From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women’s Lives and Work ‐ Edited by Susan Thistle

Abstract

From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women's Lives and Work. Susan Thistle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2006. 311 pp. ISBN 0520246462. $19.95 (paperback). Much scholarship on the work/family interface has focused on the rise of the dual-income couple or the contradictory nature of two greedy institutions: home and work. The work/family interface as a key social institution structuring economic inequality and the consequences of this economic restructuring for women and society at large have been underplayed. Susan Thistle's From Marriage to the Market demonstrates how the dynamic nature of this interface between private and public, home and work, has shifted over time to produce varying sets of consequences to different groups of women and their families. In particular, her analyses compare and contrast patterns for White and Black women separately in order to better understand who has benefited and who has lost ground in the transformation she describes. The book makes two central contributions to recent discussions on the topic of work, home, and inequality. First, the historical descriptions, beginning with the industrial revolution up to the present outline, provide rich detail of the economic, social/cultural, and legal developments that have combined in various ways to produce the current situation of burden facing many families attempting to manage one or more jobs and unpaid domestic work. The benefit of these descriptions, beyond creating a cohesive story, is that they lay the groundwork for Thistle's argument that the problems facing many women today are much like those confronting earlier groups of men during the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Such a comparison allows us to learn from these earlier struggles and forces us to recognize that this is not a new problem but one that has confronted other groups of workers in other times. With this realization in hand, we are armed to begin to try and identify solutions for solving the problems faced by contemporary workers. A second contribution of the book is the clearly articulated evidence, drawn primarily from an analysis of census data (Integrated Public Use Microdata, 1960 - 2000) showing that support for women's domestic work has shifted from family income provided mostly by husbands to family income provided mostly by wives. In a departure from the more traditional sociological analysis of the household division of labor, where men's and women's time in domestic work is compared, Thistle asks the question: who pays for women's domestic contribution? This shift in economic support from wives to husbands, she argues, is the untold part of the story linking the work/family interface to rising economic inequality. Such inequality, Thistle acknowledges, is indeed partly produced because some individuals have more limited opportunities than others in the wage economy, but it also results from the disintegration of others' support for domestic work (namely husbands and the state), which has reinforced disadvantage for some groups over others. …