Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-280) and index.

In this book, the author gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and their 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. This book 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. --,Provided by publisher.

SACFinal081324