Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment

Aliya Hamid Rao

Univ of California Press, Jun 9, 2020 - Social Science - 308 pages

In Crunch Time, Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work—that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women—loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make men’s unemployment an urgent problem, while women’s unemployment—cocooned within a narrative of staying at home—is almost a non-issue. Crunch Time reveals the minutiae of how gendered norms and behaviors are actively maintained by spouses at a time when they could be dismantled, and how gender is central to the ways couples react to and make sense of unemployment.

Contents

• A Tale of Two Unemployments: 1
• PART I GENDER AND SPACE DURING UNEMPLOYMENT: 29
• PART II GENDERED TIME IN JOB SEARCHING: 87
• PART III GENDERED TIME IN HOUSEWORK: 143
• Unemployment and Inequality in an Age of Uncertainty ...: 207
• Methodology: 219
• Interview Guide for Unemployed Professionals and Spouses ...: 241
• Notes: 245
• References: 265
• Index: 281

About the author

Aliya Hamid Rao is Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment
• Author: Aliya Hamid Rao
• Publisher: Univ of California Press, 2020
• ISBN: 0520970675, 9780520970670
• Length: 308 pages
• Subjects: Family & Relationships / Marriage & Long-Term Relationships; Social Science / Sociology / Marriage & Family