The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (9 page)

The idea of a separation arose, and they became frightened. Nancy looked at the deteriorating marriages and fresh divorces of couples with young children around them. One unhappy husband they knew had become so uninvolved in family life (they didn’t know whether his unhappiness made him uninvolved, or whether his lack of involvement made his wife unhappy) that his wife left him. In another case, Nancy felt the wife had nagged her husband so much that he abandoned her for another woman. In both cases, the couple was less happy after the divorce than before. Both wives took the children, fought with their exes about them, and struggled desperately for money and time. Nancy took stock. She asked herself, “Why wreck a marriage over a dirty frying pan?” Is it really worth it?

Not long after this crisis in the Holts’ marriage, there was a dramatic lessening of tension over the second shift. It was as if the issue was closed. Evan had won. Nancy would do it. Evan expressed vague guilt but beyond that he had nothing to say. Nancy had wearied of continually raising the topic, wearied of the lack of resolution. Now in the exhaustion of defeat, she wanted the struggle to be over too. Evan was “so good” in
other
ways, why debilitate their marriage by continual quarreling? Besides, she told me, “Women always adjust more, don’t they?”

One day, when I asked Nancy to tell me who did which tasks from a long list of household chores, she interrupted me with a broad wave of her hand and said, “I do the upstairs, Evan does the downstairs.” What does that mean? I asked. Matter-of-factly, she explained that the upstairs included the living room, the dining
room, the kitchen, two bedrooms, and two baths. The downstairs meant the garage, a place for storage and hobbies—Evan’s hobbies. She explained this as a “sharing” arrangement, without humor or irony—just as Evan did later. Both said they had agreed it was the best solution to their dispute. Evan would take care of the car, the garage, and Max, the family dog. As Nancy explained, “The dog is all Evan’s problem. I don’t have to deal with the dog.” Nancy took care of the rest.

For purposes of accommodating the second shift, then, the Holts’ garage was elevated to the full moral and practical equivalent of the rest of the house. For Nancy and Evan, “upstairs and downstairs,” “inside and outside,” was vaguely described like “half and half,” a fair division of labor based on a natural division of their house.

The Holts presented their upstairs-downstairs agreement as a perfectly equitable solution to a problem they “once had.” This belief is what we might call a family myth, even a modest delusional system. Why did they believe it? I think they believed it because they needed to believe it, because it solved a terrible problem. It allowed Nancy to continue thinking of herself as the sort of woman whose husband didn’t abuse her—a self-conception that mattered a great deal to her. And it avoided the hard truth that, in his stolid, passive way, Evan had refused to share. It avoided the truth, too, that in their showdown, Nancy was more afraid of divorce than Evan was. This outer cover to their family life was jointly devised. It was an attempt to agree that there was no conflict over the second shift, no tension between their versions of manhood and womanhood, and that the powerful crisis that had arisen was temporary and minor.

The wish to avoid such a conflict is natural enough. But their avoidance was tacitly supported by the surrounding culture, especially the image of the woman with the flying hair. After all, this admirable woman also proudly does the “upstairs” each day without a husband’s help and without conflict.

After Nancy and Evan reached their upstairs-downstairs
agreement, their confrontations ended. They were nearly forgotten. Yet, as she described their daily life months after the agreement, Nancy’s resentment seemed alive and well. For example, she said:

She also mentioned that she had fallen into the habit of putting Joey to bed in a certain way: he asked to be swung around by the arms, dropped onto the bed, nuzzled and hugged, whispered to in his ear. Joey waited for her attention. He didn’t go to sleep without it. But, increasingly, when Nancy tried it at eight or nine, the ritual didn’t put Joey to sleep. On the contrary, it woke him up. It was then that Joey began to say he could only go to sleep in his parents’ bed, that he began to sleep in their bed and to encroach on their sexual life.

Near the end of my visits, it struck me that Nancy was putting Joey to bed in an exciting way, later and later at night, in order to tell Evan something important: “You win. I’ll go on doing all the work at home, but I’m angry about it and I’ll make you pay.” Evan had won the battle but lost the war. According to the family myth, all was well: the struggle had been resolved by the upstairs-downstairs agreement. But suppressed in one area of their marriage, this struggle lived on in another—as Joey’s Problem, and as theirs.

There was a moment, I believe, when Nancy seemed to
decide
to give up on this one. She decided to try not to resent Evan. Whether or not other women face a moment just like this, at the very least they face the need to deal with all the feelings that naturally arise from a clash between a treasured ideal and an incompatible reality. In the age of a stalled revolution, it is a problem a great many women face.

Emotionally, Nancy’s compromise from time to time slipped; she would forget and grow resentful again. Her new resolve needed maintenance. Only half aware that she was doing so, Nancy went to extraordinary lengths to maintain it. She could tell me now, a year or so after her decision, in a matter-of-fact and noncritical way: “Evan likes to come home to a hot meal. He doesn’t like to clear the table. He doesn’t like to do the dishes. He likes to go watch TV. He likes to play with Joey when he feels like it and not feel like he should be with him more.” She seemed resigned.

Everything was “fine.” But it had taken an extraordinary amount of complex emotion work—the work of
trying
to feel the right feeling, the feeling she wanted to feel—to make and keep everything fine. Across the nation at this particular time in history, this emotion work is often all that stands between the stalled revolution on the one hand, and broken marriages on the other.

It would have been easier for Nancy Holt to do what some other women did: indignantly cling to her goal of sharing the second shift. Or she could have cynically renounced all forms of feminism as misguided, could have cleared away any ideological supports to her indignation, so as to smooth her troubled bond with Evan. Or, like her mother, she could have sunk into quiet depression, disguised perhaps by overbusyness, drinking, overeating.
She did none of these things. Instead, she did something more complicated. She became
benignly
accommodating.

How did Nancy manage to accommodate graciously? How did she really live with it? In the most general terms, she had to bring herself to
believe
the myth that the upstairs-downstairs division of housework was fair, and that it had resolved her struggle with Evan. She had to decide to accept an arrangement which in her heart of hearts felt unfair. At the same time, she did not relinquish her deep beliefs about fairness.

Instead, she did something more complicated. Intuitively, Nancy
avoided
all the mental associations linked to this sore point: the connections between Evan’s care of the dog and her care of their child and house, between her share of family work and equality in their marriage, and between equality and love. In short, Nancy refused to consciously recognize the entire chain of associations that made her feel that something was wrong. The maintenance program she designed to avoid thinking about these things and to avoid the connections between them was, in one way, a matter of denial, and in another way, it was a matter of intuitive genius.

First, it involved dissociating the inequity in the second shift from the inequity in their marriage, and in marriages in general. Nancy continued to care about sharing the work at home, about having an “equal marriage” and about other people having them too. For reasons that went back to her “doormat” mother, and to her own determination to forge an independent identity as an educated, working woman for whom career opportunities had opened up, Nancy cared about these things. Feminism made sense of her biography, her circumstances, and the way she had forged the two. How could she
not
care? But to ensure that her concern for equality did not make her resentful in her marriage to a man remarkably resistant to change, she “rezoned” this anger-inducing territory. She made that territory smaller: only if Evan did not take care of the dog would she be indignant. Now she wouldn’t need to be upset about the double day
in general.
She could still believe in
fifty-fifty with housework, and still believe that working toward equality was an expression of respect and respect the basis of love. But this chain of ideas was now anchored more safely to a more minor matter: how lovingly Evan groomed, fed, and walked the dog.

For Evan, also, the dog came to symbolize the entire second shift: it became a fetish. Other men, I found, had second-shift fetishes too. When I asked one man what he did to share the work of the home, he answered, “I make all the pies we eat.” He didn’t have to share much responsibility for the home; “pies” did it for him. Another man grilled fish. Another baked bread. In their pies, their fish, and their bread, such men converted a single act into a substitute for a multitude of chores in the second shift, a token. Evan took care of the dog.

Another way in which Nancy encapsulated her anger was to think about her work in a different way. Feeling unable to cope at home, she had with some difficulty finally arranged a half-time schedule with her boss at work. This eased her load, but it did not resolve the more elusive moral problem: within their marriage, her work and her time “mattered less” than Evan’s. What Evan did with his time corresponded to what he wanted her to depend on him for, to appreciate him for; what she did with her time did not.

To deal with this, she devised the idea of dividing all of her own work into “shifts.” As she explained: “I’ve been resentful, yes. I was feeling mistreated, and I became a bitch to live with. Now that I’ve gone part-time, I figure that when I’m at the office from eight to one, and when I come home and take care of Joey and make dinner at five—all that time from eight to six is my shift. So I don’t mind making dinner every night
since it’s on my shift.
Before, I had to make dinner on time I considered to be
after
my shift and I resented always having to do it.”

Another plank in Nancy’s maintenance program was to suppress any comparison between her hours of leisure and Evan’s. In this effort she had Evan’s cooperation, for they both clung hard to the notion that they enjoyed an equal marriage. What they did
was to deny any connection between this equal marriage and equal access to leisure. They agreed it couldn’t be meaningfully claimed that Evan had more leisure than Nancy or that his fatigue mattered more, or that he enjoyed more discretion over his time, or that he lived his life more as he preferred. Such comparisons could suggest that they were both treating Evan as if he were
worth more
than Nancy, and for Nancy, from that point on, it would be a quick fall down a slippery slope to the idea that Evan did not love and honor her as much as she honored and loved him.

For Nancy, the leisure gap between Evan and herself had never seemed to her a simple, practical matter of her greater fatigue. Had it been just that, she would have felt tired but not indignant. Had it been only that, working part time for a while would have been a wonderful solution, as many other women have said, “the best of both worlds.” What troubled Nancy was the matter of her worth. As she told me one day: “It’s not that I mind taking care of Joey. I love doing that. I don’t even mind cooking or doing laundry. It’s that I feel sometimes that Evan thinks his work, his time, is worth more than mine. He’ll wait for me to get the phone. It’s like his time is more sacred.”

As Nancy explained: “Evan and I look for different signs of love. Evan feels loved when we make love. Sexual expression is very important to him. I feel loved when he makes dinner for me or cleans up. He knows I like that, and he does it sometimes.” For Nancy, feeling loved was connected to feeling Evan was being considerate of her needs, and honoring her ideal of sharing. To Evan, “fairness” and respect seemed impersonal moral concepts, abstractions rudely imposed on love. He thought he expressed his respect for Nancy by listening carefully to her opinions on the elderly, on welfare, on all sorts of topics, and by consulting her on major purchases. But who did the dishes had to do with a person’s role in the family, not with fairness or love. In my interviews, a surprising number of women spoke of their fathers helping their mothers “out of love” or consideration. As one woman said, “My dad helped around a lot.
He really loved my mom.” But in describing their fathers, not one man made this link between help at home and love.

In the past, Nancy had compared her responsibilities at home, her identity, and her life to Evan’s, and had compared Evan to other men they knew. Now, to avoid resentment, she seemed to compare herself more to
other working mothers
—how organized, energetic, and successful she was compared to them. By this standard, she was doing great: Joey was blooming, her marriage was fine, her job was all she could expect.