In one specific and expanding category—single moms—the evidence is quite strong that work outside the home has a positive effect on virtually all forms of civic engagement, from club membership to political interest.24 With kids to care for and without a spouse to help, these women are often isolated socially except for their connections at work. In short, work outside the home means exposure to a wider array of social and community networks. Insofar as this factor is dominant, the movement of women into the paid labor force certainly did not contribute to the national decline of social capital and civic engagement and may actually have muted that decline.
On the other hand, women have traditionally invested more time than men in social connectedness. Although men belong to more organizations, women spend more time in them. Women also spend more time than men in informal conversation and other forms of schmoozing, and they participate more in religious activities.25 Precisely because women’s traditional investments in social capital were so time-intensive, their rate of investment has been reduced by their movement into the paid labor force.
Comparing two women of the same age, education, financial security, and marital and parental status, full-time employment appears to cut home entertaining by roughly 10 percent, club and church attendance by roughly 15 percent, informal visiting with friends by 25 percent, and volunteering by more than 50 percent. Moreover, husbands of women who work full-time are, like their wives, less likely to attend church, volunteer, and entertain at home. Conversely, other things being equal, women who work full-time (and their husbands) spend more time on personal relaxation, such as videos, movies, TV, and shopping—in short, zoning out. When both members of a couple have worked in high-stress jobs all day, relaxation, not frenetic civic engagement, is understandably a preferred leisure activity. These sorts of evidence make it plausible to suppose that the movement of women into the paid labor force has been a significant contributor to the national decline in community involvement.26
In short, work outside the home, especially full-time work, is a double-edged sword with respect to civic engagement—more opportunity, but less time. In part because of these crosscurrents, some detailed evidence is hard to reconcile with the theory that women’s liberation caused our civic crisis. For example, time diary data between 1965 and 1985 show that while the decline in actual organizational activity in recent years is concentrated among women, employed women are actually spending more time on organizations than before, while nonemployed women are spending less. Moreover, the time diary data suggest that the decline in schmoozing since 1965 has also been concentrated among nonemployed women. The decline in PTA membership and in club attendance actually has been greatest among “traditional moms”—that is, married women with kids at home and no paid employment.27 These figures suggest that women who work full-time may have been more resistant to the slump than those who do not.
These patterns might be, at least in part, an optical illusion, because women who have chosen to enter the workforce doubtlessly differ in many respects from women who have chosen to stay home. Perhaps some forms of community involvement appear to be rising among working women and declining among housewives precisely because the sort of women who, in an earlier era, were most involved with their communities have been disproportionately likely to enter the workforce, thus simultaneously lowering the average level of civic engagement among the remaining homemakers and raising the average among women in the workplace. Obviously we have not been running a great national controlled experiment on the effects of work on women’s civic engagement, in which women were randomly assigned to work or to stay home, so questions of self-selection and causality are difficult to resolve.
We can get further insight into the implications of employment for women’s civic and social life if we consider simultaneously two dimensions of women’s work life:
1. Amount of time spent in work outside the home.
2. Preference for employment outside the home.
The DDB Needham Life Style data permit us to measure these two dimensions simultaneously. First, all women in the survey are asked whether they are full-time employees, part-time employees, or full-time homemakers. Those who are employed either full- or part-time are then asked whether they work primarily for personal satisfaction or primarily for financial necessity. Those who are full-time homemakers are asked whether they stay at home primarily for personal satisfaction or primarily to take care of children. Of course, in the real world such decisions are doubtless made for a mixture of all these motivations and others besides.28 Nevertheless, as a crude first cut, this standard question distinguishes between women who are working (or not working) mainly because they want to and those who are working (or not working) mainly because they have to.
Figure 47 shows how women are distributed across these two dimensions. Column A represents women who are employed full-time primarily out of financial necessity; over the last two decades they have constituted on average 31 percent of all women. This average is somewhat misleading, however, since their numbers almost doubled from about 21 percent of all women in 1978 to 36 percent in 1999; the arrow on the column represents this trend. Column B represents women who are employed full-time primarily for personal satisfaction; they constitute 11 percent of the total sample, a figure that has not changed much over these two decades. In other words, of all women who work full-time, the fraction who say that they are doing so primarily out of financial necessity has risen from two-thirds to more than three-quarters. (Figure 48 summarizes this trend.) At least in these surveys, virtually all the increase in full-time employment of American women over the last twenty years is attributable to financial pressures, not personal fulfillment.29
Figure 47: Working by Choice and by Necessity Among American Women, 1978–1999
Column C represents women who work part-time outside the home and do so primarily for financial reasons, while column D represents those who work part-time primarily for personal satisfaction. Each of these two groups accounts for 10–11 percent of all women, with a modest tendency over time for financial reasons to gain in importance relative to personal satisfaction. Column E represents stay-at-home moms who say that their primary reason is child care; over these two decades, they represented 8 percent of all women, a figure that declined from about 11 percent in 1978 to 7 percent in 1999. Finally, column F represents women who for reasons of personal satisfaction do not work outside the home. Over the past two decades that category fell from about 37 percent of all women in 1978 to 23 percent in 1999. Not surprisingly, columns E and F disproportionately represent women at different stages of the life cycle. Stay-at-home moms (column E) are ten years younger than the national average. By contrast, the category of personally satisfied full-time homemakers (column F) includes a large number of retired women, and this category is ten years older than the national average.
