This volume focuses on the relationship between change in the family and change in the roles of women and men in contemporary industrial societies. Of central concern is whether change in gender roles has fuelled - or is merely historically coincident with - such changes in the family as rising divorce rates, increases in out-of-wedlock childbearing, declining marriage rates, and a growing disconnection between the lives of men and children.

Covering more than twenty countries, including the USA, the countries of western Europe, and Japan, each essay in the volume is organized around an important theoretical or policy question; all offer new data or analyses, and several offer prescriptions on how to fashion more equitable and humane family and gender systems.

The second demographic transition and the microeconomic theory of marital exchange are the dominant theoretical models considered; several chapters feature state-of-the-art quantitative analyses of large-scale surveys.