"Bart Landry's study adds to our accepted concepts of "traditional" and "new" families: Landry argues that black middle-class women in two parent families were practicing an egalitarian lifestyle that was envisioned by few of their white counterparts until many decades later.".

"With a mix of biography, historical records, and demographic data, Landry shows how these black pioneers of the dual-career marriage created a paradigm for other women seeking to escape the cult of domesticity and thus foreshadowed the second great family transformation. If the two-parent nuclear family is to persist beyond the twentieth century, it may be because of what we can learn from these earlier women about an ideology of womanhood that combines the private and public spheres."--BOOK JACKET.