ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explore how women's family relationships, in combination with their work roles, may permit or impede gratification of the needs to love and be loved, and to perform meaningful work. As a strategic matter, they explore the ways in which apparently different life structures may be experienced similarly, and apparently similar structures may be experienced differently. The authors examine how useful the concepts of direct agency and mutual communion may be in case studies of women in a wider variety of life situations. They consider women in a wider array of life situations, and will broaden the conceptual framework being examined. Never-married workers should be vulnerable to "unmitigated agency", in a direct form; housewives to unmitigated and asymmetrical communion, as well as to an excess of indirect agency; and working single parents should be in danger of a deficiency of mutual communion and-at least when under financial pressure-direct agency.
