Book Reviews
Abstract
BOOK REVIEWS 109 Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Professional Work and Marriage: An East- West Comparison. St. Martin's Press, New York, 1981. $22.50. This study of the accommodation of careers in people's lives compares marriages of professional partners in the United States, the USSR, and the German Democratic Republic. The goal is to determine the impact of contrasting work organization on the work lives of professionals and on their personal relationships-especially marriage, but also friendship. It is an ambitious but timely project, and the author explores her hypotheses with semistructured and unstructured interviews within a broadly comparative framework. One set of comparisons is of single-career with dual-career marriages, examining the presence or absence of multiple work pressures. The second comparative focus contrasts work organizations in North America, and then those in North America with their more secure, less competitive, and group-focused counterparts in the USSR and the GDR. The data are presented in three substantive chapters. We learn from the ten interviews with single-career (all male) professionals or their wives that the pressures of the typically competitive North American work setting isolate the men from their friends. There are great demands on the marriages to accommodate family life to the careerist