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c h a p t e r 9 How Jewishness is Related to American Jews’ Dual-Earning Patterns In the preceding two chapters, we considered whether an individual’s Jewishness was related to his or her behavior with respect to family formation , childbearing, labor force participation, and occupational achievement and rewards. In this chapter, we look at the family as a unit to get some insight into how Jewishness is related to the division of economic roles in the family. We want to know how Jewishness is related to both spouses being engaged in economic roles outside the home and whether the effect of having young children at home on the parents’ economic behavior is modified by their Jewishness. If Jewishness is related to family decisions about economic behavior, what aspect of Jewishness is responsible: the religious and/or the ethnic? Do religious identity and ethnic identity have similar effects on couples’ economic behavior in all denominations of American Jews? Note that we have information only on how the respondent expresses Jewishness, that is, the respondent’s denominational preference and expressions of Jewish identity. We do know whether or not the spouse is identi fied as Jewish, and we will explore the relationship of secular achievement to this aspect of Jewishness in the next chapter. Here we focus on the relationship between the couple’s economic roles and the respondents’ denominational preferences and expressions of Jewish identity. We see this as a further inquiry into the ways in which religious identity and ethnic identity penetrate family decisions and secular behavior. If we find that Jewish denomination and expressions of Jewish identity are not related to a couple’s allocation of economic roles and the spouses’ relative contributions to the family economy, we will have an indication of secularization ; that is, Jewishness will be separate from such decisions and behavior . If we find a relationship between Jewishness and a couple’s economic roles and rewards, we will have insight into one mechanism by which religious identity and ethnic identity on the individual level are translated into 203 204 distinctive roles of women and men everyday behavior for Jewish men and women. In turn this may be a model for how other religious and ethnic identities influence the day-to-day activities and orientations of individuals and families expressing other contemporary identities. We begin by looking at denominational differences in dual-earning patterns ; we follow this with a consideration of scores on the Jewish identity factors. denomination and dual earning The purpose of this section is to examine whether the denominations differ in terms of the economic roles of married couples. As we have already mentioned , intimate relations often mirror the broader social and cultural context , and certainly are influenced by patterns in the surrounding society. Denominational groups may form reference groups for norms affecting marital patterns, and therefore couples within a particular denomination may differ from those in another. We measure here, however, only the denomination of the respondent, not the denominational preference of the spouse. One hypothesis regarding dual earning and denominational preference is that the more traditional the denomination, the more “Jewish” is the dualearning pattern, following the distinctiveness of the Jewish dual-earning pattern shown in Chapter 5. That is, we would expect more traditional Jews to have a higher proportion of dual earners than their counterparts in other denominational groups; we would also expect a great degree of homogeneity between spouses in terms of education and occupation and large contributions by wives to joint earnings, though at the same time we would anticipate that wives act as secondary earners in the face of family need, such as the presence of many children at home or a husband’s low salary/husband’s income lower than the wife’s. A somewhat contradictory hypothesis is that the more egalitarian the denomination, the closer to equality are the spouses in terms of economic roles (extent of labor force participation, contribution to earnings, homogeneity in terms of occupational prestige and earnings). A final hypothesis is that denomination is not related to the pattern of dual earning: that the variation among Jews in terms of dual earning is primarily a result of educational differences between the spouses and childrearing responsibilities . Our earlier findings, that denominational differences in labor force participation and occupational achievement appear to result from educational differences and family roles of women, suggest that the last might be the strongest hypothesis. We see that among married Jewish...

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