Figure 48: More Women Work Because They Must, 1978–1999
One difficult conundrum in studying the effects of work on women’s behavior is this: If working women turn out to differ from full-time homemakers in some respect, that difference may reflect the consequences of working, or it may reflect instead self-selection. If working women attend church less frequently than full-time homemakers, for example, is that because of the pressures of time and competing obligations, or is it because religiously devout women are less likely to work outside the home? Here the distinction made in figure 47 between women who are working (or not working) because they want to (columns F, D, and B) and those who are working (or not working) because they have to (columns E, C, and A) provides some useful analytic leverage.
If we compare column A with column B, we are comparing women all of whom are working full-time, but some (column A) by necessity and some (column B) by choice. That is, we are comparing women whose work circumstances are similar, but whose preferences differ. Similarly, if we compare column A with column F, we are comparing women who would all apparently prefer not to work outside the home, but s
ome (column A) are employed by necessity, whereas others (column F) are contentedly remaining at home. That is, we are comparing women whose preferences are similar, but whose work circumstances differ. To be sure, life is more complicated than can be encompassed in any simple chart. Most women (like most men) have mixed and very complex feelings about both work and home, and the distinction between “personal satisfaction” and “necessity” is much too crude to capture the underlying motivations. I do not offer figure 47 as a comprehensive account of the complicated choices (some of them not actually “choices” in a full sense) that women must make in the real world. However, it does provide a useful template for considering now the implication of women’s work for civic engagement.
Consider, first, the relationship between work and clubgoing. Women working full-time attend fewer club meetings than other women. Figure 49 illustrates in more detail how clubgoing varies with both the nature of a woman’s employment and her motivations. For each category, the height of the column represents those women’s relative frequency of attendance at club meetings. (Some standard of comparison is necessary, so arbitrarily we compare each category to the average frequency of clubgoing among all men, represented by the floor in figure 49. In order to concentrate our attention on the effects of work per se, our statistical analysis holds constant other factors that affect community involvement, including education, year of birth, year of survey, marital and parental status, financial worries, and community rootedness).30 Thus women who work full-time out of financial necessity attend, on average, .7 more club meetings per year than the typical man. Women who are full-time homemakers by choice (back row of figure 49, far left), by contrast, attend 2.7 more club meetings per year than the average man, or 2 more meetings per year than their counterparts who are working full-time by necessity. (Since we have already controlled for both education and financial worries, we can be confident this difference does not simply reflect a social class discrepancy between the two groups.)
Several important conclusions can be drawn from figure 49. First, all the columns rise above the standard of comparison (the floor of the graph) that represents the level of involvement of the average man. Whether working full-time, part-time, or not at all outside the home, and whether by choice or necessity, women invest more time in associational life than the average man.
Figure 49: Working Full-Time Reduces Community Involvement
Second, full-time work significantly depresses club attendance, regardless of whether work is a choice or a necessity. (Graphically this is represented by the sharp falloff in the two right-hand columns.) Moreover, women whose work status represents a personal choice (whether at home full-time, in the workplace full-time, or some combination of the two) are more involved in organizational life than women in the same situation out of necessity. (Graphically this is represented by the greater height of the columns in the back row.) The least involvement is found among women who are working full-time not because they want to, but because they have to. Women who work full-time by necessity—the fastest-growing group of women and by now the largest—incur the steepest civic penalty. More and more women are—by necessity, not by choice—in precisely the category that most inhibits social connectedness.
