Role-Sharing Couples: A Study of Egalitarian Marriages

This paper reports findings on a new style of marriage called role-sharing, where husbands and wives share traditionally male and female family duties. Some 31 rolesharing couples were identified through strategic sampling techniques and studied intensively over a six-month period. One purpose of the study was to discover couples' motivations for trying role-sharing; most were found to have had initiated a shared role pattern out of a desire to realize certain practical benefits rather than a desire to act on an ideological commitment to feminism. An investigation was also made of the problems role-sharers encountered in establishing role-sharing and the solutions they developed for those problems.