The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (32 page)

I assumed that the man who shares would not earn more. Both spouses might agree that because his job came first, his leisure did too. I assumed that men who earned
as much or less
than their wives would do
more
housework, that being the least valued activity. A woman who wanted 50-50 in the second shift but had married a high-earning man would reconcile herself to the family’s greater need for her husband’s job and work the extra month a year. By the same token, a traditional man married to a high-earning woman would swallow his pride and pitch in at home. I assumed that money would talk louder than ideals.

If money explained who did what at home, that would mean that no matter how much effort a woman put into her job, its lower pay would mean less husbandly help at home. According to research about on-the-job stress, low-level service jobs, where women are concentrated, cause more stress than the blue- and white-collar jobs men more often do. Although working mothers don’t work the long hours fathers do, they devote as much
effort
to
earning money as men, and many women earn less for work that’s more stressful. Thus, by using his higher salary to “buy” more leisure at home, he inadvertently makes his wife pay indirectly for an inequity in the wider economy that causes her to get paid less. If money is the key organizing principle to the relations between men and women in marriage, it’s a pity for men because it puts their role at home at the mercy of the blind fluctuations of the marketplace and for women because if money talks at home, it favors men. The extra month a year becomes an indirect way in which the woman pays at home for the economic discrimination outside it.

Money mattered in the marriages I studied, but it was not the powerful “invisible hand” behind men who shared.
³
For one thing, this is clear from the family portraits. Michael Sherman earned much more than Adrienne but his job didn’t matter more. For years Ann Myerson earned more than her husband but put her husband’s job first anyway. John Livingston valued his wife’s job as he did his own, but she took more responsibility at home.

A number of researchers have tried to discover a link between the
wage
gap between working parents and the
leisure
gap between them, and the results have been confusing. Among couples in this study, these two factors were not related in a statistically significant way.

An intriguing clue appeared, however, when I divided all the men into three groups: men who earn more than their wives (most men), men who earn the same amount, and men who earn less. Of the men who earned more, 21 percent shared housework. Of the men who earned about the same, 30 percent shared. But among men who earned
less
than their wives,
none
shared.

If a logic of the pocketbook is only a logic of the
pocketbook
, it should operate the same whether a man earns more or a woman does. But this “logic of the pocketbook” didn’t work that way. It only worked as long as men earned as much or more than their wives. Money frequently “worked” for men (it excused them from housework) but it didn’t work for women (didn’t get them out of it).

Another principle—the principle of “balancing”—seems to be at work: if men lose power over women in one way, they make up for it in another way—for example, by avoiding the second shift. In this way, they can maintain dominance over women. How much responsibility these men assumed at home seemed related to the deeper issue of male power. Men who earn much more than their wives already have a power over their wives in that they control a scarce and important resource. The more severely a man’s identity is financially threatened—by his wife’s higher salary, for example—the less he can afford to threaten it further by doing “women’s work” at home.

Men who shared the second shift weren’t trying to make up for losing power in other realms of marriage; they didn’t feel the need to “balance.” Michael Sherman had given up the
idea
that he should have more power than Adrienne. Art Winfield talked playfully about men being “brought up to be kings.” But Peter Tanagawa felt a man
should
have more power, and felt he’d given a lot of it up when Nina’s career rose so dramatically. He’d adjusted to earning much less, but to a man of his ideas, this was a huge sacrifice. Nina made up for it by putting in more time at home.

More crucial than cultural beliefs about men’s and women’s
spheres
, were couples’ beliefs about the right degree of men’s and women’s
power.
Women who “balanced” felt “too powerful.” Sensing when their husbands got touchy, sensing the fragility of their husbands’ ego, not wanting them to get discouraged or depressed, such women restored their men’s lost power by waiting on them at home.

Wives did this balancing for different reasons. One eccentric
Englishman and father of three children was a tenured member of the English department of a small college. He taught classes and held obligatory office hours but had abandoned research, minimized committee work, avoided corridor conversations, and long since given up putting in for a raise. He claimed to “share” housework and child care, but what he meant by housework was working on a new den, and what he meant by child care was reflected in his remark, “While I’m working on the house; they muck about by themselves.” He was touchy about his accomplishments and nervous, it seemed, about what he called the “limitless” ambition of his workaholic wife. Without asking him to do more, perhaps his wife was making up for her ambitions by carrying the load at home.

One architect, the fourth of four highly successful brothers in a prosperous and rising black family, had lost his job in the recession of the late 1970s, become deeply discouraged, taken occasional contracting jobs, and otherwise settled into a life of semi-unemployment. His wife explained: “Eventually we’re going to have to make it on my salary. But it’s awfully hard on my husband right now, being trained as an architect and not being able to get a job. I take that into account.” Her husband did no housework and spent time with his son only when the spirit moved him. “I do very little around the house,” he said frankly, “but Beverly doesn’t complain, bless her heart.” Meanwhile, they lived in near-poverty, while Beverly worked part time, cared for their baby and home, and took courses in veterinary science at night. As she let fall at the end of the interview, “Sometimes I wonder how long I can keep going.”

