The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (37 page)

When women repress their resentment, many, like Nancy Holt, pay a certain cost in self-knowledge. The mental tricks that kept Nancy Holt from blowing up at Evan or sinking into depression were also the mental tricks that prevented her from admitting her real feelings and understanding the ultimate causes for them. Her psychological “maintenance program”—a program that kept her comparing herself to other women and not to Evan, readjusting connections she made between love and respect, respect and actions, and reminding herself that she was “lucky” and “equal anyway”—all these habits of thought smoothed the way for a grand rationalization. They softened both sides of a strong contradiction—between her ardent desire for an equal marriage and all that prevented her from having it. They blinded her to what she really felt about her life.

Some women didn’t want their husbands to share the second shift and didn’t resent their not sharing. But they seemed to pay another price—a devaluation of themselves or their daughters as females. Ann Myerson managed the home because she wanted to protect her husband’s time so he could make his “greater contribution” at work. Hers was the “less important” work. Despite herself, she also regretted having daughters, because they too would grow up managing the house in order to protect the greater contributions of their husbands. However driven, however brilliant, Ann felt, girls could never enjoy the privilege of smooth, unambivalent, highly rewarded devotion to work. Instead of seeing a problem in the system of rewards or the arrangement between the sexes, Ann felt it was too bad she didn’t have boys who could “cash in” on it. In this, Ann articulated a contradiction I believe every woman faces: women end
up doing the second shift when the second shift is secondary. The more important cost to women is not that they work the extra month a year; it is that society devalues the work of the home and sees women as inferior because they do devalued work.

Devalued as the work of rearing children is, it is probably one of the most humanly rewarding. In appreciating the toll of living in a stalled revolution, then, we should count as part of that cost the missing connections between Seth Stein, Evan Holt, and their children. Resentful of Seth’s long absences, his older son sullenly withdrew and at bedtime the younger one dashed around frantically. Drawing the one out and calming the other down became one more hassle at the end of Seth’s long day. He is missing the feelings his children would feel toward him if they didn’t resent his absence. He is missing the tangles and the arguments that ultimately remind a parent that they matter to a child. He is also missing the cuddles, the talks about what holds the clouds up and why people get sad.

Although fathers pay most of this particular emotional cost, in a different way many mothers do too. As the main managers of the second shift, women become the “heavies,” the “time and motion” persons of the family-and-work speed-up. They hurry children through their daily rounds—“Hurry up and eat….” “Hurry and get into your pajamas…. ”—and thus often become the targets of children’s aggression.

As I drive from my office at the University of California, Berkeley, across the Oakland Bay Bridge to my home in San Francisco, I often compare the couples I have been studying to the students I teach. Who will step into the biography of Nancy Holt? Who will be the new Nina Tanagawa? The Jessica Stein? The Adrienne Sherman? The Ann Myerson? And which of the men will be like Art Winfield?

Like John Livingston? Like Ray Judson? Will my students eventually rear children like Joey Holt, Alexandra Tanagawa, Victor and Walter Stein, Adam Winfield? Will it be easier for the younger generation in two-job families? Has the turmoil of the 1970s and early 1980s been a temporary phase in preparation for a new kind of marriage in the future? Or will my students also live in a revolution that is stalled?

I wonder about all this as I talk with students in my office at 464 Barrows Hall on the Berkeley campus. Nearly all of my women students badly want lifelong careers. In this they are typical of students more generally. An American Council of Education survey of 200,000 freshmen at more than 400 campuses in March 1988 asked students to name their probable career. Less than 1 percent of women answered “full-time homemaker.”
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In my office, only a handful confide that “all they want” is to be a homemaker, offering long, hesitant explanations for why they would conceivably want to stay home, as if these days this choice for a college woman called for a social version of a medical excuse.

In a 1985-86 survey of University of California, Berkeley, seniors, Anne Machung found that over 80 percent of senior women thought it was “very important” to have a career. At the same time, 80 percent definitely planned to marry or be in a committed partnership, and another 17 percent hoped to be in one. They planned to have two or three children at most, and to have them later in life than their mothers did. Most planned to interrupt their careers from one to five years to have the children but they didn’t think this would disadvantage them at work.
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The students I teach fit this description too. When I show my students a picture of the woman with the flying hair, briefcase in one hand, child in the other, they say she is unreal, but they want to be just like her.

Even for the most exceptional women, the contradictions between work and family are very real. And my students know it. Many know it from their mothers’ struggles, and sometimes from their divorces. But, faced with a contradiction and a cultural
cover-up, they feel afraid. They applaud the new opportunities at work. They are scandalized by the inequities that remain. But when it comes to matters at home, a distant, vague, distracted look comes into their eyes, and suddenly they become hesitant and inconclusive. They plan to put marriage off. They plan to go slow. If they have a steady boyfriend, they don’t talk about how they will share the work at home in the future. That’s “too far ahead.” It isn’t just one or two young women who avoid it; there seems to be a collective decision not to look. For all the media attention given the working mother, young women are not asking what major changes we need to make the two-job family work well.

If Nancy Holt and many women in this book reacted against their mothers’ frustrations at the life of an unfulfilled housewife, many of my women students, eighteen to twenty-two, are reacting against their mothers’ frustration at being
oppressed working mothers.
To many young women, the working mother is the new ideal. But she is also the new cautionary tale.

Many young men and women grew up inside busy, strained two-job families. When I ask them about the advantages of having grown up in a two-job family, they mention the education, the family vacations, the financial needs their parents’ wages met. And they generally agree with the student who said: “It’s made me self-reliant. I can cook by myself, do my homework without prodding. I wouldn’t be so independent if my mom had been home all the time.” When I ask them about the disadvantages, they sometimes recall a bad memory, like this one: “When I was ten, I had to come home and empty the ashtrays and make the salad for dinner and start my homework in the house alone. I survived, but I hated it.” Or another: “My mother was always on the go, and my dad worked long hours. I don’t feel like I really got to know either of them until I got to college.” When asked to put the advantages and disadvantages together, both men and women felt the advantages won. They want to have two-job families, too, but not in the same way.

