Content area
Full Text
Husbands and Wives. Dynamics of Married Living. R. O. Blood & D. M. Wolfe. New York: The Free Press. 1960.
The bright red paperback copy of Blood and Wolfe's Husbands and Wives has been with me since my graduate student days. Unlike many other volumes from the 1960s, it did not end up in donations to libraries or book sales but remained on my shelves and, I am confident, on the shelves of most of my colleagues. What contribution did this book make to ensure its stance as a classic work in the family literature?
The contribution of Husbands and Wives was theoretical, methodological, and empirical. From a purely empirical perspective, it is probably accurate to say that Blood and Wolfe brought representative survey research to the family field. This was surely an accomplishment in an era dominated by Parsons' mostly theoretical treatises on the family. It was also a necessary contribution in a public opinion and scientific context characterized by doubts about the family's functions and survival. Indeed, a thorough characterization of the "changing family" was one major goal of the book: "Regardless of the causes, the fact remains that families are different today from what they once were-except nobody seems to know exactly how they are different" (p. 3). What follows is a description of marriages, based on a representative sample of 909 wives in Detroit and southeastern Michigan. The study addresses a wide range of topics: power, the division of labor, employment and occupational mobility,...