The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (17 page)

Just as Robert didn’t want Ann to be a “typical wife,” so he didn’t want Elizabeth to be a typical girl. When Elizabeth occasionally wandered down to the basement, where he was working on his model train, he gave her an engine to play with. When Elizabeth started playing with dolls and talking about Snow White, he bought her an Erector set. On the Saturday I joined them in doing errands, they all browsed through a bookstore. Elizabeth brought him
Madeline and the Gypsies.
Robert thumbed through impatiently, then held out a book on trains, saying—in a perfunctory way, as if the battle were lost—“Why don’t you look at books on trains like Dada likes?”

Robert was unusual in his desire to share the traditional world of men with women, to offer women the male “advantages.” But he was less enthusiastic about wanting to preserve the traditional world of women or share it. He preferred to pay a maid and a baby-sitter to do all that. The most important reason Ann felt Robert shared was that she felt he was honestly
willing
to share the remaining wedge of domestic work—if she wanted him to.

Robert adored Ann and he wanted to please her, and being willing to share, should she need him to, is one way he pleased her. Robert wasn’t an Evan Holt. He wasn’t a Peter Tanagawa. It was really okay with him to share. Whether she chose to share or not, Ann enjoyed a certain “adoration shield” that protected her from many disadvantages women suffer. As a result of this, what they did share was power.

But Ann did not want Robert to share the second shift. She wanted to think of him as doing half the work at home. She wanted to know he would share if she needed him to. But, even if he didn’t have to travel so much, Ann didn’t actually want Robert to do half.

On this question of sharing the work at home, Ann listened to two contradictory inner voices. In her “better moments,” as she saw them, she wanted to relieve Robert of the work at home, to do it herself. When this voice spoke loudest, Ann spoke appreciatively about the heavy demands of his career and his need to relax: “Robert’s a real tinkerer. He becomes immersed in his trains, and builds radios too. It’s a wonderful hobby. When he’s absolutely exhausted from traveling, he’ll still get up at four in the morning to do his exercise and spend an hour working on his model trains.”

In her “worse moments,” as she saw them, Ann wanted Robert to share at home. When she wanted this, she would say such things as this: “Over time, Robert has become sloppier about helping at home.” Describing another “worse moment” she said: “Sometimes I tell him that he makes self-centered choices about what to do with his time. He spends hours on his trains, hours he could spend helping me with the children.” But eventually she saw her perceptions of Robert’s “sloppiness” or “selfishness” as lapses from a more “true,” sacrificial point of view.

Much to her own annoyance, Ann vacillated between her better moments and worse. As she described:

When Ann was in the “flip” stage, she took the vantage point of Carmen Delacorte. When she was in the “flop” stage, she took the vantage point of Nancy Holt. But to Ann, Carmen’s view ultimately felt more admirable, and even if she couldn’t hold it for long, she aspired to. She felt exasperated with herself for not being able to stick to it. She also surprised herself: “I never would have thought I’d want to take a backseat to Robert’s career. I never used to have this view of marriage.”

Why did Ann feel like Carmen Delacorte, that her husband’s job—and really his life—came first, when Frank and Robert, though very loving, did not talk in the same way about their wives? Carmen’s belief in male superiority is more easily understood as cultural programming: Given her strict Catholic upbringing,
her lack of training and career opportunity, it was unsurprising that she held these beliefs. But Ann had all along been groomed to be the highly successful career woman she had become, and her belief in male superiority didn’t so neatly fit her circumstances.

When I put this question to her, Ann gave two answers. First, Robert was more intelligent, she said. He had been at the top of his college class. Now perhaps Robert was, in fact, more intelligent than Ann. It is still true today that most women marry men who are more educated and accomplished than themselves, while men marry women who are less so. Women marry “up” and men marry “down,” a pattern that the sociologist Jessie Bernard calls “the marriage gradient.” As a result of this pattern, there are two pools of unmarried people—highly educated and accomplished women and uneducated, low-status men. Perhaps the same pattern holds for intellectual development: If Robert is a genius, given this “marriage gradient,” he didn’t marry another genius. In the realm of intelligence, Robert may have been looking down and Ann looking up.

