The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (6 page)

Some women moved on to slightly more equitable arrangements in the early 1980s, doing a bit less of the second shift than the working mothers I talked to in the late 1970s. Comparing two national surveys of working couples, F. T. Juster found the male slice of the second shift rose from 20 percent in 1965 to 30 percent in 1981, and my study may be a local reflection of this slow national trend.
⁴
But women like Dorothy Sims, who simply add to their extra month a year a new illusion that they aren’t doing it, represent a sad alternative to the woman with the flying hair—the woman who doesn’t think that’s who she is.

^*
This is more true of white and middle-class women than it is of black or poor women, whose mothers often worked outside the home. But the trend I am talking about—an increase from 20 percent of American women in paid jobs in 1900 to 55 percent in 1986—has affected a large number of women.

CHAPTER
3

The Cultural Cover-up

I
N
the apartment across from the little study where I work there is a large bay window that never fails to catch my eye. Peering out from inside, wide-eyed and still, is a life-sized female mannequin in an apron. Her arms are folded and have been for years. She’s there guarding the place, waiting. She reminds me and other passersby that no one is home. Maybe she’s a spoof on the nostalgia for the 1950s “mom,” waiting with milk and cookies for the kids to come home in the era before the two-job family.

Perhaps the mannequin mom is the occupant’s joke about the darker reality obscured by the image of the woman with the flying hair—briefcase in one hand and child in the other. “There’s really no one home,” it seems to say, “only a false mother.” She invites us to look again at the more common image of the working mother, at what that image hides. The front cover of the
New York Times Magazine
for September 9, 1984, features a working mother walking home with her daughter. The woman is young. She is good-looking. She is smiling. The daughter is smiling as she lugs her mother’s briefcase. The role model is taking, the child is a mini-supermom already. If images could talk, this image would say, “
Women
can combine career and children.” It would say nothing about the “extra month a year,” nothing about men, nothing about flexible work hours. That would be covered up.

There is no trace of stress, no suggestion that the mother needs
help from others. She isn’t harassed. She’s busy, and it’s glamorous to be busy. Indeed, the image of the on-the-go working mother is very like the glamorous image of the busy top executive. The scarcity of the working mother’s time seems like the scarcity of the top executive’s time. Yet their situations are totally different. The busy top executive is in a hurry at work because his or her time is worth so much. He is in a hurry at home because he works long hours at the office. In contrast, the working mother is in a hurry because her time at work is worth so little, and because she has no help at home. The analogy suggested between the two obscures the wage gap between them at work and helps the gap between them at home.

The
Times
article gives the impression that the working mother is doing so well because she is
personally
competent, not because she has a sound
social
arrangement. Indeed the image of her
private
characteristics obscures all that is missing in
public
support for the working parent. In this respect, the image of the working mother today shares something with that of the black single mother of the 1960s. In celebrating such an image of personal strength, our culture creates an ironic heroism. It extends to middle-class white women a version of womanhood a bit like that offered to poor women of color.

In speaking of the black single mother, commentators and scholars have sometimes used the term “matriarch,” a derogatory term in American culture, and a term brought to popular attention by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial government report
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.
In a section of the report entitled “Tangle of Pathology,” Moynihan cited figures showing that black girls scored higher on school tests than black boys. He also showed that 25 percent of black wives in two-job families earned more than their husbands, while only 18 percent of white wives did. Moynihan quotes social scientist Duncan MacIntyre: “… the underemployment among Negro men and compensating higher labor force propensity among Negro women …
both operate to enlarge the mother’s role, undercutting the status of the male and making many Negro families essentially matriarchal.”
¹
The implication was that black women should aspire to the standards of white women: perform more poorly on educational tests and earn less than their mates. Reading this, black social scientists such as Elaine Kaplan pointed out that black women were “damned if they worked to support their families and damned if they didn’t.” Black women were cautioned against being so “matriarchal.” But as working mothers in low-paid jobs without much male support, they also legitimately felt themselves the victims of male underemployment. While at the bottom of the social totem pole, they were described as if they were at the top. These women pointed out that they “took charge” of their families not because they wanted to dominate, but because if they didn’t pay the rent, buy the food, cook it, and look after the children, no one else would. Black women would have been delighted to share the work and the decision making with a man. But in Moynihan’s report, the black woman’s dominance came to seem like the problem itself rather than the result of the problem.

Similarly, the common portrayal of the supermom suggests that she is energetic and competent because these are her
personal
characteristics, not because she has been forced to adapt to an overly demanding schedule. What is hidden in both cases is the extra burden on women. The difference between Moynihan’s portrayal of the black working mother as matriarch and the modern portrayal of the white supermom is an unconscious racism. The supermom has come to seem heroic and good, whereas the matriarch seems unheroic and bad.

This same extra burden on women was also disguised in the Soviet Union, a large industrial nation that had long employed over 80 percent of its women, and who, according to the Alexander Szalai study (described in
Chapter 1
), work the extra month a year. In a now legendary short story entitled “A Week Like Any Other” by Natalya Baranskaya, Olga, twenty-six, is a technician in a plastics testing laboratory in Moscow and a wife and mother
of two. Olga’s supervisor praises her for being a
real
Soviet Woman—a supermom. But when Olga is asked to fill out a questionnaire listing her hobbies, she answers, “Personally my hobby is running, running here, running there….” Like the black matriarch, and the multiracial supermom, the image of the real Soviet woman confines a
social
problem to the realm of
personal
character.

Missing from the image of the supermom is the day-care worker, the baby-sitter, the maid—a woman usually in a blue collar position to whom some white collar couples pass much, although not all, of the work of the second shift. In the image, the supermom is almost always white and at least middle class. In reality, of course, day-care workers, baby-sitters, au pairs, nannies, maids, and housekeepers are often part of two-job couples as well. This growing army of women is taking over the parts of a mother’s role that employed women relinquish. Most maids and baby-sitters also stay in their occupations for life. But who can afford a house cleaner? In 2010, the median household income was about $50,000. There were 1,470,000 maids and house cleaners and 312,000,000 Americans. So for the average American, outsourcing is not a primary solution.

In the world of advertising images, the maid is often replaced by a machine. In television ads, for example, we see an elegant woman lightly touching her new refrigerator or microwave oven. Her husband may not be helping her at home, but her
machine
is. She and
it
are a team.
²
In the real world, however, machines don’t always save time. As the sociologist Joan Vanek pointed out in her study of homemakers in the 1920s and 1960s, even with more labor-saving appliances, the later homemakers spent as much time on housework as the earlier ones. The 1960s homemakers spent less time cleaning and washing the house; machines helped with that. But they spent more time shopping, getting appliances repaired, washing clothes (as standards of cleanliness rose), and doing bookkeeping. Eighty-five percent of the working couples I interviewed did not employ regular household help; it was up to
them and their “mechanical helpmates.” Since these took time they didn’t have, many dropped their standards of housekeeping.

The image of the woman with the flying hair is missing someone else too: her husband. In the absence of a maid, and with household appliances that still take time, a husband’s hand becomes important. Yet in the popular culture the image of the working father is largely missing, and with it the very issue of
sharing.
With the disappearance of this issue, ideas of struggle and marital tension over the lack of sharing are also smuggled out of view. One advertising image shows us a woman just home from work fixing a quick meal with Uncle Ben’s rice; the person shown eating it with great relish is a man. In a 1978 study of television advertising, Olive Courtney and Thomas Whipple found that men are shown
demonstrating
products that help with domestic chores, but usually not
using
them. Women are often shown serving men and boys, but men and boys are seldom shown serving women and girls.

In the world of print as well, the male of the two-job couple is often invisible. There are dozens of advice books for working mothers, telling them how to “get organized,” “make lists,” “prioritize,” but I found no such books for working fathers. In her book
Having It All,
Helen Gurley Brown, inventor of the “Cosmo Girl” and the author of
Sex and the Single Girl,
tells readers in a chatty, girl-to-girl voice how to rise from clerical work to stardom, and how to combine this career success with being feminine and married. She offers women flamboyant advice on how to combine being sexy with career success, but goes light and thin on how to be a good mother. Women can have fame and fortune, office affairs, silicone injections, and dazzling designer clothes, in Brown’s world. But the one thing they can’t have, apparently, is a man who shares the work at home. Referring to her own husband, Brown writes: “Whether a man will help in the kitchen depends on his mother, says Carol (a friend). Mine
doesn’t.
You also can’t send him to market … he comes back with tiny ears of corn vinaigrette, olives and pâté—but it’s
no good banging your head against the stove because he hasn’t got a cassoulet simmering on top of it. Usually they do something to make up for household imbecility … like love you and pay a lot of bills.”
³

In another advice book to women,
The Superwoman Syndrome,
Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz more candidly admits to losing a struggle to get her husband to share housework: “I spent a lot of time smoldering internally over his apparent recalcitrance. I took it one step further by judging that if he really loved me, he would see how hard I was working, how tired I was and would come to my rescue with cheerful resourcefulness. Need I tell you this never happened?”
⁴

Shaevitz became overworked, overwhelmed, and out of control. The answer? She should make lists, prioritize, or hire a maid. Shaevitz suggests having few children, having them late and close together because “this leaves more time in which the parents may pursue careers or other activities.” She remarks that “some relief is available if you have a child-oriented spouse” but cautions “many women don’t have that luxury….” What changes does Shaevitz recommend? Ask more favors of friends and do fewer for them. Indeed, for the working woman the very principle of reciprocity is a “problem.” As she explains, “The Superwoman not only has some anxiety about asking people for help, but the internal ‘catch 22’ is that she probably feels she’s going to have to repay that help in some multiple way.
And that is also losing control of your life.
”
⁵
So she should not do such things as “agree to pick up your friend’s child for a school play …” or “listen to a friend’s laundry list of problems with her husband and kids.”

Shaevitz doesn’t feel sharing is wrong, only that women can’t get it. In a four-page epilogue to
The Superwoman Syndrome,
the dread issue of sharing resurfaces in a strangely sour exchange between Shaevitz and her husband, Mort: