The forest and the trees: Industrialization, demographic change, and the ongoing gender revolution in Sweden and the United States, 1870-2010

Unequal Family Lives

“…It took more than a century until the social, economic, and demographic changes underway reached the point where women could join men in the public sphere as well. By then, the home had taken on its gendered nature, as a place for women and children (Stanfors and Goldscheider 2017), making it more challenging for men to include domestic tasks as part of their responsibilities. Men resist not only the gendered tasks in the home, which causes a problem in their relationships, but also the gender-linked tasks in the labor market, which is a problem for their role as provider, given that, with the decline in agriculture, the decline in manufacturing has meant that the jobs "real men" used to take have been vanishing (see Chapter 3).…”

“…Increased earnings no doubt mattered as well, although analyses of the negative effects on earnings of women's concentration in "pink-collar" occupations (Cotter et al 1997) suggest that women were eager to earn anything that could contribute more to their families than they were able to do with just their domestic skills and time. The crumbling of the "marriage bar" (Goldin 1990;Stanfors and Goldscheider 2017), which for so long prevented married women from taking many jobs, such as teaching, contributed as well.…”

“…Not until the growth in female labor force participation in the second half of the twentieth century did female education increase in response to the growth of economic opportunity. The demographic transition from high to low fertility and mortality was also important, as it made it no longer feasible to define all of women's adult years as needed for childbearing and rearing (Stanfors and Goldscheider 2017;Watkins, Menken, and Bongaarts 1989). Increased earnings no doubt mattered as well, although analyses of the negative effects on earnings of women's concentration in "pink-collar" occupations (Cotter et al 1997) suggest that women were eager to earn anything that could contribute more to their families than they were able to do with just their domestic skills and time.…”

“…In direct response to the contention that the second half of the gender revolution cannot take hold without strong state support, they refer to work showing that the levels and trends in men's share of housework and child-care time are very similar in the United States and Scandinavia (Stanfors and Goldscheider 2017). They even argue that the lack of state support for families in the United States may have increased the need for men's involvement in child-rearing since, for example, publicly funded universal preschool is not available.…”

“…Despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of policies reducing work-family conflict, the United States' levels and trends in men's share of housework and child-care time closely approximate those in Scandinavia (Stanfors and Goldscheider 2017). This is despite the fact that the ratio of female to male labor force participation is considerably lower in the United States than in the Scandinavian countries -about 85% in 2014 compared with ratios closer to 95% in Norway, Sweden, and Finlandreflecting the lack of public policies, such as child care, that support female labor force participation (Frejka, Goldscheider, and Lappegård 2018).…”