.M. Both the Johnsons agreed ~hat Mr. J<:>hnson sh0l;l1d ~ake most of the decisions about the children. ThIS was explamed in terms of Mrs. Johnson's having already had the opportunity to raise a family (i.e., her children by a previous marriage), and now it was Mr. Johnson's chance. Their sitter was well aware of this unusual skewing of the child-rearing responsiblities, for our interview data clearly indicate that she spoke to Mr. rather than to Mrs. Johnson about the children's behavior. Thus, again it appears that while the Johnsons were concerned with sexual identity and role maintenance, these issues were focused in their relations with others. In their relationship with each other, this couple differed from the others we interviewed in being relatively free of any need to delineate roles in culturally prescribed ways. Thus, each of the couples was concerned with issues of sexual identity and sex-role maintenance, though the expression of their concern differed in detail and in disruptive potential. That husbands might be threatened by their wives' assumption of what has been culturally defined as a primary feature of their role comes as no surprise. More notable is our finding that the wives joined their husbands in this concern. Both had a common unconscious commitment to the prevailing cultural stereotypes concerning their respective roles. And out of this common commitment they evolved shared mechanisms designed to conceal from themselves the degree to which their lives departed from the stereotypes they had consciously rejected. Identifications, Guilt, and the Baby-sitter
If maternal employment was dissonant with deeply embedded marital role stereotypes, it is equally at odds with our subjects' sense of what proper parents ought to be. All six mothers and some of the fathers expressed guilt about maternal employment and its possible deleterious effects on their children. Many parents, particularly the mothers, seemed to be asking implicitly if we regarded them as "bad mothers" for leaving their children for work. . Frequently, when a parent voiced concern about what he or she viewed as a developmental lag, he made reference to maternal employment as a likely explanation. At times, these references
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were explicit acknowledgments of guilt, but occasionally they took the form of accusation and angry denial. The J ohnsons were con, cerned that their I8-month-old son was only beginning to use sen. tences, and Mr. Johnson raised the question of a relation between slow speech development and maternal employment. But Mrs. Johnson vehemently denied any such correlation. The Deans de scribed their 2 Y2-year-old daughter as crying excessively in her first year and currently being very active and demanding of attention. Mrs. Dean worried both that her daughter clung to her and that she used "my working to get more attention." When the inter. viewer asked if she had ever discussed these problems with her pe· diatrician (whom we perceived as easygoing, warm, and psycho. logically oriented), she replied negatively, adding that it would automatically imply she was a poor mother. Still another couple tenuously tied maternal employment to their child's possible "im. maturity." The act of leaving the child to go to work ind uced severe discom· fort. All the mothers except Mrs. Watson, who worked part-time, described it as a particularly painful separation, and fathers reo vealed similar feelings, though with less intensity. One mother said that leaving her child to go to work "depressed me for the first few days," but that the child's not fussing helped "because it hurt more if he did." Following this statement, she quickly changed the topic. Another mother said, "1 don't like leaving time," and indicated that it bothered her each time she left for work. She added wistfully, "I wonder if it's worth it." Two others spontaneously noted that they disliked leaving their children at a sitter's if she was still dressed in pajamas and robe. They both insisted that their sitters be dressed "like she had a job too." This emphasis on the sitter-as-worker seemed designed to minimize her role as a nurturant maternal fig· ure for mothers who were concerned lest their employment im plied maternal inadequacy. We had expected the selection of the sitter and the parents' rela tionship with her to be an important issue, but we were startled to discover how much importance and what dynamic significance sit· ters had for our subjects. Wives tended to paint approved sitters in glowing terms, and presented them not as real persons with strengths and weaknesses, but as paragons of virtue. The wives tended to seek a close relationship with their sitters, while also harboring conflicted feelings toward them, frequently giving expres sion to an undercurrent of competition with the sitter for the child's love. Sitters were, on the whole, the mothers' responsibility. Husbands