Other men earned less and did less at home, but weren’t “balancing.” They were going back to get a degree, and their wives were temporarily giving them the money and time to do this. The husband’s training for a job counted as much in their moral accounting as it would if he already had that more important job. For example, one husband was unemployed while studying for a
degree in pediatric nursing. His wife, a full-time administrator, cared for their home and nine-month-old baby. The rhythm of their household life revolved around the dates of his exams. His wife explained: “My husband used to puree Stevy’s carrots in the blender. He used to help shop, and weed the garden. Now he studies every evening until ten. His exams come first. Getting that ‘A’ is important to him. He plays with the baby as a study break.” She didn’t mind doing the work at home and only got upset when he complained the house was messy. She said, “I keep myself going by reminding myself this is
temporary
, until Jay gets his degree.”

I heard of no women whose husbands both worked and cared for the family while the wives studied for a degree. For a woman, getting a degree seemed not so honored an act. There was no tradition of “putting your wife through college” analogous to “putting your husband through college.” A wife could imagine being supported or being better off when her husband got his degree. Husbands usually couldn’t imagine either situation. One husband
had
shared the work at home 50-50 when his wife worked, but came to resent it terribly and finally stopped when his wife quit her job and went back to school to get a Ph.D. A job counted but work toward a degree did not. Feeling deprived of attention and service, one man shouted into my tape recorder—half in fun and half not: “You can’t eat it. You can’t talk to it. It doesn’t buy a vacation or a new car. I
hate
my wife’s dissertation!” Women who put their husbands through school may have resented the burden, but they didn’t feel they had as much right to complain.

Taken as a whole, this group of men—semi-unemployed, hanging back at work, or in training—neither earned the bread nor baked it. And of all the wives, theirs were the least happy. Yet, either because they sympathized with their husbands, or expected their situation to improve, because they saw no way to change it, or because they were maintaining the “right” balance of power, such women worked the extra month a year. Meanwhile, their lower-earning husbands often saw their wives as intelligent,
strong, “a rock.” At the same time they enjoyed the idea that, though not a king at work, a man had a warm throne at home.

Some women had other ways of accumulating more power than they felt “comfortable” with. One woman M.D., married to a former patient, an impecunious musician, did all the second shift. As her husband put it, “She never asks.” Another woman, a teacher, secretly upset the power balance by having a long-term extramarital affair almost like another marriage. Life went on as usual at home, but she quietly made up for her secret life by being “wonderful” about chores at home.

In all these marriages, money was not the main determinant of which men did or didn’t share. Even men who earned much more than their wives didn’t get out of housework
because
of it. One college professor and father of three explained why he had committed himself to 50 percent of housework and child care:

Ironically, had his wife earned
more
at a job he admired less—and worked only for
money
—he would not have shared the second shift.

Other evidence also points away from the logic of the pocket-book. In a 1985 report, Joseph Pleck found that over the last ten years, men married to
housewives
have increased their contributions to housework
nearly as much
as men whose wives do paid
work.
⁴
Such housewives earned nothing ten years ago and earn nothing now. Yet husbands of housewives now help their wives at home more. That isn’t money talking, and not a matter of men “keeping the edge.” They had the edge, and gave some up.

These husbands of housewives may help more because of a rising standard of male consideration. Just as nonunion industries often try to avoid unionization by keeping wages in nonunion shops comparable to those in unionized shops, so husbands of housewives may be unconsciously responding to the women’s movement by helping more at home. Without quite knowing it, some “nonunion” (nonfeminist) women may be enjoying the gains won by “union” agitators. Again, the political struggle behind a cultural shift and not the timeless logic of the pocketbook seems to determine how much men help at home. To push the analogy further, the women who struggle to get their husbands to do more at home and whose husbands divorce them because of it may be like the trouble-makers who fight the company, win the point, but get fired. The outrageous few improve things for the “good workers” who make no noise.

This doesn’t mean money has nothing to do with the second shift. In two different ways, it does. In the first place, couples do need to think about and plan around financial need. Most of the men who shared at home had wives who pretty much shared at work. The men earned some but not much more. And whatever their wives earned, blue-collar men like Art Winfield really needed. Second, future changes in the general economy may press more couples to do “balancing.” Some experts predict that the American economy will split increasingly between an elite of highly paid, highly trained workers and an enlarging pool of poorly paid, unskilled workers. Jobs in the middle are being squeezed out as companies automate or seek cheaper labor pools in the Third World. The personnel rosters of the so-called sunrise industries, the rapidly growing, high-technology companies, already reflect this split. Companies with many jobs in the middle are in the so-called sunset industries, such as car manufacturing. As the economist Bob Kuttner illustrates:
“The fast food industry employs a small number of executives and hundreds of thousands of cashiers and kitchen help…. With some variation, key punchers, chambermaids, and retail sales personnel confront the same short job ladder.”
⁵
In addition, unions in sunrise industries often face company threats to move offshore, and so these unions press less hard for better pay.

The decline in jobs in the middle mainly hits men in blue-collar union-protected jobs. Unless they can get training that allows them to compete for highly skilled jobs, such men will be forced to choose between unemployment and low-paid service work.

The “declining middle” is thus in the process of creating an economic crisis for many men. This crisis can lead some men to feel it “only fair” to share the load at home, and other men—through their wives’ balancing—to do less.

Sharing men seemed to be randomly distributed up and down the class ladder. There were the Michael Shermans and the Art Winfields. In the working class, more men shared without believing in it. In the middle class, more men didn’t share even though they did believe in it. Everything else equal, men whose wives had advanced degrees and professional careers—who had what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital”—were more likely to share than men whose wives lacked such capital. All this formed part of the social backdrop to the working man’s gender strategy at home.