The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (12 page)

Carmen was an ardent traditionalist. (One woman in my study was so eager to be the traditional wife that she tried to get pregnant “by accident” so she could drop out of college and marry, had the word “obey” put back into her marriage ceremony, worked “because my husband told me to,” dressed mainly in pink, and named her cat “Pretty Kitty.” But even this woman’s traditionalism was less ardent than Carmen’s.) Carmen very much looked up to Nancy Reagan and very much down on Gloria Steinem. Even within her Latino blue-collar culture of women trapped in low-paid, dead-end jobs, she was far more deeply convinced of her desire to stay home and submit to her husband. Women in her position often wished they worked shorter hours, at better jobs and pay, but most such women did want to work. Only 10 percent of women in this study could be counted as “traditional” in the sense of not wanting to ever work, although I suspect the numbers nationwide are larger. What so appealed
to Carmen about being a traditional woman was being subordinate to Frank. As she told me excitedly: “I
don’t want
to be equal with Frank. I don’t want to be equal in work. I want to be feminine. I want to have frilly things. I don’t want to compete with men! Heck! I don’t want to do what my husband’s doing. Let him do it. Maybe that’s it—I want to be taken care of.”

Carmen went on: “I want Frank to know more than I do. I don’t want my children to be brought up thinking, ‘Oh, Mom knows it all, and Dad’s just a painting on the wall.’ I take pride in Frank knowing more. Maybe that’s wrong, but I take pride in it.”

A bright but uninspired student in high school, Carmen had gone no further, but had followed a narrow path of clerical jobs from which day care seemed a welcome relief. She considered her lack of higher education a virtue, for she thought it made her inferior to Frank—who “knew more” even though he had also ended his education the same way. Carmen applied the same principle in bed: the more Frank knew, the more dominant he was, the better. She said: “I don’t want to be his equal in bed. I want him to dominate me! I don’t want to dominate him. I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, this is the way you make love to me.’”

Carmen thought that dominating women were committing a serious sin—right up there with homicide and child abuse. One dangerous avenue to female dominance, she felt, was a successful career. Pursing her lips in disgust, she told me of an “overly” ambitious sister-in-law who got a Ph.D. in veterinary science—“a Ph.D. in bullshit,” she hissed—and as a consequence bossed people around and never married.

Carmen disliked ambitious women partly because she felt they were pushing her kind of women out of style. It was bad enough that rising prices were forcing women out of their homes; what was worse, the daytime TV soap operas she followed avidly while the children napped were featuring selfish career women who stole the allure from domestic-minded women. Today, Carmen’s kind of women were being portrayed as overweight, depressed,
abandoned—as losers. Women who believed in being a housewife were the latest endangered species. Career-minded women were taking over everywhere. She saw the women’s movement as an upper-class fad. As Carmen put it, “Betty Ford is for women’s liberation, right? But has she mopped the floor yet? Beautiful nails, face lift, hair done, and I’m there nails broken, hair a mess, and I’m thinking, sure, lady, tell me all about it…. Instead of parading around, Gloria Steinem should sit down and watch a soap opera. They tell you the way it really is. She should take off her rose-colored glasses and really look.”

On the basis of these views it might at first seem that, by temperament, Carmen was a dependent person. But the truth was Carmen believed in the wilting violet. It was part of her gender ideology. She actively pursued it. This was probably because she feared that without some cultural constraint, she could end up dominating Frank.

Why did Carmen hold this view of the sexes and not some other? I think it might have worked like this: in young adulthood, she matched her qualifications with the real world—no college, no typing experience, and few interesting, well-paid, respectable jobs out there for women without these. As she explained in exasperation: “I’m not prepared to go out and sit on my butt and be a secretary. I know how to type, but not fifty words a minute. What am I going to do?
Scrub floors?
I should have prepared for such a career [typing] but I didn’t, okay? My mother gave me a good education but I didn’t take advantage of it. It’s my fault, okay? But I’m not on welfare and I’m not on food stamps. I’m trying to help my husband.” Carmen couldn’t support herself alone without dropping into poverty; better to support herself through marriage. If her husband needed her to work, fine. That’s how it was for families these days.

Several other high school—educated women in this study who were equally trapped in low-paid clerical or sales jobs did want to like their job and share the work at home. Lack of job opportunities didn’t totally predict women’s views on gender.

A more internal motive seemed to be involved as well. Like Nancy Holt, Carmen wanted to avoid the fate of her mother. If Nancy was in flight from her mother’s self-belittling life as a housewife, Carmen Delacorte may have become a traditionalist in response to her mother’s tough life as an “independent woman.” Her mother was a model of a self-made career woman, and to Carmen a
dangerous
one. Carmen’s mother was a spunky, gifted woman who married at eighteen, got pregnant at twenty, and divorced at twenty-two. The marriage had been a disaster. Her father never sent child support and called Carmen for the first time in thirty years the day he died of cancer. Carmen described her mother’s life with empathy: “In that society, when a woman becomes divorced or a widow, there is nothing else to do except ‘dress the saints’ [put clothes on the statues of saints in the church on holidays] for the rest of your life. You don’t get remarried. You don’t date. When my mother got divorced, she was a young woman, so her father started to run her life.”

Alone with her baby, Carmen’s mother ventured to the United States working her way up from assistant file clerk to file clerk to junior auditor to senior auditor in an expanding insurance company. The two lived in a tiny apartment with two other divorced Latino women and their children, until Carmen’s mother got remarried (when Carmen was sixteen) to a cabinetmaker who drank too much.

Reflecting on how she would have fared in her mother’s situation, Carmen visibly recoiled. “
I would never want my mother’s life! Never, never!
I don’t think I could be like my mom because my mom didn’t have anybody to fall back on.”

Gloria Steinem would have drawn entirely different lessons from the struggles of a single mother, and in fact did. The trials of Carmen’s mother would have seemed textbook examples of why society should finally prevent wife battery, discourage the double standard, and ensure that divorced men continue to support their children. But sizing up her situation, Carmen drew a cautionary lesson: Don’t go out on your own. If her mother had only
submitted
more to her husband, hidden her intelligence, checked her initiative, maybe Carmen’s father would have stayed. The equation seemed to be this: it’s a cold world for women outside of marriage. So a woman has to marry. If she is to succeed in marriage, she can’t be the dominant type. To avoid dominance, she should try to feel subordinate, and if she can, she should project an image that is delicate, fragile, and innocent of much knowledge. If Carmen could manage to feel or to seem this way, she reasoned, Frank would always stay. For her, women were by nature as likely to be bright and powerful as men; but it was their duty as women to press their natural personality and I.Q. into the “wilting violet” mold. For her, female subordination was not sexism. It was a
shield
against it.

Once established, certain things followed from Carmen’s line of thinking. One had to do with her relationship with Frank, the other with the second shift. Given her perception of what she could do, she wanted to be traditional. That called on her to be demure, soft-spoken, sweet, passive, and quiet. But, in fact, Carmen was loud, colorful, engaging, active, willful, and bright. In her occasional heated discussions with Frank, neighbors in the apartment below could hear Carmen’s loud voice rising with rhetorical flourish, falling, and coursing through long explanations of something. Then they heard Frank’s voice: low, mild, appeasing, steady. In the supermarket, Frank politely followed the unspoken traffic rules of shopping-cart life, but Carmen bumped carts that blocked her way. She sometimes took the offensive in family quarrels. She had, for example, pushed Frank to “stand up for himself” when his father chided him for giving up a promising job he once had as a bank clerk. But the morning after such occasions, she scolded herself for having the “wrong” personality for the kind of woman she aspired to be.

