Women, Work, and Children: Is There a Solution?

For over five decades, there have been few problems more vexing for women than how to balance work and family life. To be sure, women have always worked, usually out of necessity. But the rapid increase in higher education for women after World War II brought a massive change in possibilities, opening the way to work by choice and to seek the same professional goals as men. An important part of that story is for women who want to work to determine whether and when to have children, and how many of them to have. The number of books and articles on the subject must run into the thousands, most of them written by women and for women. There is also a large technical literature coming out of the fields of demography, sociology, and women’s studies. It is a rich subject for many disciplines, reflecting as it does some massive social and economic changes in marriage, the family, and procreation, all of them still underway.