For the radical feminists of the 70's and 80's, the home was a "prison of domesticity." To free women from that prison, these radicals advocated dramatic changes in law and culture, changes that would take women out of the home and put them into paid employment. The remarkable success of these activists in effecting these changes has not, however, worked out quite the way they promised that it would. Indeed, in recent years, a growing number of women have apparently come to regard their place of employment as a prison and their home as an escape.
Women's growing disenchantment with paid employment and their rising appreciation for the home as a refuge from such employment are both documented in a study recently published in the Journal of Marriage and Family by sociologist K. Jill Kiecolt of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Kiecolt acknowledges that scholars and journalists have made much of "claims of a cultural reversal" in which "the rewards of work have increased relative to those of family life." But such claims, she complains, have never been well tested against empirical data. When Kiecolt actually scrutinizes the data, she finds little to suggest a cultural reversal. Quite the contrary. What she finds is evidence that employed American women are rediscovering the attractions of the home.
Examining nationally representative data from 1973 to 1994, Kiecolt discovers that contrary to the predictions of the cultural-reversal theorists, "the likelihood of finding work a haven versus finding home a haven has declined over time." To be sure, certain groups have found a kind of refuge in paid employment: the data show that "divorcees are more likely than others to find work a haven." However, in general "women have shifted away from finding work more satisfying than home toward finding home a haven." Kiecolt reports that "the size of the home-as-haven category has increased, from 31.8% in 1973 to 40.4% in 1994," a statistical significant increase. Further analysis of this increase reveals that "women accounted for nearly all of it," since "men's likelihood of finding work a haven has not changed."
Kiecolt regards the rise in American women's appreciation for the home as particularly remarkably, because it has occurred during the very time that the proportion of women in employment has risen and the number of women in intact marriages has fallen, developments that together yield "a predicted increase in the work-as- haven category." Yet "this category decreased," while the home-as-haven category grew. In other words, "were it not for changes in women's share of the labor force and the distribution of marital status over the study period, women's shift toward finding home a haven would have been even larger."
Kiecolt expresses relief that the posited cultural reversal in American life has not occurred, since such a reversal would entail the "negative consequences" that would inevitably accompany "reduced investment in family life." But in her view, her findings still "do not encourage optimism," for they suggest that "many longstanding work and family problems [are] unresolved."
Nonetheless, if the growing appreciation for the home among American women signals a growing skepticism to feminist theory, perhaps Keicolt's research offers more hope than she herself recognizes.
