The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America - by Kathleen Gerson

Abstract

The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America. Kathleen Gerson. New York: Oxford University Press. 20 10. 297 pp. ISBN: 9780195371673. $24.95 cloth. A new generation's aspirations are never guarantees. Still, each cohort's dreams and fears are a critical barometer of shifting societal conventions and conversations. In Kathleen Gerson's new book The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America, she provides an astute and compelling portrait of how young people today are redrawing crossroads of labor and love. Through an analysis of lifehistory interviews with 120 men and women between ages of 18 and 32, Gerson explores consequences of second-wave feminist revolution on ambitions of its nextgeneration sons and daughters. Two of Gerson's particularly gripping ideas are detailed here: role of gender flexibility in family adaption and growing disconnect between young men and young women's work and family fallback strategies. Gerson's participants grew up during a particularly tumultuous time in history of U.S. gender, economic, and caregiving politics. The late 20th century brought with it movement en masse of American women into workplace and related media fascination, as well as rise of diverse family forms and career patterns. What these young people saw and heard clearly shapes their current disconcerted sense of relationships and careers. Yet experiences of upheaval also provided many participants with an encouraging view of gender flexibility when they saw their parents go against well-tread gendered expectations to meet head-on pragmatic, ever-changing of their families. Throughout Gerson's analysis are threaded stories of divorced motiiers taking on successful breadwinning roles, fathers engaging anew in caregiving, and parents renegotiating gender in midst of crisis. Gerson reflects mat, although many of her participants' families faced economic crises and increasing parental discontent, homes where adults transgressed gender boundaries in breadwinning and parenting were better equipped to meet a child's economic and emotional needs (p. 216). One lesson Gerson draws for us - as scholars of family and everyday family members - is that we need to move away from our absorption on static family forms to more fully deliberate on varieties of family processes and pathways; she illustrates so well that the starting point does not determine destination (p. 215). Seeing positive effects of gender flexibility, for this generation, may serve to further loosen gender's grip on work and family life in decades to come. And for this generation of family scholars, seeing that static labels such as single parent or dual-earner household are often only temporary characterizations, not fixed categorizations, can help us focus on exploring ways families adapt to and take part in changing economic, relational, and gendered circumstances. Gender flexibility gives us one way to think about power of individually crossing gendered work and family boundaries, but this process, according to Gerson, is certainly not an easy or guaranteed course of action for this next generation. Individual and relational adjustment does not negate realities of unforgiving work structures, greedy institutions, and economic recessions. As such, fallback strategies are also central to Gerson's analysis. Most of her participants aspire to loving, committed, and equal partnerships and to rewarding and financially sustaining work lives. Yet facing an unsure future, children of gender revolution often express need to formulate backup plans or contingency strategies to compose a successful life. And new challenges, as we know, usually accompany new opportunities. Equal caregiving and wage earning in long-term relationships are ideal work and family aspirations for most young women whom Gerson interviewed; nonetheless, these women also anticipate or have already experienced necessity for a backup plan. …