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as with many anthologies, the book's variety is not only a strength, butalso a weakness. Perhaps inevitably, given the contributors' diverse back-grounds, the essays differ radically in length (from eight to forty-fourpages), tone (some are very scholarly and others seem directed at a moregeneral readership), and approach (some are rapid overviews of a field,others are in-depth case studies, while still others are abstract theoreticalarguments). Less inevitably, the essays display a disconcerting inconsis-tency in citation style; while this inconsistency may grow out of anecofeminist tolerance of diversity, it is likely to present some obstacles forreaders and could easily have been remedied during the editing process.

While these differences and inconsistencies are significant, it seemspossible that a stronger introduction could have woven the disparate partsof the book into a more cohesive whole. In the introduction. Warrencharacterizes the book's purpose as providing a multidisciplinary ap-proach to ecofeminism: "a plethora of new perspectives on ecofeministtheory and practiceones which help to undergird the power and promiseof ecofeminism" (xvi). The book certainly fulfills this purpose, but thepurpose itself seems unnecessarily vague; after finishing the introduction,readers might still wonder how a multidisciplinary perspective relates tomajor ecofeminist issues and debates and why such a perspective might beparticularly important for ecofeminism at this time.

Karla Armbruster is Assistant Professor of English at Webster Universityin St. Louis. Her research interests include ecofeminism, women's naturewriting, representations of animals, and the literature of environmentaladvocacy. She is currently working on a book on environmental advo-cacy in American literature and culture and co-editing a collection withKathleen R. Wallace entitled "Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding Bound-aries of Ecocriticism."

Diversity and Women's Career Development: From Adolescence to Adult-hood. Helen S. Farmer and Associates. Thousand Oaks, CA: SagePublications, 1997, 344 pp., $64.95 hardcover, $29.95 paper.

Who Supports the Familyi Gender atid Breadwinning in Dual-Earner Mar-riages. Jean L. Potuchek. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1997, 249 pp., $49.50 hardcover, $16.95 paper.

REBECCA M. WINDERS

How do women balance career and family values, and with what conse-quences for the well-being of individual women and their families? Work-ing from quite different vantage points toward divergent goals, each of

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these books illuminates a distinct facet of the larger question of women'sexperiences with paid employment. Farmer, et al., and Potuchek, respec-tively, have addressed young women's career choices and married women'sinterpretation of their employment in the family context. The two booksare interesting not only for their content, but also for their innovativeblending of quantitative and qualitative research methods.

Helen Farmer's study arose out of concern that women have remainedunderrepresented in the sciences and in technical fields decades afteraffirmative action requirements were established for educational institu-tions. Diversity and Women's Career Development presents findingsfrom a study of young men and women who had aspired to careers inscience or technology in high school or who had entered these fields aftergraduation. An extension of an earlier quantitative study, this researchseeks to clarify the complexity of the career development and decisionrnaking processes of young adults in order to strengthen career planningassistance provided by schools and universities. Participants in the studywere invited to describe their career development, and to discuss therelationship of their work roles to other parts of their lives. Using agrounded theory approach, researchers identified important themes in-ductively and only later related them to concepts in existing research.

Diversity and Women's Career Development is a loosely organizedcollection of papers written by Farmer and nine research associates. Shebegins with a presentation of the broad theoretical framework that guidesthe research and a discussion of the survey methodology. The next fivechapters report findings on the central issue of women's career achieve-ments in scientific and technical fields compared with men's. Section IIIaddresses issues of race, ethnicity, and class in career development byexamining the experiences of various subgroups of study participants. InSection IV, two of Farmer's associates examine the infiuence of families oforigin and current adult families on career development. She closes thebook with two chapters that discuss implications of the research forcounseling, social policy, and career development theory.

This work makes important contributions to the theory of career devel-opment. The study complements the "classic" models of Donald Superand John Holland, and especially the social learning theory of AlbertBandura, by incorporating the effects of gender on career development andchoice. Diversity and Women's Career Development also has practicalapplications for education and counseling. Farmer, et al. provide addi-tional evidence of schools' "chilly climate" for women students and itsdiscouraging effect on women aspiring to non-traditional careers. Theirmajor contribution to this area is a description of women who overcamediscriminatory environments. Farmer has culled the best practices ofher field to assemble an array of concrete suggestions for strengtheningwomen's career planning. She emphasizes the benefits of developing asense of "self efficacy"confidence in one's own abilities and decision-

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making skillsand suggests specific techniques for helping male andfemale students prepare for possible career-family role conflict. If Farmer'sexpectations for empowerment through career education seem a bit unre-alistic, she does recognize implications of her findings for policy beyondschool counseling programs. Most notably, she calls for commitment todiscouraging behaviors that are hostile to women's positive growth andexpanding the supply of quality child care, especially for infants.

The book is a valuable resource for researchers, students, and profes-sionals who are interested in women's career development. Due to itsmultiple authorship, the book's analysis and presentation are somewhatuneven, some chapters are poorly organized and contain typographicalerrors. All, however, make effective use of quotations by the study partici-pants. Chapters could be used separately as the basis for discussion notonly in university classes, but also in in-service training for teachers andcounselors.

Jean Potuchek, a sociologist and coordinator of Women's Studies atGettysburg College, abandons the conventional understanding of genderas stable sets of roles learned primarily during childhood in favor of the"gender construction" model. She advances this notion of gender as asystem of social relations continually created and recreated in the interac-tions of daily life in Who Supports the Family} Potuchek develops theconcept of gender boundaries and demonstrates the dynamic process bywhich they are negotiated. She analyzes "breadwinning"as an interpre-tive gender boundary that continues to divide men from women, eventhough the behavior of paid employment itself has ceased to serve as ameans of gender differentiation.

The author employs an intricate methodology that combines eightstatistical analyses with over 30 narrative sketches of dual-earner couples.Data for the study was obtained from personal interviews with 153 dual-earner couples and followed up five years later by a mailed questionnaire.At the heart of the quantitative study is a factor analysis that reveals themultiple dimensions of breadwinning. Factor scores serve as dependentvariables for regression analyses that examine the infiuence of childhoodsocialization and adult circumstances. The scores also form the basis ofa classification scheme used to structure the narrative descriptions ofcouples' approaches to breadwinning, and to examine changes betweeninitial and follow-up surveys.

The results of the study demonstrate that most dual-career couplesused breadwinning as a means of gender differentiation. However, thisfinding is fraught with complexity. Couples often downplayed the impor-tance of wives' sizable financial contributions in order to maintain thegender boundaries in the face of contradictory circurhstances. Husbandsand wives frequently disagreed about interpretations of breadwinning,and many couples had changed their approaches by the second survey.

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Dr. Potuchek's finely crafted study is primarily an exercise in positivistsocial science. She has developed a means of measuring gender orienta-tions that highlights diversity and registers change. Her quantitativeanalysis of gender boundaries complements the ethnomethodologicalevidence from earlier research, thus lending added credence to the genderconstruction model. However, her examination of the factors that infiu-enced the nature of the breadwinning boundary is less convincing. Moth-ers' employment status during study participants' early years is a poorrepresentation of childhood socialization in gender relations, and theregression results based on this measurement provide little basis forrejecting the idea that expectations about gender roles are formed duringchildhood. The narratives offer no further insights on this issue, since noquestions were asked about parents' infiuence. Moreover, Potuchek'smodel treats current circumstances (i.e., income, occupation, and numberof children) as exogenous factors, rather than the results of choices thatare infiuenced by perspectives on gender. The analysis captures the pro-cess of negotiation of gender roles between spouses, but does not incorpo-rate the career development process that is the focus of Farmer's research.

Who Supports the Family! is accessible to graduate students and schol-ars in the humanities as well as social sciences. Theoretical issues areclearly explained and results of the statistical analyses are reported in thebody of the text with a minimum of jargon. The author's disclosure of herpersonal experiences and perspectives helps to engage the reader. Byillustrating distinctions and conclusions drawn from the statistical analy-ses, the case studies make the research findings more credible and com-prehensible to a wider audience than quantitative research alone canreach.

On the surface, these two studies appear vastly different. They comefrom different disciplines; one uses a deductive, primarily quantitativemethod, the other, an inductive, qualitative approach; one rejects thegender roles socialization model that the other accepts as an unques-tioned premise. Yet their conclusions about gender and women's eniploy-ment are quite harmonious. There is great variation among women inexperiences and interpretations of employment. Though women's careersare constrained by circumstances, individuals are free to interpret theirsituations and to negotiate a balance of work and family roles. Both ofthese books are worthy examples of feminist social research.

Rebecca Winders is an urban planner by training and teaches policyanalysis and community development at North Carolina Central Uni-versity in Durham, North Carolina. She has a long standing interest inlabor market policy, and has conducted research on the impacts of jobdisplacement on women's careers. Her current research focuses on entre-preneurship development.