The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (10 page)

Nancy also compared herself to single women who had moved further ahead in their careers, but who fit another mental category. There were two kinds of women, she thought—married and single. “A single woman could move ahead in her career but a married woman has to do a wife’s work and mother’s work as well.” She did not make this distinction for men.

When Nancy decided to stop comparing Evan to men who helped more around the house, she had to suppress an important issue that she had often discussed with Evan: How
unusually
helpful was Evan? How unusually lucky was she? Did he do more or less than men in general? Than middle-class, educated men? What was the going rate?

Before she made her decision, Nancy had claimed that Bill Beaumont, who lived two doors down the street, did half the housework without being reminded. Evan gave her Bill Beaumont, but said Bill was an exception. Compared to
most men,
Evan said, he did more. This was true if most men meant Evan’s old friends. Nancy felt upwardly mobile compared to the wives of those men, and she believed that they looked upon Evan as a model for their own husbands, just as she used to look up to
women whose husbands did more than Evan. She also noted how much the dangerous unionizer she had appeared to a male friend of theirs:

When the wife of Dennis Collins, a neighbor on the other side, complained that Dennis didn’t take equal responsibility, Dennis in turn would look down the invisible chain of sharing, half-sharing, and nonsharing males to someone low on his wife’s list of helpful husbands and say, “At least I do a hell of a lot more than
he
does.” In reply, Dennis’s wife would name a husband she knew who took fully half the responsibility of caring for child and home. Dennis would answer that this man was either imaginary or independently wealthy, and then cite the example of another male friend who, though a great humorist and fisherman, did far less at home.

I began to imagine the same evening argument extending down the street of this middle-class Irish neighborhood, across the city to other cities, states, regions, wives pointing to husbands who did more, husbands pointing to men who did less. I imagined it extending to Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Iranian families, to unmarried, and in a different but equally important way to lesbian and gay families. Comparisons like these—between Evan and other men, between Nancy and other women—reflect a semiconscious sense of
the going rates for a desirable attitude or behavior in an available member of the same and opposite sex.
If most of the men in their middle-class circle of friends had been
given to drinking heavily, beating their wives, and having affairs, Nancy would have considered herself “lucky” to have Evan, because he didn’t do those things. But most of the men they knew weren’t like that either, so Nancy didn’t consider Evan above the going rate in this way. Most of those men only halfheartedly encouraged their wives to advance at work, so Nancy felt lucky to have Evan’s enthusiastic encouragement.

This idea of a going rate indicated the market value, so to speak, of a man’s behavior or attitudes. If a man was really rare, his wife intuitively felt grateful, or at least both of them felt she ought to. How far the whole culture, and their particular corner of it had gotten through the feminist agenda—criminalizing wife battery, disapproving of a woman’s need for her husband’s permission to work, and so on—became the cultural foundation of the judgment about how rare and desirable a man was.

The going rate was a tool in the marital struggle, useful in this case mainly on the male side. If Evan could convince Nancy that he did as much or more than most men, she couldn’t as seriously expect him to do more. Like most other men who didn’t share, Evan felt the male norm was evidence on his side: men “out there” did less. Nancy was lucky he did as much as he did.

Nancy thought men out there did more at home but were embarrassed to say so. Given her view of men out there, “Nancy felt less lucky than seemed right to Evan, given his picture of things. Besides that, Nancy felt that sheer rarity was not the only or best measure. She felt that Evan’s share of the work at home should be assessed not by comparing it to the real inequalities in other people’s lives but to the ideal of sharing itself.

The closer to the ideal, the more credit. And the harder it was to live up to the ideal, the more pride-swallowing it took, or the more effort shown, the more credit. Since Evan and Nancy didn’t see this going rate the same way, since they differed in their ideals, and since Evan hadn’t actually shown much effort in changing, Nancy had not been as grateful to Evan as he felt she should have been. Not only had she not been grateful, she’d resented him.

But now, under the new maintenance program to support the necessary myth of equality in her marriage, Nancy set aside the tangles in the give and take of credit. She thought now in a more segregated way. She compared women to women, and men to men, and based her sense of gratitude on that way of thinking. Since the going rate was unfavorable to women, Nancy felt she should feel more grateful for what Evan gave her (because it was so rare in the world) than Evan should feel for what she gave him (which was more common). Nancy did not have to feel grateful because Evan had compromised his own views on manhood; actually he had made few concessions. But she did feel she owed him gratitude for supporting her work so wholeheartedly. That was unusual.

For his part, Evan didn’t talk much about feeling grateful to Nancy. He avoided an Evan-Nancy comparison. He erased the distinction between Nancy and himself: his “I” disappeared into “we,” leaving no “me” to compare to “you.” For example, when I asked him if he felt that he did enough around the house, he laughed, surprised to be asked point-blank and replied mildly: “No, I don’t think so. No. I would have to admit that we probably could do more.” Then using “we” in an apparently different way, he went on: “But I also have to say that I think we could do more in terms of the household chores than we really do. See, we let a lot more slide than we should.”

Nancy made no more comparisons to Bill Beaumont, no more unfavorable comparisons to the going rate. Without these frames of reference, the deal with Evan seemed fair. This did not mean that Nancy ceased to care about equality between the sexes. On the contrary, she cut out magazine articles about how males rose faster in social welfare than females, and she complained about the condescending way male psychiatrists treat female social workers. She pushed her feminism “out” into the world of work, a safe distance away from the upstairs-downstairs arrangement at home.

Nancy now blamed her fatigue on “everything she had to do.”
When she occasionally spoke of conflict, it was conflict between her job and Joey, or between Joey and housework. Evan slid out of the equation. As Nancy spoke of him now, he had no part in the conflict.

Since Nancy and Evan no longer conceived of themselves as comparable, Nancy let it pass when Evan spoke of housework in a “male” way, as something he “would do” or “would not do,” or something he did when he got around to it. Like most women, when Nancy spoke of housework, she spoke simply of what had to be done. The difference in the way she and Evan talked seemed to emphasize that their viewpoints were naturally different and again helped push the problem out of mind.

Many couples traded off tasks as the need arose; whoever came home first started dinner. In the past, Evan had used flexibility in the second shift to camouflage his retreat from it; he hadn’t liked “rigid schedules.” He had once explained to me: “We don’t really keep count of who does what. Whoever gets home first is likely to start dinner. Whoever has the time deals with Joey or cleans up.” He had disparaged a female neighbor who kept strict track of tasks as “uptight” and “compulsive.” A couple, he had felt, ought to be “open to the flow.” Dinner, he had said, could be anytime. The very notion of a leisure gap disappeared into Evan’s celebration of happy, spontaneous anarchy. But now that the struggle was over, Evan didn’t talk of dinner at “anytime.” Dinner was at six.

Nancy’s program to keep up her gracious resignation included another tactic: she would focus on the advantages of losing the struggle. She wasn’t
stuck
with the upstairs. Now, as she talked she seemed to preside over it as her dominion. She would do the housework, but the house would feel like hers. The new living-room couch, the kitchen cabinet, she referred to as “mine.” She took up supermom-speak and began referring to
my
kitchen,
my
living-room curtains, and, even in Evan’s presence, to
my
son. She talked of machines that helped
her,
and of the work-family conflict itself as
hers.
Why shouldn’t she? She felt she’d earned that
right. The living room reflected Nancy’s preference for beige. The upbringing of Joey reflected Nancy’s ideas about fostering creativity by giving a child controlled choice. What remained of the house was Evan’s domain. As she remarked: “I never touch the garage. Evan sweeps it and straightens it and arranges it and plays with tools and figures out where the equipment goes—in fact, that’s one of his hobbies. In the evening, after Joey has settled down, he goes down there and putzes around; he has a TV down there, and he figures out his fishing equipment. The washer and dryer are down there, but that’s the only part of the garage that’s my domain.”

Nancy could see herself as the winner—the one who got her way, the one whose kitchen, living room, house, and child these really were. She could see her arrangement with Evan as
more
than fair—from a certain point of view.

As a couple, Nancy and Evan together explained their division of the second shift in ways that disguised their struggle. Now they rationalized that it was a result of their two
personalities.
For Evan, especially, there was no problem of a leisure gap; there was only the continual, fascinating interaction of two personalities. “I’m lazy,” he explained. “I like to do what I want to do in my own time. Nancy isn’t as lazy as I am. She’s compulsive and very well organized.” The comparisons of his work to hers, his fatigue to hers, his leisure time to hers—comparisons that used to hurt—were melted into freestanding personal characteristics, his laziness, her compulsiveness.

Nancy now agreed with Evan’s assessment of her, and described herself as “an energetic person” who was amazingly “well organized.” When I asked her whether she felt any conflict between work and family life, she demurred: “I work real well overnight. I pulled overnighters all through undergraduate and graduate school, so I’m not too terribly uncomfortable playing with my family all evening, then putting them to bed, making coffee, and staying up all night [to write up reports on her welfare cases] and
then working the next day—though I only go into overdrive when I’m down to the wire. I don’t feel any conflict between my job and Joey that way at all.”

Evan was well organized and energetic on his job. But as Nancy talked of Evan’s life at home, he neither had these virtues nor lacked them; they were irrelevant. This double standard of virtue reinforced the idea that men and women cannot be compared, being “naturally” so different.

Evan’s orientation to domestic tasks, as both described it now, had been engraved in childhood, and how could one change a whole childhood? As Nancy often reminded me, “I was brought up to do the housework. Evan wasn’t.” Many other men, who had also done little housework when they were boys, did not talk so fatalistically about “upbringing,” because they were doing a lot of it now. But the idea of a fate sealed so very early was oddly useful in Nancy’s program of benign resignation. She needed it, because if the die had been cast in the dawn of life, it was inevitable that she should work the extra month a year.

This, then, was the set of mental tricks that helped Nancy reconcile believing one thing and living with another.

In one key way the Holts were typical of the vast majority of two-job couples: their family life had become the shock absorber for a stalled revolution whose origin lay far outside it—in economic and cultural trends that bear very differently on men and women. Nancy was reading books, newspaper articles, and watching TV programs on the changing role of women. Evan wasn’t. Nancy felt benefited by these changes; Evan didn’t. In her ideals and in reality, Nancy was more different from her mother than Evan was from his father. Nancy had gone to college; her
mother hadn’t. Nancy had a professional job; her mother never had. Nancy had the idea that she should be equal with her husband. In her mother’s youth, that had seemed like a strange, dreamlike idea. Nancy felt she and Evan should have similar responsibilities. Her mother hadn’t imagined that was possible. Evan went to college, his father (and the other boys in his family, though not the girls) had gone too. Work was important to Evan’s identity as a man as it had been for his father before him. Indeed, Evan felt the same way about family roles as his father had felt in his day. The new job opportunities and the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s had transformed Nancy but left Evan pretty much the same. And the friction created by this difference between them moved to the issue of the second shift as metal to a magnet. By the end, Evan did less housework and child care than most men married to working women—but not much less. Evan and Nancy were also typical of nearly 40 percent of the marriages I studied in their clash of gender ideologies and their different ideas about sacrifice. By far the most common form of mismatch was like that between Nancy, an egalitarian, and Evan, a transitional.