MARITAL PARTNERS AND
BUSINESS PARTNERS—CONTINUITIES

One indicator of interest in couple business-partnerships is the number of books advising couples who work together in partnerships on issues of conflict, division of responsibilities, and time problems that have come out (James and James 1997; Marshack, Scott, and Jaffee 1998), and there is a website, www.couplesatwork.com, sharing information.

Today, with a new entrepreneurial spirit, husbands and wives are going into business together in enterprises springing up all over the country. These include professional legal and medical partnerships, cinema management, music production, book and magazine publishing (Davies 1998), and large-scale businesses such as the $50-million-a-year bakery chain Cinnamons, based in Kansas City (Nelton 1989). From the outsider's perspective, the new husband-wife partnerships can be viewed as prototypical of a new and useful equality between marital partners and other professional partners. Sharon and Frank Barnett (1988), authors of Working Together: Entrepreneurial Couples, have coined the term “copreneurs” for husband-wife partnerships. They point to the benefits that accrue to couples who are similarly and equally engaged in a family business because of the sensitivity each has to the other's work demands, problems, and aspirations. In a work environment in which firm loyalty to employees is decreasing (Epstein et al. 1999; Sennett 1998), many people, among them couples, are deciding to start their own businesses. The number of couples in nonfarm sole proprietorships rose by nearly a quarter of a million—from 257,899 to 482,933 between 1977 and 1985 (the last period for which I could obtain data) (Nelton 1989). No doubt there are substantially more today.

As I noted earlier, family businesses are common among immigrant families although I have not been able to locate research on professional partnerships. Studies of Korean immigrants seem to be most plentiful. They illustrate the issues that successive waves of immigrant couples face who go into business together. A 1996–97 survey of Koreans indicates that 38 percent of employed Korean women worked together with their husbands in small businesses (Min 1998). Other studies of Korean immigrants

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in NewYork, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the country also show the large participation of women in family businesses (Espiritu 1999; Park 1989; Yoon 1997). Like the women lawyers of the past, however, in those businesses, husbands usually control the money and management of the businesses and in some cases may act as the “most immediate and harshest employers” (Bonacich, Hossain, and Park 1987). These business relationships recall the exploitative experiences women lawyers faced before there was opportunity for women to go out on their own. Immigrant women today, facing the same structural conditions of prejudice, limited access to employment, and limited skills, find that they too are isolated from public life, find it difficult to integrate into American society, and find that work is regarded as an extension of their domestic responsibilities. Yet when the family gains economically by the joint labor of husband and wife, and women develop alternative employment opportunities, there is often a recalibration of power within the family and movement toward greater equality. Thus, there is the possibility that women who work in family businesses that are not real partnerships will benefit in the long run, as did women attorneys in the past who were able to take advantage of a widening opportunity structure.