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were more objective in their evaluation of sitters, a stance acknowledged by one, who said in response to his wife's description, "I take a more clinical view," and their descriptions were more realistic, if detached. However, the extent of the fathers' noninvolvement in matters pertaining to sitters often appeared to have a punitive edge. If the sitter proved unacceptable, a husband could, and frequently did, point out that he had not selected her. Whenever the Marshalls' little girl was reluctant to stop her play immediately when her parents came to take her home, they felt threatened and insecure. Mrs. Marshall talked excessively about her fear that her daughter would come to like the sitter better than herself. For example, on occasions when she felt the sitter had been too lax about discipline, she was concerned that her little girl would love the indulgent sitter more. Somehow, for the Marshalls, these discussions of the sitter always involved the grandparents as points of reference, as if sitter and grandparents posed a common threat. Grandparents seemed identified with the sitter as quasiparental figures for themselves as well as for their child, an identification that we saw more explicitly made by other couples. Two mothers spontaneously described their sitters as skillful advisors on child rearing. These remarks were prefaced with statements about the sitters' having had greater experience with children than they. In another instance, the sitter lived in the home and routinely had a breakfast ready for the mother when she woke up. This particular sitter had the same first name as the maternal grandmother. Still another mother repeatedly called her sitter a "mother substitute," and she clearly meant for herself as well as for her child. In general, the quality of the relation between the mother and the sitter paralleled the quality of the relation the mother reported having had or continued to have with her own mother. Mrs. Dean spoke of problems in which competition was clearly an issue, and these seemed to be of multiple dynamic origin. She said her chief problem in her employment had centered initially around worrying that the sitter was doing a better job than she. Mrs. Dean's competitiveness with the sitter was an extension of her competitiveness in other areas. She was so competitive with her mother-in-law that she could not allow her to sew a snowsuit for her child. Mrs. Dean insisted that the sitter be a relative. It appeared that by keeping the sitter within the extended family, Mrs. Dean minimized her own feeling of abandoning her child by going to work. She also needed to identify strongly with the sitter. Mrs. Dean's first sitter had been an aunt who proved unsatisfactory be-
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cause she seemed critical of Mrs. Dean's fussy housekeeping. Feelings reached such a pitch that Mrs. Dean was no longer willing to pick up her daughter after work and sent her husband on this mis. sion by himself. Mrs. Dean's relationship with this aunt as a sitter was part of her general difficulty in relating to women. She either tended to overidentify with other women or sought a safe, if somewhat hostile distance. Her overidentification was illustrated by her frequent in· appropriate winking at the female interviewer in a schoolgirlish manner, as if they were jointly engaged in a conspiracy. When the aunt proved unsatisfactory, Mrs. Dean arranged for her younger sister to do the baby-sitting. Earlier, Mrs. Dean had competed unsuccessfully with this sister, who she felt had been more favored in the family. This situation had eased somewhat in recent years. Unlike Mrs. Dean, the sister had failed to complete college (contrary to family expectation) and had become pregnant. Mrs. Dean also noted, in reference to her sister's appropriateness as a sitter, that she was a "blood relative," the implication apparently being that the sister could be mother if something should happen to Mrs. Dean. One sitter was viewed by a couple in a distinctly negative fashion and appeared to have been selected for that purpose. Both the Westmans were adopted children and, as the reader may recall, Mrs. Westman had been given to her aunt to raise. Mrs. Westman's relationship with this adoptive mother was tumultuous in her adolescence, and she had difficulty in her relationships with female teachers and later with female job supervisors. The fact that their sitter was unable to have children of her own was offered as a point in her favor, and we concluded that it represented a competitive advantage for Mrs. Westman. Mrs. Westman also described this woman as "dumb" and "immature," one who couldn't even recognize when the child was sick. Yet she made no effort to change sitters. DISCUSSION
We have attempted to delineate in a preliminary way some of the complex meanings maternal employment has within a family, and the often idiosyncratic responses marriage partners make to them. These meanings and patterns of response can be understood in terms of the intrapsychic functioning of the individuals involved, influenced by attitudes and images of the world acquired in t~e process of development. As important, we believe, is the way III
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which these intrapsychic factors come to expression and are responded to in the interpersonal spheres of marriage, neighborhood and extended family, and cultural attitudes. There are, of course, important limitations to the generalizations of our findings. They are based by design on a few families representing a narrow range of social class, geographical distribution, age, and family circumstances (length of time married, age of children, and so forth). Moreover, our data 'were derived from limited contacts confined to a brief period in the lives of our subjects. And, as is inevitably the case, our use of a single method of data gathering has undoubtedly introduced an element of bias into the data. We are keenly aware of one particular limitation. We had intended to obtain detailed information on the children's reactions to maternal employment, and on their parents' responses to these reactions. Yet we found our subjects had little to say about these matters, and we were puzzled by the conspicuous absence of the spontaneously told anecdotal stories most young parents relish telling about their children. We could not conclude that the children were of little concern to these parents; their warmth and compassion when the children were mentioned, and their guilt in relation to their children all speak against this too easy inference. Perhaps their reticence in this area was but one more reflection of guilty defensiveness. Or maybe they so welcomed an opportunity to explore the meanings and implications of maternal employment for themselves that they had little energy or inclination to examine the situation from their children's point of view. Perhaps our use of an interview format that excluded the children implicitly conveyed the message that our focus was on the parents. In any case, we believe that future research will profit from inclusion of the children. Our subjects' concern about sexual identity and sex-role typing is at odds with the findings of Rapoport and Rapoport (1969). They describe their dual-career families as having evolved a partnership type of marriage in which household tasks were much more evenly shared without overtones of rigid role typing. The discrepancy between their findings and ours may stem from any of several differences in the kind of families studied. Their families were English, of somewhat higher socioeconomic status, and the wives tended to be pursuing "careers" as opposed to having jobs. The differences may also be an artifact of method. All our couples emphasized the husband's willingness to help with domestic chores when we asked about this in a general way. Only when we asked the spouses to describe how a series of specific chores were performed, did we become aware of the relative absence of shared
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domestic tasks, and of the intensity of feeling related to "proper" role maintenance within the household. The importance of the sexual identity issues for our subjects is particularly important in light of the finding of several studies that the children, particularly sons, of employed mothers tend to have sexual identity problems (McCord et al., 1963; Poznanski et al, 1970). These sex-role confusions have often been explained in terms of atypical sex-role learning caused by the children's observation of their parents' sharing of important elements of the culturally defined masculine role. Our data raise the possibility that difficulties may derive less immediately from these observations than from the children's perception of their parents' own ambivalent, and sometimes highly charged, reactions to maternal employment. While the sexual identity concerns of many couples are likely reactive to the meanings maternal employment has for them, maternal employment itself must sometimes be a response to a more enduring, internally based, sexual identity problem existing prior to adulthood and marriage. In these instances, one would expect a different order of difficulty to be manifested in the children. This is a research problem that has not yet been addressed. Whatever its deficiencies, we hope this report has demonstrated that in-depth interviews designed to consider attitudinal, dynamic, and contextual features of the family, including the too-often-ignored father, can richly illuminate maternal employment research.
REFERENCES HOLLINGSHEAD, A. B. (1957), Two Factor Index of Social Position. New Haven: Author. MCCORD,]., MCCORD, W., & THURBER, E. (1963), Effects of maternal employment on lowerclass boys.]. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol., 67:177-182. POZNANSKI, E., MAXEY, A., & MARSDEN, G. (1970), Clinical implications of maternal employment: a review of research. Thisjournal, 9:741-761. RAPOPORT, R. & RAPOPORT, R. N. (1969), The dual career family: a variant paucrn and social change. Hum. Rel., 22:3-30.