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Comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) require a large number of institutional actors to work together on behalf of a neighborhood. The range of civic, social, economic, and physical development outcomes that CCIs seek cannot be achieved without collaboration and partnership. The CCIs of the 1990s taught us that although high-quality programmatic interventions are necessary for positive community change, attending to the nonprogrammatic dimensions of community change-especially individual and institutional capacities, roles, and relationships-is also an essential part of the process. In fact, weak implementation capacity and ineffective management have been found to undermine many otherwise promising initiatives whose community-level activities may have been well-theorized, welldesigned, and well-planned (Brown & Fiester, 2007; Kubisch et al., 2002; Potapchuk & Kopell, 2005). As the field has matured, it has become clear that creating effective working relationships among neighborhood organizations and then be

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The Webbs and the Mitchells, the two couples who were most successful in establishing a more equitable balance of marriage and career, were committed to rewriting the rules of professional life as well as married life. They founded new types of research organizations and educational institutions, applied research in new ways, and adopted collaborative leadership and cooperative ideals in the organizations they headed. These two-pronged efforts reinforced the values the Webbs and the Mitchells espoused in their work and their domestic lives in ways that strengthened both. Elsie Clews Parsons’s efforts to shape her marriage and affairs in accordance with her feminist beliefs were less successful. She had few opportunities to apply these values in the workplace, although she did try to move her colleagues in that direction. The wives in the more traditional couples -- the Palmers and the Youngs – failed to reconcile the tensions between their work roles and their domestic lives. Unable to break free from conventional gender stereotypes, Alice and Grace deferred to their husbands at home, bowing to their authority rather than asserting their own, and found multiple ways to limit the effects of their revolutionary careers on their roles as wives. What was needed to bring about major and lasting change in the marriages of this early vanguard of dual career couples was a conscious commitment to more equality in the home and the workplace, and a simultaneous assault on both fronts. A similar approach would prove critical in enabling large numbers of middle-class wives to carve out professional careers in the 21st century. It took decades of struggle before that was accomplished. From the 1920s through the 1960s, middle-class working wives and mothers wrestled with the same obstacles and challenges as these early women professionals did. In both the workplace and the home, they were bucking cultural norms that continued to define middle-class womanhood in terms of motherhood, wifehood, and homemaking, and expected women to be supportive and deferential to men. Middle-class wives who combined marriage and a professional career in these decades fell back on the same strategies that the women in this early generation utilized. A widespread assault on the patriarchal underpinnings of middle-class marriages and workplaces did not take hold until late in the 1960s. Fueled in part by Second Wave feminism, women won legislative protections and legal redress against problems that had long been treated as personal and individual, but were newly seen as structural and systemic issues. Intent on having careers, women began flooding into graduate and professional schools, married later, had smaller families, and stayed in the workforce after they had children. These changes have been as revolutionary for men as for women. Women who combine marriage and career are no longer flouting middle-class conventions; they are part of a trend that is reconfiguring middle-class culture and slowly reshaping workplace practices and domestic life. Middle-class women increasingly expect their male spouses and partners to share equally in housekeeping and childrearing, and men are doing more of these tasks than they formerly did. But women still do the bulk of the domestic work, and report that their male partners do less than the men think they do. Progress has been made, but more is needed. The five remarkable women depicted in this book – and the equally remarkable men they married – helped to pave the way for these changes. Alice, Grace, Elsie, Beatrice, and Lucy would be delighted to know that middle-class women have so fully entered public life and are no longer expected to choose between marriage and a career. They would be thrilled to see that men are taking more responsibility for rearing children and managing the home, although they might lament the loss of live-in servants. And they would undoubtedly applaud shifting notions of gender – especially standards of masculinity – that are helping to turn modern-day husbands into supportive partners and companionate spouses for accomplished women who find self-fulfillment in working outside the home.

Among these five couples, Lucy Sprague Mitchell (1878-1967) and Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948) most successfully combined professional accomplishments with a fulfilling marriage and a rich family life. When they married in 1912, they left their jobs at the University of California at Berkeley, and moved to New York City, which offered more professional opportunities for Lucy. A brilliant teacher and gifted administrator, Lucy became a pioneering force in the progressive education movement. She founded and led the organization that became the celebrated Bank Street College of Education. Wesley, one of the foremost economists of his generation, helped to develop the science of national statistics and launched and directed the National Bureau of Economic Research. They had four children, two of whom were adopted. Finding the right balance of marriage, work, and family involved much trial and error and frequent recalibration on both Lucy’s and Wesley’s part. Lucy did most of the childcare (with the help of many servants), but Wesley did more than most men of his era, and decided not to take one particular job because he felt it would take too great a toll on his family. Eager to show that wives and mothers can have careers when their husbands support their efforts and help to raise their children, Lucy published Two Lives, The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself, in 1953, five years after Wesley’s death. Her message – as relevant today as it was in the 1950s – was that both wives and husbands need to adopt new behaviors to make such marriages work. Determined to have careers, both Lucy and Beatrice rejected prevalent stereotypes of masculinity and romantic love and made calculated, “rational” choices about whom to marry. Like Beatrice, Lucy came from a privileged background, married a man outside her social class, and used her inherited wealth to support their lifestyle. Like Beatrice, it took her years to appreciate that the man she initially found too weak and passive was a tower of quiet strength and a model husband for an ambitious woman. Like Sidney, Wesley supported his wife’s career with ongoing, ungrudging, unambiguous enthusiasm. As a result, neither Lucy nor Beatrice suffered the marital pressure – or the guilt – that made it so difficult for Alice and Grace to maintain their independent careers. Nor did they experience the intellectual and emotional isolation that undermined Elsie’s marriage. In the end, both Beatrice and Lucy felt richly rewarded for the unconventional choices they made.