We in the United States are experiencing a radical transformation in the nature and character of family, work, and society itself, as mothers of young children enter and remain in the labor force in unprecedented numbers. What has changed so dramatically is not women's roles but their duration and sequence. Today a majority of American women engage in employment and child rearing simultaneously, a seemingly impossible feat in a world fashioned for families in which fathers serve as breadwinners and mothers as homemakers. And, as we shall see, because of the complex and unequal pace of social change, there are built-in contradictions and inconsistencies in what men and women raising families expect of themselves and each other, in what employers expect of workers, and in what society expects of its male and female members.

Throughout history women have been workers as well as wives and mothers--but not necessarily at the same time. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, marked by the separation of paid work from home life, women held work and family roles sequentially. Young unmarried girls commonly worked in factories or as domestics. When they married they left their jobs if it were financially possible to do so. As wives and mothers, women also contributed to the family economy when necessary, but at times and in ways that did not seriously conflict with their principal homemaking responsibilities--by doing piecework at home, washing other people's laundry, or taking in boarders. 2 For most women, sequencing work and family roles meant working outside the home before marriage and motherhood, and then permanently withdrawing from the labor force in order to tend to household and child-care obligations.

The first half of the twentieth century added another form of sequencing, as women gradually began returning to employment after their children were grown. In fact, by 1945 the "average" female worker in the United States was married and over 35.

In the mid- 1950s, Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein's book on women's two roles argued that women could successfully mesh their home and work roles and need not "forgo the pleasures of one sphere in order to enjoy the satisfactions of the other" ( 1956:xiii). The optimal arrangement, as they saw it, was precisely through role sequencing, with family and work roles each "given its own place in a chronological sequence" (p. 155 ). Their proposed solution was for women to continue the practice of leaving the labor force to bear and raise children but to reenter it earlier, as soon as their children reached school age.

From the 1950s on, women in fact have spent increasingly larger portions of their adulthood in employment, typically in the sequential fashion recommended by Myrdal and Klein. But unlike earlier generations, American mothers in the 1970s, 1980s, and now in the 1990s have returned to employment even more quickly--or have never even left it. By 1990 over half (59.4%) of the married mothers of preschoolers and, even more strikingly, over half (51.3%) of the mothers of infants (children under age one) were in the labor force.

We in the United States stand at something of a crossroads. A shrinking labor force, the rising costs of living, and notions of gender equality render women's employment ever more essential and desirable, but customary institutional patterns (at home and at work) make combining the mothering of young children with employment both frustrating and exhausting, if not impossible. There are no blueprints for where we go from here. . .