Book Review: Gerson, K. (2011). The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family in America.
ABSTRACT
In The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family in America, Kathleen Gerson conducted life-history interviews with 120 young adults age 18 to 32 from a variety of regional, ethnic, social class and racial backgrounds. She wanted detailed information about their experiences growing up in families in recent decades, during a time when a unprecedented revolution in gender roles, sexuality and family and work life was occurring. During this time, more mothers with young children were working than ever before, more couples were divorcing and the number of single-parent households was increasing greatly. Almost all the young adults Gerson interviewed favored these changes in gender roles that created more egalitarian relationships and offered women far more economic and educational opportunities than ever before in the past. At the same time, they were also very skeptical about their chances for establishing lifelong partnerships, especially in the context of more demanding work schedules, privatized childcare and an overall decline in incomes and living standards.
Kathleen Gerson’s book The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New era of Gender, Work, and Family in America, examines the impact that the gender revolution over the last forty years has had on young adults who come of age during a period of tremendous changes in family, work and social life. All of the contours of this revolution are familiar to sociologists and other social scientists, including the higher levels of divorce, more single-parent households, more adults living alone, a majority of mothers with children under the age of eighteen who are now in the workplace, and greater freedom for nontraditional and gay and lesbian families than was ever possible in the past. Gerson conducted detailed life-history interviews with 120 young adults age 18 to 32, who came from all regions of the country and a variety of social class, racial and ethnic backgrounds. This sample was 55% white, 22% black, 17% Hispanic and 6% Asian, while 46% were from a middle or upper class background, 38% from the working class and 16% from poor families (Gerson, 2011, p. 8). Over 40% had experienced parental divorce at some time during their childhoods and 7% after they left home. About half of those who experienced divorce in their childhood supported their parent’s decision, and over 90% believed that mothers with children should be able to work and pursue educational opportunities (Gerson, p. 9). They had far less rigid concepts of marriage, gender roles and sexuality than earlier generations, and they overwhelmingly believed in the idea that marriages should be egalitarian partnerships. At the same time, however, they were also “doubtful about their chances of reaching this goal” in their own lives (Gerson, p. 10).
Since the 1960s, there has been a tremendous, indeed, revolutionary shift in expectations about gender roles and the social and economic status of women in the United States. All of these changes have created “more options” in marriage and family life but also “unprecedented conflicts and challenges” (Gerson, p. 3). In 1970, 51% of households derived their incomes from a single male breadwinner, but by 2000 over 60% of families had two earners. In 1970, only 10% of white families and 40% of black families were headed by single mothers, but this increased to 33% and 60% respectively by 2000 (Gerson, p. 4). In 1975, only 33% of mothers with children age three and under were employed outside the home, but this grew to 61% by 2000, while 71% of mothers of children under age 18 were working (Gerson, p. 5). At the same time, work hours and demands also increased while wages and incomes stagnated, and privatized childcare was expensive and difficult to obtain. As for the younger generation raised during this period of tumultuous change, “for better or worse, they have inherited more options and questions about women’s and men’s proper places” (Gerson, p. 7).
Over 90% of Gerson’s interviewees expressed the wish that they would find stable, egalitarian partnerships, including among the 5% who were openly gay or lesbian. They almost all agreed that both parents should be able to work, but their own life experiences made them skeptical about the possibilities of establishing lifelong partnerships. During their childhoods, “almost half of those with promising family beginnings enjoyed stable supportbut the rest lived in families that took a turn for the worse” (Gerson, p. 76). They have come to expect radical and unpredictable changes in family life, although most young women and men would still like “to strike a relatively equal balance between paid work and the rest of life” (Gerson, p. 110). At the same time, more young women than men preferred self-reliance to depending on a marriage partner for survival, while most young men still assumed that women would take on the main responsibility for domestic work and childcare (Gerson, p. 11). All of this was taking place within a context in which “demanding workplaces and privatized child-rearing make work-family integration and egalitarian commitment difficult to achieve” (Gerson, p. 12). All of the stereotypical stay-at-home mothers and single-earner fathers of the era of I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best may look comical by today’s standards, but in many ways their overall income and economic situation was better than that today’s young adults are facing. It is no longer even a question whether more mothers with young children prefer to work, but that they have to in order to maintain an unsteady hold on middle class status, while families headed by single mothers do indeed tend to be significantly poorer than two-income households. For all of these reasons, then, the “children of the gender revolution inherited a complicated mix of new options, challenges, and uncertainties” that are more difficult to resolve than they were for their parent’s and grandparent’s generation, where the roles and expected roles in work, family life, gender relations and sexuality were far more rigid but also more stable and predictable (Gerson, p. 214).
REFERENCES
Gerson, K. (2011). The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family in America. Oxford University Press.
