THE TWO-CAREER COUPLE

Data on the proliferating two-career marriage is beginning to filter down now; Caroline Bird's Two-Paycheck Marriage (p. 358) provides a balanced overview. Here, two careerists--he's a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Northwestern, she's the head of their research corporation--come up with a manual of triedand-true tips. Relying heavily on categorizing, they identify four possible lifestyles for the career couple, depending on the combination of ""traditional"" or ""protean"" career styles with either a ""traditional"" or ""protean"" family life. Predictably enough, the book advocates flexibility, a movement toward equity in household chores, and the stabilization of career styles before incorporating children into the family style. (The jargon is contagious.) Time and again it returns to its main theme--confront the issues honestly (and compromise wherever possible) in deciding whether to move for the sake of one partner's career, or how to determine the balance of control and autonomy. Unfortunately, constant quizzes to help readers gauge their ""romanticism scale,"" degree of work involvement, ""leisure phobia,"" etc., tend to turn the book into an exercise in rights and wrongs. For people who want preformulated answers, then, not those who want to explore the issues.