Abstract
In The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work and Gender in America, Kathleeen Gerson offers a fresh perspective on the changing American family by giving voice to ‘the children of the gender revolution’, the young women and men who came of age amid tumultuous change in family structure and family breadwinning patterns. An astute interviewer, Gerson conducted life-history interviews with 120 young men and women between the ages of 18 and 32 to provide a window on this change. As children, these young adults lived through the massive shift in women’s employment, watching their own mothers move between being at-home and being employed. They also witnessed the rising uncertainty of men’s economic fortunes and the demise of the ‘family wage’, observing the repercussions of their fathers’ inability to live up to the good provider role, the rise of the dual-earner family, and many times the dissolution of their parents’ relationship or economic hardship. A landmark study, The Unfinished Revolution pushes our understanding of the changing relations between work, family, and gender and simultaneously challenges our assumptions.
Gerson artfully weaves in the young adults’ narratives, demonstrating that ‘family life is a film, not a snapshot’ (p. 9), as she underscores the notion of family pathways and challenges conventional wisdom that family structure is the primary determining factor of child wellbeing. It becomes clear that all families change their form as time passes, and even those that retain a stable outward form change in subtle but important ways as interpersonal dynamics shift. Confronted with family change, these young adults point time and time again to the importance of gender flexibility in breadwinning and caretaking as the key factor and most effective way their parents transcended marital or financial crises.
It is comforting to find that young women and men share the same ideals, regardless of the form of their family as they grew up. Both desire to create lasting, egalitarian partnerships, where both partners share in paid work and family caretaking. Yet, these young adults have seen their parents struggle with balancing work and family and thus are rightfully doubtful about their chances of reaching this goal because they are worried that they will not be able to integrate demanding careers with parenting, given the lack of caretaking supports. Herein lies the crux of Gerson’s book: under the ‘reality’ microscope, divergent second-best fallback strategies emerge by gender. If egalitarian relationships are not attainable, young women prefer self-reliance over economic dependence within a traditional marriage. Young men, on the other hand, worry that equal sharing will impede their breadwinning ability and hurt their career, and thus fall back on a neo-traditional arrangement that allows them to concentrate on their work and rely on their partner for the lion’s share of caregiving. They share the same dreams, but fears of time-demanding workplaces, unreliable partners, and the lack of caretaking supports may place these ideals out of reach and propel young women and men down different paths, with potentially serious implications for gender relations and future family formation.
What do we learn from The Unfinished Revolution about the future division of housework and paid work? The paradigm of separate spheres with caretaking women and breadwinning men makes less sense today, where families depend on women as earners and intimate relationships follow unpredictable paths. We are witnessing a paradigm shift in gender boundaries and family formation, and today’s young people stand at the crossroads, looking to create a new blueprint, one that allows families to blend work and care in flexible, egalitarian ways across diverse life pathways. Will this next generation finish Hochschild’s (1989) ‘stalled revolution’ of continued gender disparities in housework, child care and leisure and instead create gender equality? Not without some major changes in the workplace, the lives of men, and in federal policy. Gerson’s analysis makes it clear that ‘nothing less than the restructuring of work and caretaking will allow new generations to achieve the ideals they seek and provide the supports their own children will need’ (p. 12). Gerson points in the direction of broad solutions, calling for the restructuring of work and caretaking and changing the frame to shift the responsibility from the individual to the collective, but falls short in policy prescription.
With accessible language and the right mix of quotes and explanation, The Unfinished Revolution is a good choice for undergraduate or graduate courses covering gender, work or family. Students may feel the weight of the world upon their shoulders when reading Gerson’s book as they identify with the young adults’ childhood experiences and future uncertainties. Yet, it is this weight and association that yields provocative and lively class discussion and pushes students to contemplate their own ideals and fall-back plans regarding future relationships, the gendered division of labor, and gender equality.