The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (13 page)

Incompetence was one way to induct traditional men into the second shift. Sickness was another. Carmen had arthritis that “acted up” and prevented her from carrying heavy things. It wasn’t clear that she used sickness like she used helplessness. But curiously, other traditional women I talked with seemed to get sick more often than egalitarian women. And when they got sick, it followed a certain pattern. Insisting that every task at home was theirs, they worked heroically until they finally fell ill with exhaustion. They didn’t stop; their illness stopped them. Sometimes it was pneumonia, sometimes migraines, a bad back, arthritis. Then their husbands, primed to help out in an emergency, “lent a hand.” Upon recovering, the woman returned to her double load,
plunged full steam ahead, and eventually became sick again. Getting sick could have something in common with “getting” incompetent: both were ways of receiving indirectly what many egalitarian women received directly—a man’s labor in the second shift. The 11 percent of women in this study who reported themselves as traditional all reported being ill more often than their husbands, and more often than other women.

Like many traditional couples, the Delacortes were a curious mixture of old and new. They thought, talked, and felt in traditional ways, but they had to live with the stubborn realities of modern life. They aspired to male rule, but had backed into gender democracy. Frank wanted to be the kind of man whose wife didn’t have to work, but in truth he needed her wage. Carmen wanted to take exclusive care of their home but she actually needed Frank’s help. Frank believed the kitchen was Carmen’s domain, but he worked there anyway. He enjoyed the idea of separate spheres for men and women, but often found himself beside Carmen picking canned goods off the supermarket shelf or working their hand calculator to monitor the relentless contest between their modest wages and steadily rising prices. Carmen wanted to strip her work of any meaning except financial. But the awkward fact was that she liked her work and it gave her a power she readily used, ironically, to “give” Frank his dominance and to “work” her subordination. As long as they needed Carmen’s wage, she would have a troubling power that subverted their shared ideal.

By discrediting cultural models of female assertion, by strictly confining her tendency to dominate to the female sphere, by “remembering William,” by raising Frank above her—Carmen pursued submission. She squelched her assertion outside the home and magnified feelings of dependence.

Their traditionalism fit neither the outer nor inner realities of their lives. The outer reality was that Frank needed Carmen to earn money and Carmen needed Frank’s help with housework and child care. The inner reality was that Frank was not dominant and
Carmen was not submissive. What contained both contradictions was the family myth that “Frank did little around the house.”

Both the Delacortes and the Holts jointly shared a belief about how they divided the labor of the home, and in both cases, the belief was a myth. The Holts said that their upstairs-downstairs arrangement was equal. The Delacortes said theirs was unequal. Both stories reflected what the couple wanted to believe, which clashed, in turn, with some important reality and created a tension that their “cover story” hid and managed.

By itself, a gender ideology doesn’t tell us how much of the second shift the husband of a working mother does. In general, the traditional men in my study actually did slightly
more
around the house than transitional men who supported the idea of their wives working but felt those wives should also care for the home. Most strongly egalitarian men did share.

What tells us more about how much the husband of a working mother does at home is the interplay between the couple’s particular gender ideologies, the economic realities of their lives, and the gender strategies through which they reconcile these. Carmen was a tradition defender whose strategy of playing helpless got an untraditional result—a busy man in the kitchen. On the other hand, after her fierce feminist battle, Nancy ended up with a traditional result. In the Holt family, of course, it was Evan who played helpless.

Unlike Evan, Frank didn’t dissociate “fairness” from sharing the second shift—he wasn’t trying to be fair in Nancy’s sense. He didn’t, like some men who had committed themselves to fifty-fifty, try to get out of it by pretending to share. Nor did Frank claim to be in the grips of his career or to suffer more on-the-job stress. Without fanfare, he pitched in.

Nancy’s strategy was to push for a change. When that failed, she resorted to female wiles she didn’t believe in. Her sexual disinterest and her overabsorption with Joey were also daily reminders to Evan of the emotional costs of his refusal.

Nancy Holt’s experience tells how a woman tries to get a failed
strategy behind her and feel all right about it. Carmen didn’t have that work to do. But both stories suggest ways in which early experience creates the emotional steam behind a certain version of womanhood and manhood. Both stories show ways of maintaining the façade of a gender identity when such things as the resistance of a spouse or the limits of a family budget undercut the essence of it.

As economic pressures force more reluctant, home-centered women into low-paid jobs in the expanding service sector, the Delacortes’ way of reconciling tradition with modern life may become more common. But what happened to Frank and Carmen may also happen to others. The last I heard, Frank had a falling out with his foreman and lost his job. As they drew together against this rough luck, they often said to themselves, “Thank God for Carmen’s job.”

CHAPTER
6

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

P
ETER
Tanagawa, a dark-haired man of thirty-three with twinkly brown eyes that express exuberance, leans forward in the leather chair of the small office attached to a technical books store. Speaking in a low voice, he sums up something small but key: “Nina wants me to do more with the kids, to be more concerned with their education and development, be more of a family person. And I am! But not as much as
she
is.”

