Few would challenge the statement that one of the major social changes in the United States is the increased employment of mothers. For mothers with children under age eighteen, the United States has gone from less than 30 percent in the labor force in 1960 to less than 30 percent not in the labor force today. Yet, despite the fact that there have been numerous studies of the effects of mothers working over the years, we still know very little about how a mother's employment status affects her family, her children, and her own well-being. The prevailing view that mothers' employment is a social problem has been challenged in recent publications, but few empirical studies have really examined how being a mother with a paid job or one who is a full-time homemaker affects family life and children's development. That is the focus of this book.

In this book, we first review the previous literature and then present a study designed to trace the impact of the mother's employment status on three aspects of family life – the father's role, the mother' well-being, and the parents' childrearing orientations – and how these, in turn, affect children. The study focuses on 369 families with a child in the third or fourth grades of the public schools in an industrialized city in the Midwest. They represent a broad socioeconomic range and include both one-parent and two-parent families, African Americans and Whites.