On the other hand, maybe Ann was just as smart as Robert. After all, she had earned straight A’s through college even while working thirty hours a week. Who knows what she might have done with thirty hours more study each week? Maybe Ann can’t bring herself to honor her own potential.

The second reason Ann gave for why Robert’s time mattered more was that her work felt unreal to her.

Ann’s sense that only home was real even caused her to want more children, to make them into her achievement. She explained: “If I’m going to be the parent at home, well, I want to have a real challenge. If I have half a dozen children, I can show that I can really do it well. Anybody can raise two.”

Why, I wondered, did her career feel unreal? As a child, Ann had moved a great deal. Living in a different town each year of high school, she found it hard to make friends; and from age fourteen on, work became her refuge from friendlessness. Her involvement in work became a sign of personal failure. Perhaps the unreality of her work also had to do with her fear that she was not “feminine enough.” All through her twenties and early thirties, Ann hadn’t wanted children. When she confessed this to her father, a Catholic father of six, he had stormed out of the room, throwing at her the remark, “One would question your femininity.” “I took that seriously. I said to myself, ‘Maybe that’s right.’” Then, too, maybe her work represented outdoing her father, a man with whom she strongly identified and who had done less well in the same profession. If work meant being unable to make friends, if it meant outdoing her father and being unfeminine, then she might have felt afraid of seeing her work as real.

Whatever the cause, Ann’s sense that Robert’s mind and work were more meaningful than hers led her to do the second shift while she worked full time, and eventually led her to quit. One episode seemed to say this very thing. During a visit to the Myersons’, I found Elizabeth and her mother sitting in Elizabeth’s
walk-in clothes closet playing grocery store. Ann was passing a series of empty spice jars across the “counter” and Elizabeth was telling the “grocery clerk” what was in each one—marinated artichoke hearts, condiments, Hungarian paprika, raspberry conserves. Since her mother was already the grocery clerk, and since I was sitting on the floor apparently unemployed, Elizabeth made me into the nanny. “I hope you can carry my baby,” she said winsomely. Maybe because she saw herself in her daughter, Ann interjected with feeling, “But you’re the mother.
You
carry her.”

All in all, Ann was less interested in sharing the work at home than Nancy Holt, Nina Tanagawa, and most of the women in this study. Most women wished their husbands did share the work at home, but didn’t put that wish first, or didn’t dare push. Due to a complex set of motives, Ann Myerson’s man wasn’t getting out of the second shift. She wasn’t letting him in.

At the end of our last visit, I asked Ann if she had any advice for young women about to enter two-job marriages. She mused for a while, then concluded that since she had given up having it all, she really had none. She moved in a perfunctory way over the agenda of liberal reforms—part-time work, flex time, job sharing—that would make it possible to have more time at home. Then she shared this parting thought.

CHAPTER
8

A Scarcity of Gratitude: Seth and Jessica Stein

A
T
thirty-six, Seth Stein has been a husband for eleven years, a father for five, a practicing lawyer for eight, and a litigation attorney for the last six. He is tall, with broad, slightly stooped shoulders, and a firm handshake. We sit down for our interview at eight in the evening; normally at this hour, he tells me, he would be unwinding from a ten-hour day, beer in hand, slouched and unmoving in his TV chair, moving his thumb over the buttons of his hand-held remote TV channel control almost randomly. He would have had dinner with his wife and two small children at six-thirty or seven, perched himself on the periphery of his children’s activities for three-quarters of an hour, and this, now, would have been the first stretch of time he’d had to himself all day.

His unwinding, I discovered, was usually solitary. Once the children were in bed, his wife, Jessica, a lawyer specializing in family law, found herself free at last, and returned to her legal papers. (“Sometimes,” Seth said later, “I look over the papers in her study and think, ‘We’re
both
caught up in our professions.’”) The living room, with its modern Danish chairs and bright Indian tapestries standing out against white walls, is his private recovery room, a place where he “comes to” after the daily operations of his demanding career. For the first time all day, he takes off his glasses and loosens his tie.

I ask Seth to describe a typical day: