The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE SECOND SHIFT

Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has co-edited one book and authored seven others, three of these
New York Times Review
Notable Books of the Year. She was won Guggenheim, Fulbright, Mellon, and Alfred P. Sloan awards, and her books have been translated into fourteen languages.

Newsweek
describes
The Second Shift
as having the “detail and texture of a good novel”;
Publishers Weekly
noted that “the concept of the second shift … has entered the language”; and in the
New York Times Book Review
, Robert Kuttner described her “subtlety of … insights” and “graceful, seamless narrative,” and called
The Second Shift
the “best discussion I have read of what must be the quintessential domestic bind of our time.” The
Financial Times
said of the
Time Bind
, “there are wit, humour, and joy as well as portents of doom.” In Christine Stansell’s
Washington Post
review of
The Commercialization of Intimate Life
, she describes Hochschild’s “curious, roving mind, her big ideas … No one,” she writes, “has written about (family dilemmas) with Hochschild’s intelligence, originality, and on-the-ground knowledge.”

Hochschild has written for the
New York Times Book Review
and
Magazine
, the
Atlantic Monthly, O, The Oprah Magazine, Ms.,
the
American Prospect
, and
Mother Jones
, directed the U.C. Berkeley-based Alfred P. Sloan Center on Working Families, and lectures widely in Europe and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild. They have two sons and share the second shift on the weekly overnight visits of their two small granddaughters.

Anne Machung currently works as director of accountability for the University of California. She received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published articles on higher education and family in
Change
and
Feminist Studies.

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1989

Edition with a new introduction published in Penguin Books 2003

This edition with a new preface published 2012

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Arlie Hochschild, 1989, 2003, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 1940-

The second shift : working families and the revolution at home / Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung.

p. cm.

Rev. ed. of: The second shift : working parents and the revolution at home. 1989.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 9781101575512

1. Dual-career families—United States. 2. Dual-career families—United States—Case studies. 3. Sex role—United States. 4. Working mothers—United States.

I. Machung, Anne. II. Title.

HQ536.H63 2012

306.872–dc23 2011043651

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro Designed by Alice Sorensen

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Contents

   Preface

   Acknowledgments

   Introduction

CHAPTER
1  The Family Speed-up

CHAPTER
2  Marriage in a Stalled Revolution

CHAPTER
3  The Cultural Cover-up

CHAPTER
4  Joey’s Problem: Nancy and Evan Holt

CHAPTER
5  The Family Myth of the Traditional: Frank and Carmen Delacorte

CHAPTER
6  A Notion of Manhood and Giving Thanks: Peter and Nina Tanagawa

CHAPTER
7  Having It All and Giving It Up: Ann and Robert Myerson

CHAPTER
8  A Scarcity of Gratitude: Seth and Jessica Stein

CHAPTER
9  An Unsteady Marriage and a Job She Loves: Anita and Ray Judson

CHAPTER
10 The “His” and “Hers” of Sharing: Greg and Carol Alston

CHAPTER
11 No Time Together: Barbara and John Livingston

CHAPTER
12 Sharing Showdown and Natural Drift: Pathways to the New Man

CHAPTER
13 Beneath the Cover-up: Strategies and Strains

CHAPTER
14 Tensions in Marriage in an Age of Divorce

CHAPTER
15 Men Who Do and Men Who Don’t

CHAPTER
16 The Working Wife as Urbanizing Peasant

CHAPTER
17 Stepping into Old Biographies or Making History Happen?

                 Afterword

Appendix
  Research on Who Does the Housework and Child Care

                 
Notes

                 Selected Reading

                 Nonprofit Organizations Engaged in Helping Working Families

                 Index

Preface

When I was thirty-one, a moment occurred that crystallized the concern that drives this book. At the time, I was an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the mother of a three-month-old child. I wanted to nurse the baby—and to continue to teach. Several arrangements were possible, but my solution was a pre-industrial one—to reintegrate the family into the workplace, which involved taking the baby, David, with me for office hours on the fourth floor of Barrows Hall. From two to eight months, he was nearly the perfect guest. I made him a little box with blankets where he napped (which he did most of the time) and I brought along an infant seat from which he kept a close eye on key chains, colored notebooks, earrings, and glasses. Sometimes waiting students took him out into the hall and passed him around. He became a conversation piece with shy students, and some returned to see him rather than me. I put up a fictitious name on the appointment list every four hours and fed him alone.

The baby’s presence was like a Rorschach test for people entering my office. Older men, undergraduate women, and a few younger men seemed to like him and the idea of his being there. In the next office there was a seventy-four-year-old distinguished emeritus professor; it was our joke that he would stop by when he heard my son crying and say, shaking his head, “Beating the baby again, eh?” Textbook salesmen with briefcases and striped suits
were generally shocked at the unprofessional gurgles (and sometimes unprofessional odors) from the box. Many graduate student women were put off, partly because babies were out of fashion in the early 1970s, and partly because they were afraid that I was deprofessionalizing myself, women in general, and, symbolically, them. I was afraid of that too. Before having David, I saw students all the time, took every committee assignment, worked evenings and nights writing articles, and had in this way accumulated a certain amount of departmental tolerance. I was calling on that tolerance now, with the infant box, the gurgles, the disturbance to the dignity and sense of purpose of my department. My colleagues never seemed to talk about children. They talked to each other about research and about the department’s ranking—still “number 1” or slipping to “number 2”? I was just coming up for tenure and it wasn’t so easy to get. And I wanted at the same time to be as calm a mother for my son as my mother had been for me. In some literal way I had brought together family and work, but in a more basic way, doing so only made the contradictions between the demands of baby and career all the more clear.

One day, a male graduate student came early for his appointment. The baby had slept longer than usual and hadn’t been hungry at my appointed Barrows Hall time. I invited the student in. Since we had never met before, he introduced himself with extreme deference. He seemed acquainted with my work and intellectual tastes in the field, and perhaps responding to his deference, I behaved more formally than usual. He began tentatively to elaborate his interests in sociology and to broach the subject of my serving on his Ph.D. orals committee. He had the task of explaining to me that he was a clever student, trustworthy and obedient, but that academic fields were not organized as he wanted to study them, and of asking me whether he could study the collected works of Karl Marx under the rubric of the sociology of work.