n be discerned when considered against the widespread perception that modernity has transformed familiar, gender-specific traditions of popular imagination so much that novel structures are being formed that mark a definite break with the past. Hertz refers to the "new dream" regarding home and career that surfaced among young women in the 1980s, "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, 1986, p. 3).
But Hertz says that idea itself is a socially constructed myth (Hertz, 1986, pp. 5-6). Hochschild and Machung (1989) focus on the role of industrial economy in that myth. In dual-career households, gender strategies actually (1) preserve, within the formal context of something besides a traditional nuclear family, the emotional experience of that tradition, or (2) reinforce, within that same context, the validity of claims for actions, feelings, and behavior consistent with supposedly nontraditional myth. "'Family myths' . . . obscure a core truth in order to manage a family tension" (Hochschild & Machung, 1989, p. 19). Thus a husband supports a wife's career while leaving to her the messy chores of child care ("quality time") and taking on lawn duties (a "man's job"). Verbal valorization of women's work does not value it upward but reinforces traditional gender-specific divisions of labor that perpetuate and rely on the myth of gender roles. Mainstream-culture women in dual-career households worry about having it all--but not men. Thus do supposedly nontraditional cultural structures conceal unsatisfying truths with a long tradition.
Hispanic is a term that does not describe a homogeneous culture but a number of distinctive cultures that share the Spanish language. The increased wave of Central American immigrants from the 1970s onw...