1. There is evidence of widespread perception on the part of many who are on the brink of configuring a family unit that the conditions of society, i.e., the familiar traditions of popular imagination, have been transformed in the modern period to such an extent that novel and exciting traditions are being formed that mark a definite break with the past. Enter in particular the conception of the dual-career model for the modern family, wherein the wife "has it all" and roles inside the household, which is intimately bound up with the out-of-household employment of husband and wife, are pretty much on an equal footing. Hertz refers to the "new dream" of life regarding home and career that surfaced in the 1980s, harbored chiefly by young women who "believe not only that sex discrimination in the workplace is dead but also that the new 1980s man is looking for a wife who has an exciting, rewarding career just like his. . . . In short, the traditional job of the wife becomes a shared career" (Hertz 3).
The reality is rather different, not only because of the socioeconomic difference between "career" and "job" but also because the phenomenon of dual-career households is itself a modern mythical construction (Hertz 5-6, et passim). There is evidence in the literature that traditional gender roles (gender ideology) are invoked, or employed as gender strategies, or actions "through which a person tries to solve problems at hand, given the cultural notions of gender at play" (Hochschild and Machung 15), by participants themselves to support (or oppose) new configurations in family life that are suited to their purposes or to the purposes of the family unit, notably in nontraditional forms such as dual-career households and surrogate motherhood.
In dual-career households, gender strategies are employed either (1) to preserve, within the formal context of something besides a traditional nuclear family, the emotional experience of that tradi...