The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (39 page)

In celebration of National Telework Week, Joan Blades, the founder of the Internet-driven organization MomsRising, recently renewed the call for flexi-place—work from home or neighborhood workstations.
¹³
Compared to office-based workers, research shows, home-based workers get more done and save companies money. Working from home, we also unclog freeways, save gas,
and green our nation while saving precious time for giggling children at home.

But at the very root of a successful gender revolution is, I believe, a deep value on care—making loving meals, doing projects with kids, emotionally engaging family and friends. Most women in America are no longer homemakers. But the choice arises—do we devalue that role, or do we value its emotional core and share that now with men? And here we must address a strange imbalance between two values associated with the early women’s movement. As that movement rolled forward—during the days I first jotted notes envisioning this book—it put forward two big ideas. One was female
empowerment
—the idea that women should express their talents, be all they can be, and stand equal to men. The second big idea was valuing—and sharing—the duties of caring for others.

Without our noticing, American capitalism over time embraced empowerment and sidetracked care. So in the absence of a countermovement, care has often become a hand-me-down job. Men hand it to women. High-income women hand it to low-income women. Migrant workers who care for American children and elderly, hand the care of their own children and elderly to paid caregivers as well as grandmothers and aunts back in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and other countries of the global South. And those Filipina, Sri Lankan, or Mexican paid caregivers at the end of this care chain pass child-care duties to oldest daughters. The big challenge in the years ahead—and the challenge at the heart of this book—is to value and share the duties of caring for loved ones. Facing it, we could—and why not in our lifetimes?—finally celebrate a world beyond this unstalled revolution.

Appendix

Research on Who Does the Housework and Child Care

When I read Gwendolyn Salisbury Hughes’s description of women factory workers in Philadelphia after World War I doing laundry and washing their front steps on Saturday mornings, I was reminded of the stories I was hearing from women over sixty years later. But in 1918, when Gwendolyn Hughes was collecting her information, no one would have thought to do a survey comparing men’s work at home with women’s. Outside of a small social circle, in 1918 this comparison was hard to imagine.

In contrast, through the mid-1960s, 1970s, and 1980s there has been an explosion of research that compares working women to men in their relative contributions to the home. One of the largest time-use studies was conducted by John Robinson at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center. In his 1965 survey, published in 1977, Robinson gave the 1,244 men and women the so-called yesterday interview in which respondents were asked to remember on one day what they did the previous day. The study overrepresented urban, educated people. The same interview was conducted by Alexander Szalai in 1965-66 in twelve other countries in Western and Eastern Europe, including West Germany, Belgium, France, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the former USSR.

A second major study, by Kathryn Walker and Margaret Woods, sampled 1,296 men and women (all married couples) living in Syracuse, New York, in 1967 (the report was published in 1976). Their methods differed from those of Robinson, but both found a large leisure gap between working men and women. Both found that husbands of working wives do little more at home than husbands of housewives. Both found that husbands of working wives actually put in altogether
fewer
hours of work (paid
work combined with work at home) than did husbands of housewives— because husbands of working wives could now afford to cut back on their paid work. These husbands did
proportionally
more than husbands of housewives (25 percent versus 15 percent of home work) but that’s because
both
spouses did less at home when the wife went out to work.

Are men doing more now? Studies done in the late 1970s and 1980s come up with mixed findings. Some studies find no increase. The 1977 nationwide “Quality of Employment” survey done by the University of Michigan combined the hours of paid and unpaid work men and women each do and found a daily leisure gap of 2.2 hours, about the same gap researchers found in the 1960s. Another study—this one in 1985-by Bradley Googins of Boston University’s School of Social Work, took as its subjects the 651 employees of a Boston-based corporation. Of these employees, the married mother averaged 85 hours a week on job, homemaking, and child care. The married father averaged 66 hours—a nineteen-hour-per-week leisure gap. In 1983, Grace Baruch and Rosalind Barnett’s study of 160 middle-class Boston families found no difference in the help around the house between men whose wives worked and men whose wives didn’t. In her 1983 study of 1,500 white working couples, Shelley Coverman found that women did a total of 87 hours of paid and unpaid work while men did 76-leaving a leisure gap of 11 hours a week. In her 1981 study of professional women with children, Sara Yogev found a leisure gap of 30 hours.

In her 1977 study, Harriet Presser asked how much husbands increased their work at home after their wives took outside jobs. She found 44 percent of the husbands did more work at home, 45 percent did the same amount, and 11 percent actually did less. One study by Greg Duncan and James Morgan (1978) presents some stark statistics on the extra hours of work marriage costs women and saves men. They reported hours of housework per year as follows: 1,473 for married women, and 886 for single women, 301 for married men, and 468 for single men. All of this evidence points to “no change.”

But other recent studies find a decrease in the leisure gap. One study—a replication of the earlier University of Michigan study by Robinson—found that women worked only a tiny bit longer than men each day. Between 1965 and 1975 Robinson and his coworkers found the leisure gap between men and women had virtually disappeared.
Men
weren’t doing
more
housework and childcare.
Women
were doing
less
, and putting in four to five hours less on the job as well. Rather than renegotiating roles with their husbands, these wives pursued a strategy of cutting back at home and at work.

If this study is representative of women and men in the general population, then “cutting back”—not male sharing—is the new response to the strains of being a supermom. But I don’t believe this study is representative of the general population, and the researchers themselves were puzzled. During 1965 through 1975, when this study was done, hours of women’s paid labor did not shrink and the proportion of women part-timers did not increase in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Table 677), the proportion of women working part time was 19 percent in 1965, 22 percent in 1970, 21 percent in 1975, 21 percent in 1980, and 20 percent in 1982. In short, most women continued to work full time. The proportion who worked part time didn’t change between 1965 to 1982.

But the hours at work of women in this
study
did decline, and the decline was probably an artifact of the researchers’ method. In hopes of improving the accuracy of their study, the researchers periodically reinter-viewed the same respondents at different times of day. So detailed and repeated were the questions in this study that about a quarter of the people dropped out of it—among them, presumably, the busiest. Ironically, the women most burdened by the very crunch the researchers were investigating probably didn’t have time to fill out such a lengthy questionnaire.

Observing the findings of this study, Joseph Pleck cautiously hailed the day when the problem of the leisure gap would pass. But the fact is, for most women that day has not come. Even if all women could iron out the leisure gap by working part time, is part-time work a solution
if it’s just for women
? Given the increasing danger of marginalizing family life, I believe it’s important to offer and legitimate well-paid part-time jobs (see
Chapter 17
), but for men as well. I think it would be a mistake to settle for part-time work “just for women.” This division of labor would lead to economic and career inequities between men and women, which would make women economically vulnerable in an age in which half of marriages don’t last. A better solution might be to share the part-time option or alternate part-time phases of each spouse’s work life.

Anne Machung and I interviewed 145 people altogether, two-thirds of them several times over. We interviewed 100 husbands and wives (50 two-job couples) and 45 other people, including baby-sitters, day-care workers,
schoolteachers, traditional couples with small children, and divorcées who had been in two-job couples. I did the in-depth observations of 12 families, and these families were selected from among the 50 couples in our study as good examples of common patterns we found. We supplemented the in-depth study with a quantitative analysis of all 50 families.

Of the men we interviewed, the mean age was thirty-three, of the women, thirty-one. Forty-seven percent had one child, 38 percent had two, and 15 percent had three; no couple had more than three. As a whole, those we interviewed were disproportionately middle class. Twelve percent were blue-collar workers (craft workers, operatives, service workers), 17 percent clerical and sales, 25 percent managers and administrators, 46 percent professional and technical workers. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the United States as a whole in 1982, 44 percent were blue-collar workers, 25 percent were clerical or sales, 12 percent were managers and administrators, 17 percent were professional and technical workers, and 3 percent farmers. These add up to 101 percent due to rounding error.)

As for education, 6 percent of the people we interviewed had a high school education or less, 31 percent had some college, 19 percent had a B.A. or B.S., 12 percent had some graduate education, and 32 percent had graduate degrees. As for home ownership, only 2 percent already owned a home, 55 percent were in the process of buying one, and the rest rented. In this study, 8 percent of families had regular outside help, 13 percent had occasional help, and 79 percent had no help at all. (Nationwide, 85 percent of all the families have no form of outside help.)

Working couples who are poorer—and especially the women in those couples—have it harder. In her 1986 dissertation on lower-and working-class Chicanas, Denise Segura reported that when she asked wives whether their husbands helped at home, they responded with “half smiles, painful silences, tensing of facial muscles and at times, outright laughter.” The problems of the second shift are probably nowhere resolved any better than in the couples we’ve studied here.

Seventy percent of our couples were white, 24 percent were black, 3 percent Chicano or Latino, and 3 percent Asian. Although I found more conservative attitudes among Chicanos, I found no difference between whites and Chicano men in their help at home. Nor did I find a difference
between whites and blacks. (One of Joseph Pleck’s studies, 1982, showed a smaller weekly leisure gap among black husbands and wives—11 hours—than among whites—17 hours—but I didn’t find this.)

Initially we contacted couples by distributing a short questionnaire on work and family life to every thirteenth name drawn from the personnel list of a large corporation. Fifty-three percent returned the questionnaire. At the end of this short questionnaire we explained what we were interested in and asked if respondents would be willing to volunteer for an in-depth interview. To supplement our list, we later asked the people we interviewed for the names of neighbors and friends who were also two-job couples with children under six.

We asked men and women, “Can you tell me about your typical day?” We found that wives were much more likely to spontaneously mention something to do with the house; 3 percent of wives but 46 percent of husbands didn’t mention the house at all in their spontaneous description of a “typical day.” Three percent of the women and 31 percent of the men made no spontaneous mention of doing something for a child—like brushing hair or fixing a meal.

Working mothers also more often mentioned caring for people within the larger family circle: their own parents, their husbands’ parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, baby-sitters. One woman made sandwiches every Saturday for the neglected children of a neighboring working couple. Another helped her baby-sitter through a marital crisis. Another phoned daily to a relative bedridden with a back injury. Another made Christmas cookies for neighbors. Similarly, when gifts or phone calls came, they often came from busy working mothers. Men, especially working-class men, were often generous about giving time to move furniture, repair cars, or build additions on houses. But in most of these families, the communal circle of informal help seemed to be based more solidly on the informal work of women.