Journal of Family Psychology Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 2000, Vol. 14, No. 4, 658-670 0893-3200/00/$5.00 IX)I: 10.1037//0893-3200.14.4.658 Do Women's Provider-Role Attitudes Moderate the Links Between Work and Family? Heather Helms-Erikson University of North Carolina at Greensboro Jennifer L. Tanner, Ann C. Crouter, and Susan M. McHale Pennsylvania State University The authors examined the links between mothers' work qualifies and their individual well-being and marital quality, as well as adolescent daughters' and sons' gender-role attitudes, as a function of mothers' provider-role attitudes, in 134 dual-earner families. In home interviews, mothers described their work, provider-role attitudes, family relationships, and mental health; their offspring reported gender-role attitudes. Women's attitudes about breadwinning were coded into main-secondary, coprovider, and ambivalent coprovider groups. Mothers' provider-role attitudes moderated the links between status indicators and mothers' depression, marital conflict, and daughters' gender-role attitudes. For example, depression and marital conflict were negatively related to coprovider mothers' earnings and occupational prestige. The same was not true for main-secondary and ambivalent coprovider mothers. These findings under- score the importance of considering employed women's interpretation of their work roles when exploring work-family links. Although many wives and mothers today en- act the role of breadwinner for the family by earning an income, they do not necessarily de- Heather Helms-Erikson, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Jennifer L. Tanner, Ann C. Crouter, and Susan M. McHale, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Perm- sylvania State University. Portions of this article were presented at the an- nual meeting of the National Council on Family Relations, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 1998. This research was supported by National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Grant R01HD29409-01A3. We gratefully acknowledge Ella Bashore, Rosanna Bertrand, Matthew Bumpns, Devon Corneal, Mafia Eguia, Julia Jackson-Newsom, Mary Maguire, Emily Smith, Robert Smith, Jennifer Tanner, Corinna Jenkins- Tucker, and Kimberly Updegraff for their assistance in bringing this project to fruition. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Heather Helms-Erikson, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Stone Building, P.O. Box 26170, University of North Caro- lina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27402-6170. Electronic mail may be sent to h_helmse@uncg.edu. fine themselves as providers or breadwinners for their families (Bernard, 1981; Haas, 1986; Hood, 1983). Feminist research on families points to the importance of understanding the psychological stance of employed women to- ward the breadwinner or provider role (Ferree, 1988; Haas, 1986; Hood, 1986; Perry-Jenkins & Crouter, 1990; Potuchek, 1997; Wiley, 1991). Rather than simply treating wives' labor force participation and breadwinning as synonymous, this body of work underscores the fact that women do not necessarily equate participating in the paid-labor force with providing or bread- winning and alerts family researchers to this understudied aspect of wives' employment. In- deed, many wives, even those employed full- time, think of themselves as the secondary breadwinner, someone who contributes to the family's economic well-being but who is not centrally responsible for breadwinning (Hood, 1986; Perry-Jenkins & Crouter, 1990; Po- tuchek, 1992). In this study, we explored whether and how dual-earner wives' orienta- tions toward breadwinning moderated the links between their work and the quality of their personal lives. More specifically, we explored how work-related qualities are associated with mothers' personal well-being and marital qua]- 658