ABSTRACT
This article considers how women construct plans to combine work and family and factors that encourage or discourage them from matching their early plans. About two-thirds of all women create specific plans to combine employment and child-rearing by the time they are finished with school. Among the others, about two-thirds have general plans about an occupational career goal or desired family size but do not have strategies for achieving these goals; the rest have few plans and prefer to live day by day. When making plans, women report that they are more likely to change their choices about the number and timing of children to fit their career plans than to change their career plans to fit their childbirth desires. The extent of challenge, responsibility, and financial reward of early jobs; the support of job supervisors and husbands; personally valuing employment or homemaking; and timing of marriage and childbirth are the factors most likely to influence women to maintain or to change their minds between their early plans and later actions.
