The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (34 page)

When day-care workers feel sorry for the children they care for something is wrong. This woman, a thirty-year-old black mother of three, was gentle and kindly, a lovely person to care for children. What seemed wrong to me was the overly long hours, the blocked channels of communication, and the fathers who imagined their wives were “handling it all.”

In a time of stalled revolution—when women have gone to work, but the workplace, the culture, and the men have not adjusted themselves to this new reality—children can be the victims. Most working mothers are already doing all they can. It is men who can do more.

Fathers can make a difference that shows in the child. I didn’t administer tests to the children in the homes I visited nor gather systematic information on child development. I did ask the babysitters and day-care workers for their general impressions of differences between the children of single parents, two-job families in which the father was uninvolved, and two-job families in which the father was actively involved. All of them said that the children of fathers who were actively involved seemed to them “more secure” and “less anxious.” Their lives were less rushed. On Monday, they had more to report about Sunday’s events: “Guess what I did with my dad….”

But curiously little attention has been paid to the effect of fathers on children. Current research focuses almost exclusively on the influence of
mothers.
A panel of distinguished social scientists chosen by the National Academy of Sciences to review the previous research on children of working mothers concluded in 1982 that a mother’s employment has no consistent ill effects on a child’s school achievement, IQ, or social and emotional development.
⁶
Other summary reviews offer similar but more complex findings. For example, in charting fifty years of research on children of working mothers, Lois Hoffman, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, concluded that most girls of all social classes and boys from working-class families, whose mothers worked, were more self-confident and earned better grades than children whose mothers were housewives. But she also found that compared to the sons of housewives, middle-class boys raised by working mothers were less confident and did less well in school. But what about the influence of the fathers? Research documents a fact one might intuitively suspect: the more involved the father, the better off the child. Professor Norma Radin and her coresearchers at the University of Michigan conducted a number of studies that show that, all else being equal, the children of highly involved fathers are better adjusted socially and emotionally than children of noninvolved fathers and score higher on academic tests. In Dr. Radin’s research, “highly involved” fathers are those who score in the top third on an index composed of questions concerning responsibility for physical care (e.g., feeding the children), responsibility for socializing the child (e.g., setting limits), power in decision making regarding the child, availability to the child, and an overall estimate of his involvement in raising his preschooler. In one study of fifty-nine middle-class families with children between the ages of three and six, Dr. Radin found that highly involved fathers had sons who were better adjusted and more socially competent, more likely to perceive themselves as masters of their fate, and had a higher mental age on verbal intelligence
tests.
⁷
A 1985 study by Abraham Sagi found Israeli children of highly involved fathers showed more empathy than other children.

A 1985 study by Carolyn and Phil Cowan, two psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that three-and-a-half-year-old children of involved fathers achieved higher scores on certain playroom tasks (classifying objects, putting things in a series, role-taking tasks) than other children. When fathers worked longer hours outside the home, the Cowans found in their observation sessions, the three-and-a-half-year-olds showed more anxiety. The daughters of long-hours men were, in addition, less warm and less task oriented at playroom tasks, although they had fewer behavior problems. When fathers worked long hours, mothers tended to compensate by establishing warm relations with their sons. But when mothers worked long hours, husbands did not “compensate” with their daughters. In spite of this, the girls did well in playroom tasks. When fathers
or
mothers worked more outside the home, the parent established a closer bond with the
boy.
⁸

The results of active fatherhood also seem to last. In one study, two psychologists asked male undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to respond to such statements as “My father understood my problems and worries and helped with them, hugged or kissed me goodnight when I was small, was able to make me feel better when I was upset, gave me a lot of care and attention.” They were also asked to describe his availability (“away from home for days at a time, … out in the evening at least two nights a week, … home afternoons when children came home from school,” and so on). Young men who ranked their fathers as highly—or even moderately—nurturant and available were far more likely to describe themselves as “trusting, friendly, loyal, and dependable, industrious and honest.”
⁹

The effects of a man’s care for his children are likely to show up again and again through time—in the child as a child, in the child
as an adult, and probably also in the child’s own approach to fatherhood, and in generations of fathers to come. An exceptionally warmhearted man, like the stepfather of Art Winfield, could light a future way. In the last forty years, many women have made a historic shift into the economy. Now it is time for a generation of men to make a second shift—into work at home.

CHAPTER
16

The Working Wife as Urbanizing Peasant

W
OMEN
’s move into the economy is the basic social revolution of our time. It embraces the lifetimes of Nancy Holt, Nina Tanagawa, Anita Judson, their mothers and grandmothers. Nancy Holt is a social worker and mother of Joey. Her mother was a Nebraska housewife and mother of four, and her grandmother raised five children on a wheat farm. Nina Tanagawa is an executive and mother of two. Her mother ran the house, raised three children, and helped keep the books in her father’s hardware store. Her grandmother raised chickens and cows on a farm. Anita Judson is a billing clerk and mother of two. Her mother worked two jobs as a domestic and raised four children. Her grandmother worked a farm in Louisiana. Working from the present generation back, there is often this pattern: working mother now, urban housewife thirty years ago, farm woman fifty years ago. Sometimes two generations of urban housewives follow the farm woman, sometimes none. All these women worked. What’s new is that, in taking paid work outside the home, masses of women live a life divided between two competing urgency systems, two clashing rhythms of living, that of family and workplace. What’s new, in scale at least, is child care for pay, the massive spread of the double day, and the struggle within marriage to equalize the load at home. What’s new is the pervasive
effect
of the struggle on apparently unrelated events—as in “Joey’s Problem.”

This recent change is an extension of an earlier one. Before the
industrial revolution in America, most men and women lived out their lives on the private family farm—where crops were grown and craft work done mainly for domestic consumption. With industrialization, more crops and goods were produced and distributed to wider markets for money. But industrialization affected men and women at different times and in different ways. In a sense, there is a “his” and a “hers” to its history in America.

Painting the picture in broad strokes, the growth of factories and trades in early American cities first began to draw substantial numbers of men and women away from farm life around the 1830s. Many single girls worked in the early New England textile mills for four and five years until they married, but mill girls represented a tiny fraction of all women and less than 10 percent of all those who worked for wages.
¹
In 1860, most industrial workers were men. Only 15 percent of women worked for pay, most of them as domestic servants. As men entered factory work, they gradually changed their basic way of life; they moved from open spaces to closed-in rooms, from loose seasonal time to fixed industrial time, from life among a tight circle of kinfolk and neighbors to a life among more different kinds of people. At first, we might say, men did something like trying to “have it all.” In the early New England rural factories, for example, men would work in these factories during the day and go home in the evenings to work in the fields. Or they moved in and out of factory work depending on the season and the crop ready for harvest. But over time, the farmer became an urban worker.

On the whole, the early effects of industrial employment probably altered the lives of men in a more dramatic and immediate way than it altered the lives of women, most of whom maintained a primary identity at home. To be sure, life changed for women, too. Earlier in the century, a young mother might churn butter and raise chickens and hogs. Later in the century, a young mother might live in the city, buy her butter and eggs at the grocery store, take in boarders, be active in church, and subscribe to what the historian Barbara Welter has called a “cult of true womanhood” based
on the special moral sensibility ascribed to women. Through this period, most women who married and raised children based their role and identity at home. “Home” changed. But, as the historian Nancy Cott argues in
Bonds of Womanhood
, throughout the nineteenth century, compared to men, women maintained an orientation toward life closer to what had been. If we compare the overall change in the lives of women to those in the lives of men, we might conclude that during this period men changed more.

Today, it is women whose lives are changing faster. The expansion of service jobs has opened opportunities for women. Given that women have fewer children now (in 1800 they gave birth to about eight and raised five or six to adulthood; in 2010 they average two) and given that their wage has been increasingly needed at home, it has become “the woman’s turn” to move into the industrial economy. It is now women who are wrenched out of a former domestic way of life.

In the early nineteenth century, it was men who began to replace an older basis of power—land—with a new one—money. It was men who began to identify their “manhood” with having money in a way they had not done before. Through the great value on a man’s purchasing power, the modern worship of goods—or what Karl Marx criticized as a “commodity fetishism”—became associated with “being a man.”

Today, it is women who are establishing a new basis of power and identity. If women previously based their power on attractiveness to men or influence over children and kin, now they base it more on wages or authority on the job. As Anita Judson, the billing clerk married to the forklift driver, observed, “After I started earning money, my husband showed me more respect.” Given the wage gap, and the greater effect of divorce on women, the modern woman may not have a great deal more power than before, but what power she has is
based
differently.

Paid work has come to seem exciting, life at home dull. Although the most acceptable motive for a woman to work is still “because I have to,” most of the working mothers I talked to didn’t
work just for the money. In this way they have begun to participate in a value system once exclusively male and have developed motivations more like those of men. Many women volunteered to me that they would be “bored” or “go bananas just staying home all day,” that they were not, on any permanent basis, the “domestic type.” This feeling held true even among women in low-level clerical jobs. A nationwide Harris poll taken in 1980 asked women: “If you had enough money to live as comfortably as you’d like, would you prefer to work full time, part time, do volunteer-type work, or work at home caring for the family?” Among working women, 28 percent wanted to stay home. Of all the women in the study, including housewives, only 39 percent wanted to stay home—even if they had enough money to live as comfortably as they liked. When asked if each of the following is an important reason for working or not, 87 percent of working women responded “yes” to “providing you with a sense of accomplishment and personal satisfaction,” 84 percent to “helping ends meet,” and 81 percent to “improving your family’s standard of living.”
²
Women want paying jobs, part-time jobs, interesting jobs—but they want jobs, I believe, for roughly the same complex set of reasons peasants in modernizing economies move to cities.
^*

In many ways, the twentieth-century influx of married women into an industrial economy differs from the earlier influx of men. For one thing, through the latter half of the nineteenth century up until the present, women’s tasks at home have been reduced. Store-bought goods gradually replaced homespun cloth, homemade soap and candles, home-cured meats, and home-baked bread. More recently, women have been able to buy an array of preprepared meals, or buy “carry-out,” or, if they can afford it, to eat out. Some send out clothes to a “wash and fold” laundry, and
pay for mending and alterations. Day care for children, retirement homes for the elderly, homes for delinquent children, mental hospitals, and psychotherapy are, in a way, commercial substitutes for jobs a mother once did at home.