Elinor Ochs

This is a series of articles interpreting the findings of a three-year ethnographical study of 32 American dual-earner households in Southern California, a study involving video-recording, interviews, questionnaires, and other methods more normally used in researching remote communities and unfamiliar cultures. The data acquired will certainly be a useful resource for researchers of the future. But while the study's originators emphasise the uniqueness of their scientific approach, it is clear that what has been objectively documented only confirms our unscientific assessment of American life: homes packed with an unprecedented number of personal possessions, declining outdoor leisure, fewer meals cooked from scratch and/or eaten together, little expectation that children will contribute anything to the work of maintaining the house, uneven distribution of home/childcare tasks between men and women. The much more thought-provoking parts of the book involve the interviews. But of course the interpretation of these interviews is necessarily subjective, and while the authors' conclusions seem cogent in 2014, a few decades from now they may seem as unintentionally entertaining as a marriage manual from the 1950s. Certainly we can foresee a time when the stresses of the "dual income" family will become as transparent as the stresses of the "servantless home," since no one will remember any other kind.… (mehr)