Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment

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.

• | Author: Aliya Hamid Rao
• | Publisher: University of California Press
• | Publication Date: June 23, 2020
• | Number of Pages: 308 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0520298616
• | ISBN-13: 9780520298613