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don’t. They didn’t explain why some women seemed content to work the extra month, while this made others deeply unhappy. When I compared a couple who was sharing and happy with another couple who was sharing but miserable, it was clear that purely economic or psychological answers were not enough. Gradually, I felt the need to explore how
deep
within each man and woman gender ideology goes. For some, men and women seemed to be egalitarian “on top” but traditional “underneath,” or the other way around. I tried to sensitize myself to the difference between shallow ideologies (ideologies which were contradicted by deeper feelings) and deep ideologies (which were reinforced by such feelings). I explored how each person reconciled ideology with the rest of life. I felt the need to explore what I call gender strategies.
T HE TOP AND B OTTOM OF G ENDER I DEOLOGY
    A gender strategy is a plan of action through which a person tries to solve problems at hand, given the cultural notions of gender at play. To pursue a gender strategy, a man draws on beliefs about manhood and womanhood, beliefs that are forged in early childhood and usually anchored to deep emotion. He makes a connection between how he thinks about his manhood, what he feels about it, and what he does. It works in the same way for a woman. Each person’s gender ideology defines what sphere a person
wants
to identify with (home or work) and how much power in the marriage one wants to have (less, more, or the same amount).
    I found three types of ideology of marital roles: traditional, transitional, and egalitarian. Even though she works, the “pure” traditional woman wants to identify with her activities at home (as a wife, a mother, a neighborhood mom), wants her husband to base his identity on work, and wants less power than he has. The traditional man wants the same. The “pure” egalitarian wants to identify with the same spheres her husband does, and to have an equal amount of power in the marriage. Some want the couple to be jointly oriented to the home, others to their careers, or both of them to jointly hold some balance between the two. Between the traditional and the egalitarian is the transitional, any one of a variety of types of blending of the two. But, in contrast to the traditional, a transitional woman wants to identify with her role at work as well as at home, but she believes her husband should base his identity more on work than she does. A typical transitional wants to identify
both
with the care of the home and with helping her husband earn money, but wants her husband to focus on earning a living. A typical transitional man is all for his wife working, but expects her to do the lion’s share at home too. Most people I talked with were transitional in their beliefs.
    In actuality, I discovered contradictions between what peoplesaid they believed about their marital roles and how they seemed to
feel
about those roles. Some men seemed to me egalitarian on top but traditional underneath. Others seemed traditional on top and egalitarian underneath. 1 Often a person’s deeper feelings were a response to the cautionary tales of childhood as well as to life as an adult. Sometimes these feelings
reinforced
the surface of a person’s gender ideology. For example, the fear Nancy Holt was to feel of becoming a submissive “doormat,” as she felt her mother had been, infused emotional steam into her belief that her husband, Evan, should share the second shift.
    On the other hand, the dissociation Ann Myerson was to feel from her successful career undermined her ostensible commitment both to her career and to a shared second shift. She
wanted
to feel as engaged with her career as her husband was with his. She thought she
should
love her work. She
should
think it mattered. In fact, as she confessed in a troubled tone, she didn’t love her work and didn’t think it mattered. She felt a conflict between what she thought she ought to feel and