ABSTRACT
In France, as in other industrialized countries, the dramatically increasing participation of women in the labour force, leading to a growing number of two-income couples, has had profound repercussions upon every aspect of life, and particularly upon housing and residential location patterns. If the residential choices of these households and their impact upon urban forms and structures are to be better understood, explicit attention must be paid to the complex processes by which the locational decisions are made and to the range of factors that affect them (Stapleton 1980). Prior studies have shown that the presence of two earners in a household ‘potentially both increases and narrows residential location options’ (Hanson and Pratt 1988: 312) while the decision process becomes more complex, as additional parameters must be taken into account. Numerous studies on residential mobility have treated the household unit as an undifferentiated whole, however, and have not accounted for divergent needs and desires between male and female household members. Little empirical research has been conducted concerning housing and residential choice among husband and wife pairs (Michelson 1988); Shlay and Di Gregorio (1985), for example, demonstrated that women and men desire different neighbourhood worlds; however, they interviewed only one respondent per household. As research is developed to examine divergence within the household, it is important to consider how the particular characteristics of couples and the contexts in which they make decisions shape their choices. In this chapter, I have chosen to examine a group that has emerged relatively recently in significant numbers in French life — upper-middle-class couples in which the adult woman is highly educated and employed. I focus on couples who mostly have two or three children, the wife being in early middle age. As Alice Rossi has noted, motives and aspirations can change over time and depend upon the stage of life (1985). The couples I studied are all experiencing a transition point, having recently moved or being about to move residence within the Ile-de-France region. My purpose is to analyse the negotiations, trade-offs, and compromises they make at this point in their lives as they seek to define and implement choices which will meet their personal and familial goals.
