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Notes 1. In the case of poor families, ironically, many of these same profamily advocates support greater parental work effort—laying the blame for parental unavailability on childbearing outside of marriage and on marital disruptions. 2. Following the convention in cross-national research, we refer to Canada as “English-Speaking,” although it is officially bilingual, part Anglophone and part Francophone. All of the European countries in this study, with the exception of Norway, are members of the European Union. Chapter Two 1. In the nineteenth century, married women had more pregnancies and bore more children than their counterparts do today. These high levels of fertility undoubtedly bolstered the logic for such a rigid gendered division of labor. 2. For an excellent summary of the effects of industrialization on gendered divisions of labor and the genesis of the traditional breadwinner -homemaker family, see Blau, Ferber, and Winkler (2002). 3. Substantial racial differences in women’s employment patterns were still evident in 2000. The labor force participation rate of married mothers (with husbands present) was even higher for black mothers than for white mothers—81 and 70 percent respectively. 4. The 1963 Pay Equity Act and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex in virtually all aspects of employment, and two executive orders in the late 1960s introduced affirmative action for employers with federal contracts. 5. Wives’ earnings were particularly crucial for lower-income families. Between 1979 and 1989, average income for families in the bottom 322 Notes fifth of the income distribution fell by 6 percent; without wives’ increased earnings, it would have fallen by more than 10 percent. During the next decade (1989 to 1999), incomes for this group rose by 5 percent but would have risen by only half as much without an increase in wives’ earnings (Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt 2001). 6. How much of the increase in women’s engagement in paid work has been pull and how much has been push remains an open question. In one empirical study, Philip Cohen and Suzanne Bianchi (1999) address the question of whether women’s labor market involvement has increased more because of rising opportunities or declining constraints. They analyze women’s employment between 1978 and 1998, focusing on changes in the effects of a series of predictor variables, including women’s own educational attainment and their spouses’ earnings. They find that the largest increase in participation was among the most educated women and that, though spousal earnings continued to influence wives’ labor supply —low earnings raising wives’ participation in paid work—the income effect diminished over time. They conclude that the rise in women’s employment during these years is more consistent with an opportunities than with a constraints interpretation. 7. The small increase in hours was partly driven by falling wages, which caused some workers, both male and female, to elect to increase their overtime hours (ILO 1995). 8. In addition to time at the job, American workers spend an average of 3.7 hours a week commuting to and from the job (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1999). 9. Jacobs and Gerson (2001) note that many women are counted as part-year workers when, in fact, they are beginning long spells of employment and just happen to start a spell in the middle of the survey year. Thus part-year work is falling, and average total weeks rising, principally because fewer women are entering the labor market in any given year as more and more are continuously employed . Leete-Guy and Schor’s work (1992) suggests that the increase in weeks worked per year is real—not simply a measurement artifact, as Jacobs and Gerson conclude. It is likely that both findings are correct. Jacobs and Gerson analyze weeks worked per year using data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), and in the CPS, paid time off—vacations, holidays, and so forth—is generally counted as working time. Thus the increase in weeks worked due to decreases in paid time off (as reported by Leete-Guy and Schor) would not even be captured in the CPS. If those increased weeks were counted, the rise in annual weeks (and days) worked would most likely be even larger. [3.236.145.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:48 GMT) Notes 323 10. Mishel and colleagues also report that increases in working time in recent decades have taken place among diverse groups of workers: “Some critics have argued...