The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (14 page)

Like Frank Delacorte, Peter probably did more to make the children have a good time than he wanted to imagine. One evening when I was having dinner with them, Diane began to whimper and suddenly threw up some purple chewing gum. The two parents spontaneously leapt to their feet; Peter rushed to Diane, and Nina rushed for the mop. Peter comforted the child: “It’s okay, Diane. Your tummy’s okaaaay.” After cleaning up the floor, Nina took Diane’s clothes off to be washed. Nina seemed like the maid of the house—putting in a load of laundry, changing a lightbulb, packing the lunches, calling the sitter. Peter was the nanny, the understander and comforter. To reconcile the conflict between their views about men and women and the inner reality of their personalities, they developed a family myth: Nina was “naturally more interested in and better with children.”

In 1973, Nina Tanagawa was one of five women in her entire college class to go on to earn a master’s degree in business administration. In the early 1970s, when just a few companies were beginning to see the profit in female talent from top business schools, Nina was hired to work in the personnel department of Telfac, a large and expanding computer company. The job was enjoyable, challenging, and it paid enough to put Peter through business school.

Nina leapt with astonishing speed through the managerial ranks from one promotion to another, until her salary put her in the top half of 1 percent of women nationally. She was five years younger than the youngest employee at her level in the company, and one of the top three women in the entire company; the other two had no children. By either female or male standards, she was a fabulous success.

After Nina had worked for five years in the company, the Tanagawas began their family. First came Alexandra. Nina took a year off to stay home with her. Looking back, she felt it had been the right thing to do. She sang songs to Alexandra, wallpapered her room in candy stripes, and sewed her tiny jumpers. But Nina also admitted to feeling bored taking care of the baby alone at home; she shouldn’t have felt bored, she thought, but she did. She also thought she was becoming boring to Peter. So her reason for going back to work, as she told me, was to “be a better wife.” Then, when her boss called to ask if she wanted to come back to work part time, she hired a housekeeper/baby-sitter and, despite her reservations, jumped at the chance.

When there was a fall in the computer market, Nina was put in charge of the company’s “unhiring” program in several offices, and her hours increased. In the evenings, after Alexandra was in bed, she would read reports and write memoranda about her “unhired clients.” To maintain her managerial image, she arrived half an hour earlier than her staff in the morning and stayed half an hour later at night. When staff members stayed late, she bit her tongue and left first. Under the watchful eyes of conscientious coworkers and subordinates, her work hours steadily increased. As Nina recalled: “I came back to work three days a week, then four days a week. But the job grew too rapidly. I was running—go, go, go! I’d drop into bed at night and realize I’d been working for seventeen hours a day.”

After about two years of this, their second child, Diane, was born. This time she stayed home for six months before she once
again received a call from her boss and once again went back. But this time there was more to do at home and less of her to go around. As Nina put it: “The house got messier. There was that much more laundry with two kids, more dinner action and noise.”

She had hired a housekeeper who said, “No windows, no floors and I leave at five-thirty.” So after long sieges of work during the week, Nina became the consummate housewife and mother on Saturdays. On Sunday mornings, when Peter played tennis, Nina washed the children’s hair, cut their fingernails, and cleaned house. As she put it wryly, “Peter lets me take over a lot.” In one sense, though, it was a relief to take over.

All the top brass of Nina’s computer company were workaholics, actually or virtually single. At first she tried to pretend to be as involved as they were. But one day, just as Nina was beginning to feel she couldn’t pretend anymore, her boss burst into her office with a broad smile: “Congratulations! You’ve just been promoted!” Well-wishers crowded into her office to celebrate, and Nina felt pleased and flattered. But as she drove home that night, what would prove a lengthy depression was already taking hold. She recalled hearing a speaker at an office seminar on work and family life declare, “I don’t know of a working mother who can balance a career, children, and marriage; one of these has to give.” Nina remembered secretly thinking, I’m proving you wrong. Now she wasn’t sure.

