Money, Marriage and Motherhood: Dual Earner Households after Maternity Leave

Abstract

This chapter considers a lifestyle which, with the demographic changes expected in the 1990s, promises to become increasingly significant. There will be a rising number of households in which the arrival of children signals, not the mothers’ withdrawal from the labour market, the typical practice in Britain in the post-war years, but a continuing full-time commitment by both parents to full-time employment. Women who work full time when they have a young child may be expected to be in the vanguard of equality, not only in terms of their attitudes to and practices in employment, but also with respect to parenthood and marriage. In this chapter, the perspectives of women in this situation are analysed with respect to three central, interrelated issues: the significance women attach to their full-time earnings; their responses to the (still unequal) division of childcare and domestic labour in the household; and their social construction of the maternal role. These are issues which are integral to an assessment of the significance of the dual earner life style: about whether (or not) the lifestyle produces equality between men and women in the household and how far it leads to a redefinition of, or an accommodation to, existing gender roles.