The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (18 page)

Jessica, a tall, willowy woman of thirty-six, who often dressed in graceful peasant blouses and long floral skirts, had reached that stage in her career, she felt, where she was sure enough of herself as a professional woman that she could abandon the “strong” dark suits she had worn to work earlier, and still wore in court. She grew up the daughter of a widowed waitress in Texas, and worked her way through the University of Texas law school. But there were few clues to the determination it must have taken to do this in the shy, expectant manner with which she approached my questions.

She and Seth had begun marriage intending to honor both law degrees equally. But after many reasonable discussions, Jessica had agreed that Seth’s career came first because “litigation law was more demanding.” These discussions did not seem like moves in his or her gender strategy, but attempts to “do the best thing” for each person and the family. Seth was happy about the outcome to these discussions but vaguely unhappy about his marriage. Jessica was unhappy about both.

If Evan Holt resisted his wife’s pressure to help at home but gave in on the “upstairs-downstairs” cover story, and if Peter Tanagawa resisted but gave in on his role as the main provider, then Seth Stein resisted and gave up nothing except, gradually, his wife.

Like Nancy Holt, Jessica had begun with a dream of sharing
50-50 and had been forced to give it up. Like Nancy, she remained married, but, unlike her, Jessica gradually began to detach from her husband.

Curiously, Seth had none of the traditional man’s attitudes toward “women’s work.” If he’d had the time, he could have done the laundry or sewing without a bit of shame. His manhood was neither confirmed nor denied by what he did at home, for what he did there didn’t matter. Instead, his sense of self and of manhood rose and fell with the opinions of his legal community. Loaded as his career was with this meaning for his manhood and self, Seth’s career told him what he had to do.

Yet, this connection between manhood and career was hard for Seth to see. He actually had little to say about what it meant to “be a man.” “People are people, that’s about it,” he would say about these matters. All that occurred to him consciously, it seemed, was how nervous it made him on those rare occasions when he took time off. Meanwhile, fellow lawyers were saying that Seth “had a lot of balls” to break into the fierce competition among litigation lawyers in such a crowded urban market.

While Seth’s obsession about his career did not seem desirable to either him or Jessica, it seemed normal and acceptable and had three effects on his family. First, what occurred at the imperial center of his career determined what happened out in the “colony” of his home. Second, although neither of them quite articulated this, Seth’s dedication to his career led him to feel he deserved her nurturance more than she deserved his. Because he worked the longest hours, and because long hours seemed a manly way of earning nurturance, Seth felt he had “first dibs.” Third, his career led him to suppress his emotional attachment to his children, although not his ultimate concern for them. He loved them, but day to day he left it to Jessica to think about what they needed and felt. As he saw it, these were not a result of a gender strategy, but the normal attitude of a top-notch professional. And indeed, his gender strategy was built into the very clockwork of male-dominated careers. It was not simply Seth’s personal attitudes that were at issue,
but the normal hours of work in his office, the calls, the gossip that reminded each worker of the overwhelming importance of work to self-esteem, and a whole urgency system based on the exclusion of life at home.

Seth and Jessica had married when they were law students. They share the memory of studying together in the library for exams and being interrupted by a fellow student and friend asking, “Shall we go out for Chinese? Italian?” Six years after their marriage, Victor was born, and two years after that, Walter. As with the Tanagawas, the Steins’ firstborn strained the couple’s energy, but the second-born provoked a crisis.

Quietly but inexorably a conflict arose between Seth’s capitulation to the clockwork of his career and the enormous demands of his young babies and anxious wife. Seth felt Jessica had to handle the second shift. The problem was to prevent her from
resenting
it. To lighten her resentment, Seth dwelled on his sacrifices of leisure: it wasn’t so easy to work eleven-hour days. For Jessica, the problem was how she could get Seth to want to share. To make a case for sharing the second shift, Jessica focused on the sacrifices she made of her hard-won career: it wasn’t that easy to do. Their notions of “sacrifice” began to clash. Neither one felt much gratitude toward the other.

I asked Seth whether he’d ever considered cutting back his eleven-hour day while Victor and Walter were young. “It’s not a question of what I want,” he explained patiently, “I can’t. I couldn’t share my work with a group of incompetent lawyers just to get a night off. It would blow my reputation! When you come to a desirable area like this, the legal competition is fierce.” His conversation moved spontaneously from lawyers who cut back their hours to be with family to a top lawyer friend who one day abandoned law to play second trumpet in a third-rate orchestra, and a brilliant friend who became a cosmetic surgeon at a Beverly Hills “fat farm” for rich socialites. To Seth, these men were spectacular dropouts from their reputable worlds, a reminder of how low a man could fall.

I had begun by asking how he felt about taking time off to be
with his children, but the topic had slid over to disreputable lawyers. Taking time off to be with his child at a play gym seemed to fit into the same mental category in Seth’s mind as working at a “fat farm.” Both discredited a man’s career, and so the man himself. Seth said he didn’t know any
good
lawyers who worked reduced hours in order to spend time with their young children: none.

