Men, Women, and Work: Reflections on the Two-Person Career

Women adapt in different ways to the demands of their husbands' occupations. In the United States, the "two-person single career" is a special combination of roles whereby wives are inducted by the institutions employing their husbands into a pattern of vicarious achievement. The two-person career pattern serves as a social control mechanism which derails the occupational aspirations of the highly educated woman into a subsidiary role determined by her husband's career. It is a very American solution to a common American dilemma, in which an explicit ideology of equal opportunity in education conflicts with inequalities in occupational opportunities. Some reflections on the two-person career serve to illustrate the necessity for more determined efforts to include studies of women's lives in…