Bracing for the plunge into adulthood, most of these young students are turning away from Carmen Delacorte’s model of womanhood, but not reaching out with confidence to Adrienne Sherman’s. Most of my women students—at the University of California, the heartland of student revolt in the 1960s—are wistful for a 50-50 marriage, but don’t think they’ll get it. Raised as babies in families who struggled over the second shift, they are weary of marital wars. They accept the goals of the revolution but approach them pragmatically, timidly, fatalistically, in the spirit of the “stall.” They are poised to step into the biography of Nancy Holt.

Next to the experience of their own working mothers, what most affects their views on marriage is their exposure to divorce. It makes some young women more traditional. As one described: “In her first marriage, my mother really pushed to be equal with my dad. That led to horrible arguments. In her second marriage, she’s staying home. She just says, ‘Yes, dear … yes, dear’ and things are calmer. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know I don’t want a marriage like her first but I can’t see myself in a marriage like her second.” Most daughters of divorce don’t want to “get caught” unprepared. As one nineteen-year-old student explained to me: “My mother worked as a freelance graphic designer and it was she who took care of my brother and me. She didn’t earn much for her work, so after the divorce, her income plummeted and she got really depressed. Meanwhile my dad got remarried. When I called my dad to tell him how depressed she was, he just said she should get a job.” If a woman lets go of her place at work to care for a family, she can “get caught.” So some women may creep cautiously into the biography of Anita Judson, the billing clerk and mother of two who kept on working to be prepared “just in case.”

The problems middle-class women face are doubled in the working class. Blue-collar women are likely to marry blue-collar men, who are the most vulnerable to the vacillations of the near economy. Less-educated women are more likely to defer to their
husbands’ jobs; one 1986 national study found that 53 percent of women with no high school education, in contrast to 25 percent of women college graduates, believe “that it is more important for a wife to support her husband’s career than to have a career herself.”
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Unlike upper-middle-class women, they will still have to work, and won’t enjoy the services of a maid.

And how about young men? Are they planning to share the work at home with working wives? In a 1986 study of Berkeley seniors, 54 percent of the women and 13 percent of the men expected to be the one who would miss an important meeting at work for a sick child. Sixty-nine percent of the women and 38 percent of men expected to share the laundry work equally. Fifty percent of women and 31 percent of the men expected to share cooking.
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A survey by Catalyst found that
half
of the women plan to put the husband’s job first, but
two-thirds
of the men said they planned to put their own job first.

In a 1985 in-depth study of Berkeley seniors, Anne Machung asked undergraduate men if they expected to marry a woman who held a job outside the home. “She can work if she wants,” most answered. When asked if they would be willing to marry a woman who wanted them to do half the housework and child care, one man answered, “Yes, I could always hire someone.” Another answered, “It would depend on how much I liked her and how she asked.” A number of men didn’t want “lists.”

Brought to America by the tradition of the European Enlightenment, the belief in human progress easily fit the open American frontier, the expanding national and international economy, and the movements for racial and gender equality. Like most Americans over at least two centuries, most of the men and women I interviewed for this study said they believed “things were getting
better.” They said they believed men “are doing more at home than before.” In small measure, this is true.

But the young do not promise to usher in a new era. Corporations have done little to accommodate the needs of working parents, and the government has done little to prod them. The nuclear family is still the overwhelming choice as a setting in which to rear children. Yet we have not invented the outside supports the nuclear family will need to do this job well. Our revolution is in danger of staying stalled.

Certainly this is what has occurred in the former Soviet Union, the other major industrial society to draw a majority of its childbearing women into paid jobs. Since industrialization, Soviet women had worked outside the home and done the lion’s share of the second shift too. “You work?” the Soviet joke went. “You’re liberated.” A stalled revolution was passed off as the whole revolution. And some argued that there, too, the extra burden on working mothers is behind the rising rate of divorce.
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Can we do better than this? The answer depends on how we make history happen. Just as individuals have gender strategies, so do governments, corporations, schools, and factories. How a nation organizes its workforce and day-care centers, how its schools train the young, reflects the work and family roles it envisions for each sex.

While we hear much rhetoric about families, we hear very little talk about government policies that would actually help them. Indeed, comparatively speaking, we are a backward society. In 1993 President Clinton signed the historic Family and Medical Leave Act that gave workers the right to twelve weeks of leave for a new baby or a family medical emergency. But that left out the roughly 50 percent of workers employed in companies with fewer than 50 workers. It didn’t apply to part-time workers, most of whom are women, and leave isn’t paid.

After giving birth, a German mother receives fourteen weeks of leave at full pay. Italian mothers receive twenty weeks at full pay. In 2002, Canadian mothers won the right to take a full year off
from work after childbirth at 60 percent pay. Mothers in Norway can take a year at 80 percent pay. In Japan in 2011 new parents receive $450-500 a month and child care is free. Worldwide, 127 countries—including virtually every industrial nation—mandate some sort of paid family leave. But in the United States, the richest nation in the world, working parents are not guaranteed a penny of paid leave to stay home with a newborn baby.

A profamily policy in the United States would offer paid parental leave to parents—married, single, gay or lesbian—of natural or adoptive children, and paid “care leave” to tend the elderly. Through comparable worth, it would pull up wages in “women’s” jobs. It would go beyond half-time work (which makes it sound like a person is only doing “half” of something “whole”) by instituting lower-hour, more flexible “family phases” for all regular jobs filled by parents of young children.