He explained:

Among his legal colleagues it was almost fashionable to be a “neurotic, hard-driving, Type-A guy” and personally a bit unhappy. Fellow lawyers quietly shared tips about how to resist their wives’ pleas that they spend more time at home. Seth told me that one doctor friend had advised, “Promise her you’ll take the kids to the zoo this Sunday.” Another had said, “I’ve put my wife off by promising her a four-day vacation this spring.” I could imagine these lawyers’ wives—Jessica among them—calling out from the wings, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, “Your children will only be young once! Young once. Young once….” Inside Seth’s legal fraternity, the career men sometimes joked about fantasies of taking time off for themselves; but they never talked about it seriously. They talked about it like cutting out coffee or mastering French. Curiously missing from Seth’s talk about his long hours was talk about his children.

Given that his children were so young, why did he abdicate to the demands of his career with so little struggle? Perhaps a clue could be found in his boyhood in a highly achievement-oriented Jewish working-class family and neighborhood of New York in
the 1950s. He described his sisters as “housewives who weren’t brought up to have careers.” He described his mother as a housewife and his father as a zealous Russian Jew who threw himself into one cause after another. As he explained, “There was a long period when he would have dinner and then go to a meeting every night. He was the chairman of this and that—Russian war relief, food, clothes to the Russians. Later he was a super-duper Zionist. He was always out there every night.”

Even if Seth’s childhood had readied him to be an active father (which it had not), even if his legal colleagues had encouraged him (which they did not), in the end it may have been the very unhap-piness of his marriage that kept him out of his children’s lives.

Seth wanted to see his long work hours as a sacrifice to his family. One day when he was feeling especially unappreciated, he burst out to Jessica: “I’m not sailing a yacht. I’m not on the tennis court. I’m not rafting down the Colorado River. I’m not traveling around the world. I’m working my goddamn ass off.” But Jessica listened coolly.

From the beginning Jessica had been prepared to
balance
her law practice with raising a family. The only legal specialties she seriously considered were those she felt were compatible with taking time for a family; that excluded corporate law. But she did not want to be marooned in solitary motherhood, as her widowed mother had been while raising her. As she made compromises in her career, she wanted Seth to make them in his.

After their first child, Victor, was born, Jessica established two patterns many women would consider desirable “solutions”: she cut back her hours at work and she hired a full-time housekeeper. Five years later, when I met her, she would talk cheerfully at dinner
parties of having “the best of both worlds”—an adorable three-year-old, a five-year-old, and work she loved. She dropped Victor off at nursery school at nine and went to work. Then she picked him up at noon, gave him lunch, and left him at home with Carmelita, her housekeeper, while she returned to work until five. But there was a certain forced cheer in her account of her day that Seth was the first to explain:

Jessica didn’t need Seth to help her with housework; Carmelita cleaned the house and even did the weekend dishes on Mondays. Jessica didn’t need Seth for routine care of their children either; Carmelita did that too. But Jessica badly wanted Seth to get more emotionally involved with the children. Even if he couldn’t be home, she wanted him to
want
to be.

Jessica did not adjust to his absence in the way nineteenth-century wives adjusted to the absence of husbands who were fishermen and sailors, or the way twentieth-century wives adjust to the absence of husbands who are traveling salesmen. She kept expecting Seth to cut back his hours and she led the children to hope for this too. She kept wanting Seth to feel that he was missing something when he went back to the office in the evening, as he sometimes still did. She acted as if she were co-mothering the children with a ghost.

The Steins’ different views about their responsibilities at home led them to want to be appreciated in ways that did not correspond. Seth wanted Jessica to identify with his ambition, enjoy the benefits of it—his large salary, their position in the community—and to accept gracefully his unavoidable absence from home. The truth was, Jessica did understand the pressures of his work as only a fellow lawyer could. But he didn’t seem to want to be home, and he wasn’t. For her part, Jessica wanted to be appreciated for the sacrifices she made in her career, and for her mothering. She worked twenty-five hours a week now, fifteen billable hours, but had been keen to develop a larger family law practice and perhaps write a book.

Seth ignored this sacrifice—indeed, was it a sacrifice? Wouldn’t a twenty-five-hour-a-week job be
nice
? He was also too tired at the end of the day to notice much of what had gone on in his absence. A man like Peter Tanagawa may not have done much of the second shift, but he cast an appreciative eye on all his wife did; Seth was too exhausted to notice.

The clash of ideas about what deserved appreciation led each to resent the other. As Seth put it, “We both feel ripped off.” For example, Jessica had recently complained that she’d passed up a chance to go to a family law conference in Washington, D.C., because Seth couldn’t stay with the kids. On a different occasion, Seth had been too engrossed in a litigation case to take the chance to go sailing on the bay with friends. Jessica didn’t imagine this was
hard
for him; she figured he was “sneaking in more work.”

Small events sometimes symbolize bigger ones. So it was with a birthday gift Seth bought Jessica. As he explained: “For her birthday I bought her this gold chain, because I know she likes gold chains. But she felt I hadn’t gotten her the
kind
of chain she really wanted, so she was mad. And I was mad that she didn’t appreciate the trouble I’d gone to in order to get it. We were both furious.” Which was
the real conflict—that over the gift of the gold chain with the round links that Seth was able to find on a lunch break or the one with the oblong links that Jessica had had her eye on? Or was it a conflict over getting too
much
of your career, or getting too
little
? Having to be away from home, or getting stuck there?

The Steins’ misunderstanding over gifts led to a scarcity of gratitude, and the scarcity of gratitude led to a dearth of small gestures of caring, especially from Jessica to Seth. Increasingly, they were feeling out of touch. When I asked Seth what he was not getting from Jessica, he replied in a surprising way, slipping in and out of lower-class grammar: