Abstract
This article examines the strategies male and female rural clergy use to limit professional demands and preserve time and space for their family life. Clergy like other professionals face expansive work demands that originate in the understanding of professions as a vocation and are based on a masculine organization of work. Data drawn from ethnographic interviews with twenty female and twenty male clergy suggest that these clergy use their families as a bulwark against expansive professional demands and define them as one of the few legitimate reasons for saying no to work. In doing so, they resist gendered underpinnings of the profession. Clergy accounts demonstrate how ordinary arrangements for time off (i.e., days off or vacation time) and formal methods of time management fall short of guaranteeing time for the family in this particular professional milieu. Gender differences in women's and men's strategies for protecting family time are also discussed.
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