In recent years, much attention has been paid to the role strains experienced by women who add the new role of worker to the more traditional roles of wife and mother (Hochschild, 1989;Wortman, Biernat, & Lang, 1991). In sharp contrast, there has been almost no research on the stress affecting women who substitute new roles for old ones, for example, by embarking on professional careers while remaining childless or single (Allen, 1989;Fong, 1992). Nevertheless, this is a sizable and growing population. Not only are more women entering historically male professions each year (Marshall, 1989) but, in comparison with both their male colleagues and women in general, professional women are less likely to marry or bear children (Marshall, 1989; Statistics Canada, 1989). Moreover, this tendency to refrain from marriage, childbearing, or both is not restricted either to specific professions or to Canadian women but has been repeatedly reported in recent studies of managerial, professional, and academic women (
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