Finally, Figure 49 also shows that the greatest involvement is found among part-time workers, especially those for whom work is a choice, not a necessity. We can guess that these women are striving to balance conflicting obligations to family, community, and self and have a certain amount of maneuvering room in which to do so. At least from the point of view of civic engagement, part-time work seems like a “golden mean.”31
These fundamental findings about club attendance turn out to apply to other modes of community involvement, both formal and informal, including church attendance, entertaining at home, visiting with friends, and volunteering. Other things being equal, women employed full-time attend church four fewer times a year, entertain at home one or two fewer times a year, spend about one-third less time visiting with friends, and volunteer about four fewer times per year than other women.32 The fact that full-time work reduces community involvement among both women working by choice and those working by necessity suggests that the correlation is not primarily a result of self-selection. In fact, since as figure 48 showed, virtually all the increase in female employment over the last two decades of the twentieth century was by necessity, not by choice, self-selection must have played a minor role at best during this period.
Women working by choice are more involved with clubs, church, friends, home entertaining, and volunteering than are women who are working out of necessity. This fact, illustrated by the difference between the front and back columns on the far right of figure 49, is a rough measure of the degree of self-selection underlying the correlation between civic involvement and work. This evidence suggests that socially active women were somewhat more likely to choose to enter the workforce than their less civic-minded sisters, but that compared to the effect of work itself, the effect of self-selection is modest.
Women who must work full-time are the least likely to visit with friends, to entertain at home, or to volunteer, just as they are least involved in club life. Women who work part-time, especially those who do so by choice, volunteer more, entertain more, and visit more with friends than do full-time employees or full-time homemakers.33 With only a very few exceptions, women in all categories are more involved than men in all these forms of community activity.
In short, full-time work inhibits a woman’s social involvement, both formal and informal.34 However, the degree to which a woman works by choice is also closely associated with community engagement. In fact, the greatest community involvement is found among women who are working part-time by choice. (Recall that we are here holding constant other features of the woman’s circumstances, including her education, marital and parental status, and financial situation, so the civic advantage of part-time work is not due merely to the kind of women who are able to choose part-time work.) This striking fact suggests that one practical way to increase community engagement in America would be to make it easier for women (and men too) to work part-time if they wished. 35
Several important qualifications must be added to our conclusions about women’s work and civic engagement.
First, to avoid misunderstanding, I explicitly disclaim the view that working women are “to blame” for our civic disengagement. Obviously full-time employment reduces the time available for other activities. Although the mothers of the current generation of American adults were usually not part of the paid labor force, they engaged in many socially productive activities. As their daughters have assumed a greater share of work outside the home, one might have expected their sons to assume a greater share of other social and community responsibilities, but (as our evidence shows) that has not happened. The movement of women toward professional equality has released much creative energy and increased individual autonomy and has been a net plus for American society. The broader social ledger of costs and benefits, however, must include not merely the benefits of women’s new roles, but also the costs of social and community activities collectively foregone.
Second, full-time employment has not inhibited all forms of organizational involvement. As we noted earlier, women’s participation in the more public sorts of civic activities has been enhanced by full-time employment. The same is true for formal membership in many professional and service organizations.36 In other words, to some extent, as women’s place of work has moved outside the home into the public sphere, so too has the locus of their community engagement. For some working women the increase in opportunity for involvement in community life has outweighed the decrease in time, and they have swum against the society-wide current of community disengagement.
Third, and most important, neither the movement of women into the paid labor force nor the increase in financial distress discussed earlier can be the main reason for the basic decline in American civic engagement over the last
two decades. In fact, based on the evidence now available, my best guess is that both factors together account for less than one-tenth of the total decline.37 In short, the emergence of two-career families over the last quarter of the twentieth century played a visible but quite modest role in the erosion of social capital and civic engagement.
One way to see the limited potential of these explanations is to focus on the two social categories least affected by them—namely, unmarried men and married women without full-time employment who are financially comfortable. Bachelors and affluent housewives constitute only small fractions of the American population, but their testimony is important to our case, for they have been relatively shielded from the forces for civic disengagement we have been examining in this chapter, especially the movement of women into the workplace.
The level of social engagement is higher among affluent housewives than among other women—they spend more time visiting friends, entertaining at home, attending club meetings, and so on. So the long-term movement of women out of the category of “affluent housewife” into other social categories has tended to depress civic engagement. However, the declines in home entertaining, clubgoing, community projects, visiting with friends, and so forth are virtually as great among these women who have been least affected by the rise of two-career families or by the roughly simultaneous rise in financial distress as among other women. In fact, the dropout rate from public meetings, party work, local leadership, and other kinds of formal involvement has been greater among affluent housewives than among the rest of the population. Similarly, the decline in club meetings, visiting friends, working on community projects, serving as a local leader, signing petitions, and the like has been at least as great among bachelors as among the rest of Americans. None of this is consistent with the hypothesis that our national civic disengagement over the past several decades can be attributed primarily to the movement of women into the paid labor force.38
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