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Bedlam broke out when Claudia Goldin, professor of economics, asked a class on women and the family, "What does Generation X want?" One response: "All I want is to marry a man, have a family, and have a career-that's all! But the most important thing is that the man I marry should want what I want." That woman represented a vocal majority, says Goldin. But the man who spoke next struck a nerve: "There are many wonderful and beautiful and intelligent women in this class, and I think I'd like to marry a Harvard woman and have children with a Harvard woman. And I think I'd be willing to sacrifice something for it."

"Well," Goldin laughs, "there were books thrown at this guy. `Sacrifice!' said the woman. `That's exactly what I mean. You don't want what I want if you feel it's a sacrifice.'" With these prototypical "she saids/he saids" in mind, Goldin embarked on a study of Career and Family: College Women Look to the Past, a working paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Tracing the work and childbearing histories of college women during the twentieth century, Goldin found that not a single generation so far has had a high success rate in combining family and career-not even her own baby-boomer cohort. Her 1990 book Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women discusses related issues.

The family-career choice was an either/or for women born in the 1890s, who graduated from college around 1910. The next generation, graduating around 1933, began careers that were eventually cut short by the arrival of children. And Goldin found that for women graduating in the mid-1950s, whom she called cohort III, "Family came first, in terms of timing and priority, then employment."

Not until the postwar baby boomers of cohort IV-born from 1944 to 1957 and graduating between 1966 and 1979-did a significant number of women seriously pursue careers. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women, which has tracked women who were 14 to 24 years old in 1968, Goldin determined that a record 33 percent attained "career" status in 1987 and 1988. But only a startlingly low 13 to 17 percent had achieved both "family and career" by the time they were 37 to 47 years old and "close to the end of their fertility histories," Goldin writes. This generation of college women has experienced the highest rate of childlessness (almost 30 percent) since the early twentieth century. As Goldin notes, "These figures do not look good for the `family and career' route."

The Gen-X women of cohort V, born since 1958 and graduating after 1980, reject the choices of previous generations. They are "unwilling to schedule events serially and thereby risk forfeiting one of them," Goldin writes. But these women have no illusions, having witnessed firsthand the costs of conflicting parental desires, she says; more than any other generation, they are the children of divorced parents. "It was career, not children, that somehow affected divorce. College graduate women with both family and career had a divorce rate that was 20 to 30 percent higher than average for the entire group of college women," she writes.

Goldin limited "career" status to two groups of women: those whose incomes surpassed the earnings of the bottom 25 percent of college-educated men for at least two years running; and, more stringently, those whose incomes met the same standard for three years. "Having a career requires that you earn a substantial amount, that you have work that would be a career if you were a man," she explains. "Not a career given that `I have two kids and one has to be picked up at 2:30 and the other at 3:30.'"

And just how many men "have it all?" Goldin quickly notes that only men with earnings above the 25th percentile would qualify. But she also reveals an odd economic fact: "We never ask men whether they have children. I guess we assume some of them don't know," she adds with a smile. "But my guess is that 60 percent would combine career and family. On the other hand, do the ones with children see the kids? If we went back to the land of Ozzie and Harriet, I wouldn't be surprised if Ozzie wished he could see the kids more. Harriet may work at Macy's only part-time, but she sees the kids. The guys all have careers, but they would say in their heart of hearts that they wish they could see their kids more."

The 13 to 17 percent of baby-boom women who reached midlife with both family and career are probably the first in U.S. history to do so, says Goldin. That benchmark may become a target for their daughters to surpass as the women of Generation X raise cohort VI-the collegians of the twenty-first century.

Harbour Fraser Hodder

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