Rosalind Barnett, a senior scholar in residence at Radcliffe College's Henry A. Murray Research Center, has won a Books for Better Life literary award.

She Works, He Works: How Two-Income Families are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off (HarperCollins San Francisco, May 1996) was selected by a committee of book publishing executives and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. The book, coauthored by Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University, competed with 300 other books nominated by their publishers in the relationships category.

She Works, He Works portrays the new American family -- working couples with children -- as happier and healthier than the traditional family of years past. The book, based on a study of 300 couples, has received critical acclaim and national attention in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review, as well as numerous national magazines.

The award winners were honored at a ceremony this week in New York City by honorary chair Hillary Rodham Clinton. During the month of February, Barnes & Noble will support the new awards program with a month-long, nationwide superstore marketing campaign.

"We are delighted that She Works, He Works has been given this honor, and especially pleased that the true story of American couples today can receive a wide hearing," said Barnett. "People who portray the only correct family as the one that closely resembles the Ozzie and Harriet family with the breadwinner father and the homemaker mother are dead wrong. The dual-career couples of today are thriving."

Barnett's study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and is archived at the Murray Research Center, the nation's leading social science data archive for the study of lives over time. Data from the study are already being analyzed by scholars across the country on such topics as the power balance in marriage, how division of childcare in a couple relates to stress, and how attitudes toward traditional and non-traditional sex roles affect a couple's well-being.