In her youth, she told me: “I had a boyfriend everybody loved, and we thought we were going to marry. But I was awfully dominating. He left me and I always thought he would come back, but he didn’t. Mother always says, ‘
Don’t forget William.
’”

Married life after the first three years was harmonious, but Carmen and Frank had had one telling showdown. One day, Frank was complaining that Carmen had shown poor judgment in making a payment on a new chair (which could wait) before paying the rent (which could not). According to Carmen, “Frank said to me, ‘Since I’m making the most money, I can make most of the decisions.’ I said, ‘What?! Wait a minute! Forget it! Just because you’re making more money doesn’t mean anything. I’m still working.’ I told him, ‘Do you really believe that?’ And he said with a smile, ‘Well, not really. I just thought I’d give it a try.’”

All in all, for Frank, the veneer of Carmen’s submission would do. He liked Carmen, plucky as she was. Her spunk was no big deal; he wasn’t threatened in the least. Getting her personality in line with her ideology was her dilemma, not his.

Carmen wanted to be submissive. She wanted Frank to earn the bread while she tended the home. When I asked her what she would do with a million dollars, she laughed raffishly and began naming all the pieces of furniture she’d buy and describing the grand apartment house she’d buy for her mother. Then, slowing down, she carefully explained how the money would not affect the
separation
of male and female spheres: “With that kind of money you would have teas, coffees, showers, benefits to go to. Then I’d have the kids over for Kool-Aid. I’d just be Mom.” If they had a million dollars, and if Frank didn’t have to work, would he stay home? I asked. “Absolutely not! The children would not respect him if he stayed home. He’d hate himself and after a while he’d hate me. And if I didn’t want to do the housework, I’d pick on him to do it. At least he should get in the car and play golf for two hours, do something outside the house.”

But back in the real world a practical problem arose: How could Carmen manage all of the second shift? After her first baby was nine months old, Carmen started caring for other children in her home again. Despite her views on women, her needs were no different from those of other working moms: she desperately needed Frank’s help. But this need aroused strongly contradictory feelings. On one hand, she really
needed
help. On the other hand, the house was supposed to be “her turf.” She said she didn’t care much about Frank’s sharing the second shift—his help might be nice but it wasn’t worth a big fuss. Besides, it might seem dominating of her to make him help in the kitchen. Indeed, to the extent that Frank was not in the kitchen, Carmen was proud. When Carmen described their division of housework, it was as if she had to
concede
how much Frank helped. She interpreted his involvement in her housework as her failure, and in this respect differed from other women who
boasted
about all their husbands did at home. Carmen described Frank’s contribution to shopping, paying the bills, cleaning up, in the manner of a confession: “Okay, Frank and I are equal in the sense that we do some of the housework together.” But she immediately began to talk about the dangers of sexual equality. “Equality” made a wild leap to “competition” and another long leap to antagonism and divorce.

How was she to manage the contradiction between the desire to keep Frank out of the kitchen and the need to have him in it? She left her submissive persona intact by continuing to claim that Frank was “really the boss.” But she also solved her problem by putting an old female custom to new use: she played helpless. It was a stroke of genius; playing helpless allowed her to remain the submissive wife at the
front
door while also bringing Frank into the kitchen through the
back.

The only cost of this strategy might be the low opinion others held of her competence, but that wasn’t a problem. She never asked Frank for help directly, so when he did help, it wasn’t because it was his role, but because Carmen couldn’t do it. Frank cooked the rice when he got home from work—not because he
liked to do it, not because he was especially good at it, but because he could cook the rice better than Carmen could. Frank paid the bills because Carmen paid the wrong ones first. Frank sewed (when Carmen’s mother didn’t sew for them) because Carmen couldn’t sew. Frank worked the automatic teller for Carmen because she “always forgot” the account’s code number. Frank drove them on shopping trips because Carmen couldn’t drive. Responding to one calculated incompetence after another, Frank had come to do nearly half of the second shift. Perhaps Carmen drew the line there, or maybe Frank did. Half would not have seemed right.

The myth that Carmen was “helpless” saved Frank’s male pride: he could now enter the kitchen as an act of chivalry “to help a lady out.” And it saved Carmen’s female pride: she could tacitly request that Frank share her feminine terrain without being any less of a woman. The myth of female helplessness wouldn’t have worked for all traditional men, and it would have appalled egalitarian men. But it was useful to Carmen and Frank.