Exam 3: Social Class, Occupation, and Social Change

Correct Answer:

Verified

In the 20th century, women were drawn into the labor market by the ballooning demand for clerical workers and later for service workers. Beginning in the early 1970s, growing numbers of wives joined the labor force to bolster family incomes that were being eroded by the stagnating earnings and the rising unemployment rates of male workers. Increasingly, couples recognized that middle-class and upper-middle-class living standards required two incomes. The pull of economic forces was reinforced by the push of social forces:
A declining birth rate, a rising divorce rate, and the increasing proportion of births to single mothers all led women to seek work outside the home. By 1970, the implicit marital compact that had tied men and women to sharply defined family roles in industrial society (husband as provider, wife as permanent housekeeper-caregiver) was collapsing. Attitudes toward working wives and mothers were shifting--encouraged perhaps by the women's movement, but also compelled by the new economic and marital uncertainties. These changes were particularly felt by the women of the baby boom generation--the extra-large cohort of Americans born after World War II, from 1946 to 1965. Compared with their own mothers and grandmothers, the boomers were much closer to men in their educational achievement, late to marry, and more likely to be childless or to delay childbearing. As a result of these factors and others outlined earlier, boomer women were more likely to join the labor force, more career oriented, more inclined to work full time and continuously, and more like men in their occupations and earnings.