The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (5 page)

What do each husband’s ideas about manhood lead him to think he “should feel” about what he’s doing at home and at work? What does he really feel? Do his real feelings conflict with what he thinks he should feel? How does he resolve this
conflict? The same questions apply to wives. What influence does each person’s strategy for handling the second shift have on his or her children, job, and marriage? Through this line of questioning, I was led to the complex web of ties between a family’s needs, the sometime quest for equality, and happiness in modern marriage.

We can describe a couple as rich or poor and that will tell us a great deal about their marriage. We can describe them as Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, black, Chicano, Asian, or white and that will tell us something more. We can describe their marriage as a combination of two personalities, one “obsessive compulsive,” say, and the other “narcissistic,” and again that will tell us something. But knowledge about class, ethnicity, and personality takes us only so far in understanding who does and doesn’t share the second shift, and whether or not sharing makes marriage happier.

When I sat down to compare one couple that shared the second shift with another three that didn’t, many of the answers that would seem obvious—a man’s greater income, his longer hours of work, the fact that his mother was a housewife or his father did little at home, his ideas about men and women—all these factors didn’t really explain why some women work the extra month a year and others don’t. They didn’t explain why some women seemed content to work the extra month, while this made others deeply unhappy. When I compared a couple who was sharing and happy with another couple who was sharing but miserable, it was clear that purely economic or psychological answers were not enough. Gradually, I felt the need to explore how
deep
within each man and woman gender ideology goes. For some, men and women seemed to be egalitarian “on top” but traditional “underneath,” or the other way around. I tried to sensitize myself to the difference between shallow ideologies (ideologies which were contradicted by deeper feelings) and deep ideologies (which were reinforced by such feelings). I explored how each person reconciled ideology with the rest of life. I felt the need to explore what I call gender strategies.

A gender strategy is a plan of action through which a person tries to solve problems at hand, given the cultural notions of gender at play. To pursue a gender strategy, a man draws on beliefs about manhood and womanhood, beliefs that are forged in early childhood and usually anchored to deep emotion. He makes a connection between how he thinks about his manhood, what he feels about it, and what he does. It works in the same way for a woman. Each person’s gender ideology defines what sphere a person
wants
to identify with (home or work) and how much power in the marriage one wants to have (less, more, or the same amount).

I found three types of ideology of marital roles: traditional, transitional, and egalitarian. Even though she works, the “pure” traditional woman wants to identify with her activities at home (as a wife, a mother, a neighborhood mom), wants her husband to base his identity on work, and wants less power than he has. The traditional man wants the same. The “pure” egalitarian wants to identify with the same spheres her husband does, and to have an equal amount of power in the marriage. Some want the couple to be jointly oriented to the home, others to their careers, or both of them to jointly hold some balance between the two. Between the traditional and the egalitarian is the transitional, any one of a variety of types of blending of the two. But, in contrast to the traditional, a transitional woman wants to identify with her role at work as well as at home, but she believes her husband should base his identity more on work than she does. A typical transitional wants to identify
both
with the care of the home and with helping her husband earn money, but wants her husband to focus on earning a living. A typical transitional man is all for his wife working, but expects her to do the lion’s share at home too. Most people I talked with were transitional in their beliefs.

In actuality, I discovered contradictions between what people
said they believed about their marital roles and how they seemed to
feel
about those roles. Some men seemed to me egalitarian on top but traditional underneath. Others seemed traditional on top and egalitarian underneath.
¹
Often a person’s deeper feelings were a response to the cautionary tales of childhood as well as to life as an adult. Sometimes these feelings
reinforced
the surface of a person’s gender ideology. For example, the fear Nancy Holt was to feel of becoming a submissive “doormat,” as she felt her mother had been, infused emotional steam into her belief that her husband, Evan, should share the second shift.

On the other hand, the dissociation Ann Myerson was to feel from her successful career undermined her ostensible commitment both to her career and to a shared second shift. She
wanted
to feel as engaged with her career as her husband was with his. She thought she
should
love her work. She
should
think it mattered. In fact, as she confessed in a troubled tone, she didn’t love her work and didn’t think it mattered. She felt a conflict between what she thought she ought to feel and did feel. Among other things, her gender strategy was a way of trying to resolve that conflict.

The men and women I am about to describe seem to have developed their gender ideology by unconsciously synthesizing certain cultural ideas with feelings about their past. But they also developed their ideology by taking opportunity into account. Sometime in adolescence they matched their personal assets against the opportunities available to men or women of their type; they saw which gender ideology best fit their circumstances, and—often regardless of their upbringing—they identified with a certain version of manhood or womanhood. It “made sense” to them. It felt like “who they were.” For example, a woman sizes up her education, intelligence, age, charm, sexual attractiveness, type of sexuality, her dependency needs, her aspirations, and she matches these against her perception of how women like her are doing in the job and marriage market. What jobs could she get? What men? If she wishes to marry, what are her chances for an equal marriage, a traditional marriage, a happy marriage, any marriage?
Her courtship pool has very traditional men? She takes these into account. She looks at job prospects with the same eye.
Then
a certain gender ideology, let’s say a traditional one, “makes sense.” She will embrace the ideology that suits her perception of her chances. She holds to a certain version of womanhood (the “wilting violet,” say). She identifies with its customs (men opening doors), and symbols (lacy dress, long hair, soft handshakes, and lowered eyes). She tries to develop its “ideal personality” (deferential, dependent), not because this is what her parents taught her, not because this corresponds to how she naturally “is,” but because these particular customs
make sense
of her resources and of her overall situation in a stalled revolution. The same principle applies to men. However wholehearted or ambivalent, a person’s gender ideology tends to fit their situation.

When a man tries to apply his ideas about gender to the life unfolding before him, unconsciously or not he pursues a gender strategy.
²
He outlines a course of action. He might become a “superdad”—working long hours and keeping his child up late at night to spend time with him or her. Or he might cut back his hours at work. Or he might scale back housework and spend less time with his children. Or he might actively try to share the second shift.

The term “strategy” refers both to his plan of action and to his emotional preparation for pursuing it. For example, he may require himself to suppress his career ambitions to devote himself more to his children, or suppress his responsiveness to his children’s adoring appeals in the course of steeling himself for struggles at work. He might harden himself to his wife’s appeals, or he might be the one in the family who “lets” himself see when a child is calling out for help.

I have tried to attune myself to fractures in gender ideology,
conflicts between thought and feeling and to the emotional work it takes to fit a gender ideal when inner needs or outer conditions make it hard.

As this social revolution proceeds, the problems of the two-job family will not diminish. If anything, as more and more women do paid work, these problems may well increase. If we can’t return to traditional marriage, and if we are not to despair of marriage altogether, it becomes vitally important to understand marriage as a magnet for the strains of the stalled revolution, and to understand gender strategies as the basic dynamic of marriage.

The interplay between a man’s gender ideology and a woman’s implies a deeper interplay between his gratitude toward her, and hers toward him. For how a person wants to identify himself or herself influences what, in the back and forth of a marriage, will seem like a gift and what will not. If a man doesn’t think it fits his male ideal to have his wife earn more than he, it may become his gift to her to “bear it” anyway. But a man may also feel like the husband I interviewed, who said, “When my wife began earning more than me I thought I’d struck gold!” In this case his wife’s salary is the gift, not his capacity to accept it “anyway.” When couples struggle, it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.

As I watched couples in their own homes, I began to realize that they often improvise family myths—versions of reality that obscure
a core truth in order to manage a family tension.
³
Evan and Nancy Holt managed an irresolvable conflict over the distribution of work at home through the myth that they now “shared it equally.” Another couple unable to admit to the conflict came to believe “we aren’t competing over who will take responsibility at home; we’re just dreadfully busy with our careers.” Yet another couple jointly believed that the husband was bound hand and foot to his career “because the job demanded it,” while in fact his careerism covered the fact that they were avoiding each other. Not all couples need or have family myths. But when they do arise, I believe they often manage key tensions which are linked, by degrees, to the long hand of the stalled revolution.

After interviewing couples for a while, I got into the practice of offering families who wanted it my interpretation of how they fit into the broader picture I was seeing and what I perceived were their strategies for coping with the second shift. Couples were often relieved to discover they were not alone, and were encouraged to open up a dialogue about the origins of their troubles.

Many couples in this book worked long hours at their jobs and their children were very young: in this way their lot was unusually hard. But in one crucial way they had it far easier than most couples in America: most were middle class. Many also worked for a company that embraced progressive policies toward personnel, generous benefits and salaries. If
these
middle-class couples find it hard to juggle work and family, many other families across the nation—who earn less, work at less flexible, steady, or lucrative jobs, and rely on poorer day care—are likely to find it harder still.

Anne Machung and I began interviewing in 1976, and accomplished most of our interviews in the early 1980s. I finished in 1988. About half of my later interviews were follow-up contacts with couples we’d talked to earlier; the other half were new.

How much had changed from 1976 to 1988? In practice, little. But something was different, too. More couples
wanted
to share and imagined that they did. Dorothy Sims, a personnel director,
summed up this new blend of idea and reality. She eagerly explained to me that she and her husband, Dan, “shared all the housework,” and that they were “equally involved” in raising their nine-month-old son, Timothy. Her husband, a refrigerator salesman, applauded her career and was more pleased than threatened by her high salary; he urged her to develop such skills as reading ocean maps and calculating interest rates (which she’d so far resisted learning) because these days “a woman should.” But one evening at dinner, a telling episode occurred. Dorothy had handed Timothy to her husband while she served us a chicken dinner. Gradually, the baby began to doze on his father’s lap. “When do you want me to put Timmy to bed?” Dan asked. A long silence followed during which it occurred to Dorothy—then, I think, to her husband—that this seemingly insignificant question hinted to me that it was
she,
not he or “they,” who usually decided such matters. Dorothy slipped me a glance, put her elbows on the table, and said to her husband in a slow, deliberate voice, “So, what do
we
think?”

When Dorothy and Dan described their “typical days,” their picture of sharing grew even less convincing. Dorothy worked the same nine-hour day at the office as her husband. But she came home to fix dinner and to tend Timmy while Dan fit in a squash game three nights a week from six to seven (a good time for his squash partner). Dan read the newspaper more often and slept longer.

Compared to the early interviews, women in the later interviews seemed to speak more often in passing of relationships or marriages that had ended for some other reason but in which it “was also true” that he “didn’t lift a finger at home.” Or the extra month alone did it. One divorcee who typed part of this manuscript echoed this theme when she explained, “I was a potter and lived with a sculptor for eight years. I cooked, shopped, and cleaned because his art took him longer. He said it was fair because he worked harder. But we both worked at home, and I could see that if anyone worked longer hours, I did, because I
earned less with my pots than he earned with his sculpture. That was
hard
to live with, and that’s really why we ended.”