H-4's may be able to work

As an incentive to retain skilled foreign professionals that the country needed to sustain the economic edge in the international competition, the USCIS planned an administrative fix to authorize the employment for the spouses of H-1B professionals. This plan is supposed to give benefits to the H-1B families as well as the country. From the perspectives of H-1B temporary foreign workers, this issue involves a number of issues for the family as well as the spouses. Typical H-1B foreign professionals are mostly in the twenties and some in thirties in ages. 

The forced full-time house wife status have created a serious problems, including the boredom of the forced unemployed spouses, not to mention a forced compromise of their own careers for not being able to continue their careers through employment. Unemployment leads them to face failure in updating their skills and knowledge and in the long run, they will have to lose their opportunity to continue their careers. This adds the mental and emotional stress for the professional spouses, not to mention a forced isolation in a foreign land without close relatives, friends, and neighbors. In the worst cases, this could create a marital problem. Because of such problems, some H-1B high-tech professional foreign workers had to return to their home countries to salvage their families as well as the spouse's careers.