The issue of how much of a “family person” he should be was not new for Peter. Early on in their vibrant courtship, riding bicycles, talking for hours on end, Peter and Nina had explored their ideas about “men” and “women,” as couples do. Nina had wanted to anchor her identity at home, to ground only what was psychologically left over at work. In this she stood between Carmen Delacorte (who wanted to stay home and put Frank out in the world) and Nancy Holt (who wanted to balance herself and Evan equally between home and world). When Nina and Peter first met, each was attracted to the way the other felt about the roles of men and women. Peter’s career in book sales, they agreed, would take priority over any job Nina would pick up, but she’d want to pick up something. They were right for each other, both transitionals.

But tension developed. Like Nancy Holt, Nina Tanagawa pressed Peter to do more at home, and like Evan, Peter resisted. But because Nina started on more traditional footing, she was to turn to
an irresistible job offer as the reason she was venturing further into the world, and as the reason he should do more at home.

As a child growing up in a close-knit Japanese community in Hawaii, Peter had been his mother’s favorite and distant from his father, who worked long hours and came home tired and distracted. Now, as a father himself (his two children, Alexandra and Diane, were five and three), he felt more engrossed in their lives—like a mother—and more discontent with his book business than his views of manhood would allow. He seemed to need Nina
between
himself and the children for things to feel right.

Nina, a stunning, slender blue-eyed blonde of thirty-three, is slightly shy in manner. When I interviewed her in the evening at home, she seemed still ready for the office, dressed in a white skirt and jacket—a fairy princess in a business suit. Like her father, Nina is resourceful and practical. Her mother, a lifelong housewife and busy volunteer, had been intermittently restless with her husband’s refusal to allow her to work. Nina had long expected to be the center at home. Yet she was now inadvertently drawn by her own success toward a desire to be the linchpin of Telfac’s personnel department. Gradually she was shedding the feminine identity she’d had when she was twenty—or was she?

Peter believes that Nina should tend the home not because her anatomy is her destiny, not because God intended men to dominate women, nor because Peter earns more money. Peter believes she should tend the home because she is more interested and competent in it and has freely chosen to put her time and energy into it. Nina agrees. Accordingly, she does 70 percent of the child care and about 80 percent of the housework. (They agree on this estimate.) Nina stays home if the children are sick; she retrieves a
child’s forgotten jacket from a friend’s house; she waits for the new sofa to be delivered. Although Peter describes his daughters as “daddy’s girls” and he seems to me to do quite a bit around the house, they both agree that he has little responsibility for the daily work of caring for them.

One evening when I was visiting their home, Nina took the children upstairs to bed to say their prayers; Peter whispered to me, pleased and proud, “
Now
they’re getting
quality
time.” Then, since I had asked both parents to go through the evening as they normally would, he settled down with the newspaper. He saw his parental role as supporting
Nina’s.
He mothered Nina; Nina mothered the children.

This did not mean Peter was not an able, interested father. Both agree he is more intuitive about the children’s feelings. For example, he is quick to sense just what favor to Diane had made Alexandra feel slighted. He knows when Alexandra is really hurt and when she is faking it. Often he tells Nina, and Nina does something about it. Nina tends the children’s physical needs, organizes their social lives, and in a kindly way administers them. An absence of warm communication with her own mother had left Nina slightly anxious about being a good mother herself, so she welcomes Peter’s appreciation, and Peter appreciates Nina’s mothering.

At one remove from the children, Peter is enormously interested in them. When he talks to me about himself, he weaves in extraneous reminders of his wife and children. Unlike many men, he describes his typical workday morning with a consensual “we”—as in “We get up at six.” When he describes a typical day, his work seems an interlude between more emotionally charged periods of time with his family:

In contrast, Peter’s description of his workday is brief and perfunctory: “I arrive at work at eight-thirty or nine. Then once I get there, it’s just another daily routine. I leave around five or five-thirty.” Once home, Peter disappears upstairs to change into his jeans (after work, Nina remains in her white business suit). He describes mealtime, bath time, and quality time all in spontaneous, appreciative, and loving detail, recalling just what Nina had packed in Alexandra’s lunchbox, exactly which clothes she had laid out for Diane.

In Nina’s account of her typical day, the morning is short, a matter of warmly, efficiently dispatched routine. The detail begins when she gets to the first morning meeting, the calls and appointments over an impending crisis at the company. She slows down to talk at length about the challenging issues that would come before an important committee next week, and about a bristling rivalry between two members of her staff. Just as Peter lives less intensely at his office than he had intended, Nina lives more intensely than she had intended at hers.

Far more than most men who did not share, Peter could visualize clearly just what sharing would be like. Recalling the preparations for Alexandra’s fifth birthday, he describes a vast array of tasks he has not done: