The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (35 page)

Products and services in the market often excel over mama’s best efforts at home. A woman’s skills at home are then valued less. One mother remarked: “Sometimes when I get upset and want to make a point, I refuse to cook. But it doesn’t work. My husband just goes and picks up some Colonel Sanders fried chicken; the kids love it.” Another mother said, “When I told my husband I wanted him to share the laundry, he just said, ‘Let’s take it to a laundry.’” The modern industrial versions of many goods and services come to be preferred over the old-fashioned domestic ones, even as colonial cultures came to prevail over old-fashioned “native ways.” Just as the First World has raised its culture over the Third World’s indigenous culture, so too the store-bought goods and services have marginalized the “local crafts” of the housewife.

Not only are many of the products and services of the home available and cheap elsewhere, the status of the full-time housewife has sunk. Wives who “just” stay home have developed the defensiveness of the downwardly mobile. Facing the prospect of becoming a housewife after quitting her job, Ann Myerson said, “If you want to know what shunning feels like, go to a cocktail party. People will ask you what you
do.
Say ‘I’m a housewife.’” One illustration in the November 1970 issue of
True
magazine sums up the housewife’s predicament: a commuter train is filled with businessmen reading morning newspapers and office memos. A bewildered middle-aged housewife in bathrobe and furry slippers, hair in curlers, searches the aisles for her husband, his forgotten briefcase in hand. Her husband is hiding behind his seat, embarrassed that
his wife looks so ridiculous, so out of place. In their suits, with their memo pads and newspapers, going somewhere, the men of the commuter car determine what is ridiculous. They represent the ways of the city; she is a lost peasant in their midst.

Working mothers often feel poised between the cultures of the housewife and the working man. On one hand, many middle-class women feel severely criticized by relatives or neighbors who stay home. Feeling increasingly threatened and militant about their own declining position, they pose the question, “Do you
have
to work?” Nina Tanagawa felt the critical eye of the stay-at-home moms of her daughter’s friends. Jessica Stein felt it from affluent neighbors. Nancy Holt and Adrienne Sherman felt scrutinized by their mothers-in-law. Some of these watchful relatives and neighbors cross over the big divide themselves. When Ann Myerson’s mother was a housewife, she criticized Ann for her overzealous careerism, but when her mother got a job herself, she questioned Ann’s decision to quit.

Many working mothers seemed to feel both superior to housewives they knew and envious of them. Having struggled hard for her accounting degree, Carol Alston didn’t want to be confused with “ordinary” women who weren’t productive. But seeing housewives slowly pushing their carts down the aisle at the Safeway at midday, she also came to question her own hectic life.

Women who’ve remained back in the “village” as housewives have often been burdened with extra tasks—collecting delivered parcels, letting in repairmen, or keeping afternoon company with the children of neighborhood mothers who work. One complained that housewives were the only ones who volunteered at Cub Scout meetings. Their working neighbors seldom have time to stop and chat or, sometimes, return favors.

Their traditional source of honor, like the peasant’s, has been threatened. Unpaid work, like that of housewives, came to seem like not “real” work. The housewife became “just a housewife,” her work became “just housework.” In their book
For Her Own Good
, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English describe how at
the turn of the century, the Home Economics Movement struggled against the social decline of the housewife by trying to systematize and upgrade the role into a profession. Women, its leaders claimed, could be dignified “professionals” in their own homes. Ironically, the leaders of the Home Economics Movement thought housework was honorable—not because it was
intrinsically
valuable—but because it was just as real as
paid
work, a concession revealing how much moral ground had already been lost.

If working wives are the modern-day urbanizing peasant, then there are important differences between some “peasants” and others. In addition to the split between housewives and working women, this social revolution also widens a split between women who do jobs that pay enough to pay a baby-sitter and women who baby-sit or tend to other home needs. Carmen Delacorte, who sat for the children of two other families I talked to; Consuela Sanchez, the Salvadorian woman who baby-sat for the Livingstons’ daughter and whose mother was raising Consuela’s child back in El Salvador; the Myersons’ Filipino baby-sitter, who had an eight-year-old daughter in the Philippines; the Steins’ housekeeper and assistant housekeeper: all these women are part of a growing number of workers forming an ever-broadening lower tier of women doing bits and pieces of the housewife’s role for pay.

Most likely, three generations back, the grandmothers of all these women—professional women, baby-sitters, housekeepers—were housewives. Since class has a remarkable sticking power, it may be that the granddaughters of working-class housewives moved into the economy mainly as maids, day-care workers, laundry and other service workers—doing low-paid “female” work—while the granddaughters of upper-middle-class and upper-class housewives moved in as lawyers, doctors, professors, and
executives. The granddaughters of the middle class may have tended to move into the expanding world of clerical jobs “in between.” Both Carmen Delacorte and Ann Myerson form part of the new “peasantry,” but as in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, some newcomers to the city found it much tougher going than others, and were more tempted to go home.

But women of every social class and in every kind of job face a common problem: how shall I preserve the domestic culture of my mother and grandmother in the age of the nine-to-five or eight-to-six job? In some ways, the experience of Chicana women condenses the experience of all working women. Many Chicanas have experienced the strains of three movements—that from rural to urban life, from Mexican to American life, and from domestic to paid employment. In her research on Chicana working women, the sociologist Beatrice Pesquera discovered that many conceived it to be their job as women to keep alive
la cultura
, to teach their children Spanish songs, stories, religious rituals; to teach their daughters to cook tortillas and chile verde. This was, she argued, eroded by television and ignored by schools in America. So the Chicana was a cultural bridge between past and present, posing yet another task in her second shift. When they don’t have time to be the bridge themselves, Chicana working mothers often seek a “tortilla grandma” to baby-sit and provide
la cultura.
Many white working mothers have fought a similar—and often losing—battle to carry forward a domestic culture—a culture of homemade apple pie, home-sewn Halloween costumes, hand-ironed shirts. If she didn’t do it on weekdays, she got to it on Saturday.

Many traditional women feel they should carry on
all
of the domestic tradition and that
only women
can carry it on. Having secured a base in the industrial economy, men have relied on
women to connect them back to a life outside it. In
The Remembered Gate
, Barbara Berg argues that as Americans moved off the land, the values of farm life moved into the home. The woman at home became the urban agrarian, the one who preserved the values of a bygone rural way of life while living in the city. By “staying back” in this sense, she eased the difficult transition for the men who moved ahead.

Who is easing the transition for women now? Although traditional women want to preserve a “domestic heritage,” most working mothers I talked to felt ambivalent about it. “Do I really
need
to cook an elaborate meal every night?” one woman asked. Another mused, “I’m not the type that has to see my face in the kitchen floor. That part of my mother’s cleaning routine I let go of, no problem. But I don’t give my child as much as my mother gave me. That’s why I want my husband involved—to make up for that.”

Some men have responded to the declining domestic culture, much as colonizers responded to the marginalization of traditional peasant life. Secure in their modern world, the colonizers could collect peasant rugs, jewelry, or songs, or cultivate a taste for the indigenous cuisine. Today, some successful professional men, secure in their own modern careers, embrace a few tokens of the traditional female culture. They bake bread or pies on Saturdays, or fix a gourmet meal once a month. But very few men go completely “native”; that would take an extra month a year.

Women’s move into the economy, as a new urban peasantry, is the basic social revolution of our time, and, on the whole, it has increased the power of women. But other realities also lower it. If women’s work outside the home increases their need for male help
inside it, two facts—that women earn less and that marriages have become less stable—inhibit many women from pressing men to help more.

Today, while women average eighty cents to the dollar, their wages are more important than ever before to family life, and as half of all workers, they are more important than ever to the national economy. But overall it remains true that, given how things are, women have a greater economic need for marriage than men, and are more likely to fall into poverty outside it.

Meanwhile, what has changed is the extent to which a woman can depend on marriage. The divorce rate has risen steadily through the century and between 1970 and 1980, it doubled. Experts estimate that today 43 percent of all first marriages, 60 percent of all second marriages, and 73 of third ones eventually end in divorce. Whatever causes divorce, as the sociologist Terry Arendell points out in
Divorce: Women and Children Last
, the effect of it is much harder on women. Divorce usually pushes women down the class ladder—sometimes way down. Most divorced men provide surprisingly little financial support for their children. According to the Bureau of the Census in 1985, 81 percent of divorced fathers and 66 percent of separated fathers have court orders to pay child support. Twenty percent of these fathers fully comply; 15 percent pay irregularly. How much child support a father pays is also not related to his capacity to pay.
³

After divorce, fathers have distressingly little emotional contact with their children as well. According to the National Children’s Survey conducted in 1976 and 1981 and analyzed by sociologist Frank Furstenberg, 23 percent of all divorced fathers had no contact with their children during the past five years. Another 20 percent had no contact with their children in the past one year. Only 26 percent had seen their children for a total of three weeks in the last year. Two-thirds of fathers divorced for over ten years had not had any contact with their children in more than a year. In line with this finding, in her study of divorced women, sociologist Terry Arendell found that over half of the children of divorced
women had not received a visit or a call from their father in the last year; 35 percent of these children had not seen their fathers in the last five years. Whatever job they took, these women would also have to be the most important person in their children’s lives.

The frightening truth is that once pushed down the class ladder, many divorced women and their children get stuck there. This is because they have difficulty finding jobs with adequate pay and because most of them have primary responsibility for the children. Also, fewer divorced women than men remarry, especially older women with children.

In the nineteenth century, before a woman could own property in her own name, get a higher education, enter a profession, or vote, she might have been trapped in a marriage to an overbearing husband and have nowhere else to go. Now we call that woman “oppressed.” Today, a woman can legally own property, vote, get an education, work at a job, and leave an oppressive marriage to walk into an apparently “free” form of inequality.

Divorce is an undoing of an economic arrangement between men and women. Reduced to its economic bare bones, traditional marriage has been what the economist Heidi Hartmann calls a “mechanism of redistribution.” Through it men supported women to rear their children and tend their homes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unions won a higher “family wage” for male workers, on the grounds that men needed the money more than women to support wives and children. At that time it seemed reasonable that men should get first crack at better-paying jobs, and even earn more than women for the same work because “women didn’t support a family.” Since this arrangement put men and women in vastly unequal financial positions, the way most women got a living wage was to marry. In the job market, the relation between men and women was as the upper to the lower class. Marriage was the equalizer.

But as marriage—this “mechanism of redistribution”—has grown more fragile, divorced men still earn a “family wage” but no longer “redistribute” it to their children or the ex-wife who cares for
them. The media stresses how sexes both have the freedom to divorce, and surely this choice is an important advance. At the same time, the more men and women live outside marriage, the more they divide into separate classes. Three factors—the belief that child care is female work, the failure of ex-husbands to support their children, and higher male wages—have taken the economic rug from under that half of married women who divorce.