Female breadwinning has recently gained in significance in Germany. This article examines the extent to which female breadwinning is linked to new gender roles, and the impacts the role reversal may have on families’ everyday lives. Qualitative interviews with female breadwinners living in Western Germany were conducted to explore families’ ways of doing gender and doing family as an interrelated process. The research examined, first, the female-breadwinner families’ division of employment and domestic labor and second, the relationship between individual gender self-concepts and factual income arrangements. Some examples of modernization of gender roles and arrangements in everyday life in female-breadwinner families were found, but traditional gender concepts and practices prevailed. The families achieved doing family results comparable to couples with other breadwinning arrangements, but this demanded extraordinary efforts. We reconstructed “practices of normalization,” which couples used to reassure themselves and others of their “normalness” despite their gender-atypical roles.

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Carrying the `double burden' of juggling a family and a job with different schedules, how can women achieve a favourable life situtation in the face of such conflicting demands? Battles for time arise through the complexities and expectations of everyday life, which is why it is important to find a way of consciously and effectively managing one's time. Working from an empirical investigation into the `conduct of everyday life' of women and men in different systems of work time, the author highlights differences between the social construct `feminine time' as `time for others' and the empirical time experiences of women. She considers to what extent it is justifiable to speak of `women's' experiences of time when these differ greatly according to age, profession, class, family status and cultural background. In conclusion, some patterns of dealing with time are outlined and some `conditions for success' identified.