Peter supported Nina’s career, in the way transitional men do. He talked with her about her problems at work, he soothed her brow at night. He worried about her health. He did a bit more here, a bit more there at home. But even these bits seemed to take reminders. As Nina put it: “I say to him, ‘Do you want to bathe the kids tonight or do you want to clean up the kitchen?’ Because if I don’t, he’ll go watch TV or read the paper.”

Nina hinted that she needed help. But she put it in such a way that her job, not she, was doing the asking. Unlike Nancy, she
didn’t say a word about “fairness.” She stuck to the job offer: she didn’t want to say yes but how could she possibly say no?

Peter heard the hints, but took them as signs of “Nina’s problem.” So in time, Nina let her fatigue speak to him. Great rings appeared around her eyes. She had grown almost alarmingly thin. She even began to move and talk listlessly. Finally, she confided to Peter that she was getting close to a certain emotional edge. Instead of having a nervous breakdown, however, she got pneumonia and took the first ten days of pure rest she had taken since Diane’s birth. It was as if her illness had said what she herself could not: “Please help. Be a ‘mother’ too.” Although Peter was concerned about Nina, he considered the problem to be a conflict between
her
career and
her
motherhood.

Nina was changing. But had her opinion of
him
as a man altered? In truth, Peter didn’t want to change, but he also didn’t quite dare especially now that Nina was earning much more than Peter. Nina felt fortunate to be able to add so much money to the family coffers. As she noted: “My salary would make it possible for Peter to get out of technical books, if he wanted, and go into psychology. Sometimes he talks about wanting to become a therapist. He’d be wonderful at it. I’ve reminded him he can if he wants. We can afford it.” By offering to be the main provider for a while so he could get into work he loved, Nina was offering Peter a gift.

Peter appreciated the spirit of Nina’s gift, and the opportunity. Her salary also allowed them a new home, a new car, and a private school for Alexandra—even when he was not quite settled in his career. But Peter felt uneasy about Nina’s salary. He certainly didn’t feel as grateful to Nina as she would have felt to him, had their salaries been reversed. This was not because Peter thought Nina was competing with him. He put it this way: “Nina is successful, but she isn’t ambitious. I’m more ambitious than she is. Nina also isn’t competitive, maybe just a little, and I am, just a little.” So the problem was not Nina’s ambition or competitiveness. It was that Nina’s higher earnings
shamed him as a man.
Friends and relatives—
especially older males—would think less of him if they knew his wife earned more, he wanted their good opinion.

So he could not gracefully accept Nina’s gift. In fact, he and Nina treated her salary as a miserable secret. They did not tell his parents; if Peter’s father found out, Peter said, “he would die.” They didn’t tell Nina’s father because “Nina outearns him.” And they didn’t tell Peter’s high school buddies back home because, Peter said, “I’d never hear the end of it.” Over lunch one day, Nina told me in a near whisper: “I was interviewed for an article in
Businessweek
, and I had to call the fellow back and ask him please not to publish my salary. When he interviewed me I was proud to tell him my salary, but then I thought, I don’t want that there—because of Peter.”

Nina was giving Peter the kind of gift that, under the old rules, a man should give a woman: relief from pressure to provide. Peter wanted to give Nina “the choice of whether to work or not.” He wanted her to want to work—sure, why not?—but not to need to work. But Nina did not need that particular gift: given her combination of skill and opportunity, she would always choose to work.

With his notion of manhood under new pressure, Peter made one of those unarticulated “moves” that serve the goal of preserving a man’s relation to a man’s sphere, and his notion of the right amount of marital power. He summoned the feeling that it was not Nina who gave him the gift of her high salary. It was he, Peter, who was giving the important gift. People out there in the world Peter came from and cared about ridiculed men whose wives outearned them. They shook their heads. They rolled their eyes. In order to live with Nina’s salary, he had to absorb an assault on his manhood. As Peter said, looking me in the eye, “Only one in a hundred men could take this.” Nina was lucky to be married to such an unusual man. And Nina gave him credit: she thought Peter was unusual too. Her salary
was
hard to take. She was lucky.

Curiously, because Peter and Nina allowed them to, it was their parents, the guys in Peter’s office, his buddies at home, society out
there—not the two of them privately—who defined the value of the gifts they exchanged. What was it that had ultimately lowered Nina’s credit with Peter and reduced her side in their balance of gratitude? One thing was their joint appreciation of the injury he had suffered to his male pride—an appreciation based on their feeling that a man
should
be able to base his pride on traditional grounds. And this pride hinged on the attitude of others. In this way, the outside came inside. She owed him one.

On the surface, Peter adapted to her salary; it was “fine”; he wished her well. But, given this concession to his older view of himself as a man, he wanted her gratitude. After all, it was
she
who had passed on the pressure from her irresistible opportunities at Telfac to him and the family.

Through this invisible “move”—to expect Nina to be grateful to him—Peter unwittingly passed the strain of a larger social change (of which the call for female executives at Telfac in the early 1970s was one sign) back to Nina—through their marital economy of gratitude. Now she owed him gratitude for “being willing to take it.” Like a great storage closet crowded with objects that would otherwise clutter the house, her indebtedness made the rest of their relationship more tidy. Peter supported and took pride in Nina’s work—but only by storing in this hidden emotional closet the tension between his unchanged idea of himself and Nina’s new salary. It was like a bite taken but not swallowed.

Nina’s sense that Peter was doing her a favor in being that “one in a hundred” guy also had a bearing on the second shift. She told me:

Peter made it clear in conversations with me that Nina’s salary was painful. He felt he couldn’t be the man Nina would still love thirty years from now if he both earned less than she did and also shared the second shift. In his heart of hearts, Peter didn’t really care about his career success. What he did care about was his marriage to Nina, and for things to feel right between them, she could not be that far ahead at work, that disengaged from home. Peter wanted to be involved in family life, but only if Nina were
more
involved. He was doing more at home now than when they first married. He wanted credit for all the changing he had done. He felt perilously close to the line that marked the limits of his ability to change, and which he guarded by his move to win credit for sacrificing honor, credit for being the one to adapt when, as Nancy Holt said, usually women do that.

One sign of this line emerged as a surprise in an interview. I had asked Peter to look at a long list of household chores—laundry, sewing, car repairs, and so on—and tell me who did each one. Expecting a series of perfunctory replies, I was taken aback—as he was himself—when we came to lawn mowing. “Lawn mowing!” he burst out suddenly. “
I
do the mowing!” He jabbed the page with his finger and exclaimed:

In the woman he deeply loved, in the home that mattered most, and in the world of work, a whole gender revolution was under way. But old-fashioned customs still held for Peter Tanagawa’s lawn and car.

Nina felt “lucky.” Peter was “one in a hundred men.” But behind her sense of luck lurked a cautionary tale. Just as Carmen Delacorte was chastened by the memory of her mother’s struggle as a single mother, as Nancy Holt was haunted by her mother’s depression, so Nina was chilled by tales of divorce among contemporary friends. Several female colleagues at work had seen their marriages wrecked on the shoals of the second shift and had been thrown down the social class ladder, where some got stuck, and others struggled back up at the expense, Nina felt, of their children. Recently, two close friends exactly Nina’s age, both in fulltime jobs, both with children the ages of Alexandra and Diane, were suddenly abandoned by their husbands—or so it seemed to Nina and Peter. One of these women stayed with them a week, bringing her devastating story with her. Nina responded with empathy, horror, and a certain fascination. “My friend is gorgeous. But she said she wasn’t feeling good about herself,” Nina related, “so she got a face lift. She’s younger than me! Her husband went out and got a younger woman, even more gorgeous.” Outside the safety of their love nest lay this cool marketplace of romantic partners, the men choosing, the women being chosen for youth, looks, the absence of children. It was frightening.