The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (15 page)

Just as Nina and Peter were speculating about what had gone haywire in their friend’s marriage, Peter’s father dropped a bomb closer to home. After forty years of marriage, he announced that he was divorcing Peter’s mother and taking up with a blond Caucasian
twenty years younger than he. What was going on? Had the marriage been that unhappy all along? In the wake of this shock, Peter and Nina turned to reaffirming conversations about how much fun their courtship had been, how their love had deepened.

But Nina vaguely sensed a vital link between these divorces in the outside world and what she was asking of Peter at home. The cold winds outside made the hearth seem warm. As she reflected in a serious tone:

She could ask him more nicely, and less often. They could get more outside help. She could cut back her work hours, do more of the second shift. The “as if” world of divorcees that Peter and Nina would enter if they did divorce also subliminally lowered Nina’s credits at home. She was beautiful, well-off, and unusually blessed in chances to remarry. But it was apparently still more scary for a woman like her to be “out there” than it was for a man like him. Life was harder, pickings were slimmer. Divorce was a cautionary tale for them both, but more for her.

So warned, Nina made up for outearning Peter and injuring his male pride by working the extra month a year herself. Peter participated in home life in the spirit of one who leans curiously over a neighbor’s fence but avoids getting too involved in the
neighbor’s affairs. He entered “Nina’s sphere,” but from the safe vantage point of the active witness, the helpful adviser.

Difficulties arose with their dark-haired Alexandra, an observant, somber child who seemed older than her five years. From the first, these difficulties were defined as a “Nina-Alexandra” problem. Peter had routed his own feelings for Alexandra through Nina. Alexandra glumly explained to me one day, “I’m driven to school by Annie’s mom, Sarah’s mom, Jill’s mom. My mom doesn’t drive.” Alexandra distinguished between school friends (friends she played with at school) and home friends (friends invited home). She had school friends but no home friends. She explained that in order to invite friends home, you needed
a mother
at home. By all three—Nina, Peter, and Alexandra—it was considered a truth that a girl can’t make home friends without a mother at home.

If Peter had an urge to plunge more fully into the children’s routines, he controlled it. If he had a different urge, to leave it to Nina, he acted on it. He helped Alexandra unreverse her printed
B
’s and
D
’s. He read Dr. Seuss books to her, and buttoned her dress in the mornings. But the rest of quality time, he said with anxious reverence, was up to Nina. In this way he again shaped his inclinations so as to separate himself from the ultimate responsibility for the second shift but to identify lovingly with each family episode through the medium of his wife.

Sensing her father’s gaze toward her mother, Alexandra turned to Nina. When Alexandra began to compare her lot to that of school friends with mothers who stayed home, it was to her mother that she addressed a silent protest. It was Nina who felt guilty.

If Mommy wasn’t going to be home, it seemed, Alexandra wasn’t going to “be home” either—not in conversation, not in weekend play. One day, Alexandra came home with a note in her
lunchbox addressed to Nina from Alexandra’s teacher. As Nina recalled: “The teacher said that even though this was Alexandra’s second year at school, she still had no friends.”

On the following Saturday, a week before Valentine’s Day, something worse happened. Nina had taken Alexandra to a stationery store to buy valentine cards for her classmates. Alexandra picked the prettiest card for herself because, as she explained in a low voice, “I don’t think anyone at school is going to give me one.”

Sometimes a way of life collapses because of a small stunning episode. So it was with the valentine card. That night, Nina told Peter, “We have a crisis.” The incident had been tiny, but they agreed it wasn’t minor. “Handle it the best way you can, honey,” he said, “I’m a hundred percent behind you.”

A week later, Nina asked her boss if she could take a cut in pay and work only three days a week, and he said she could. She broke the good news to Alexandra at dinnertime, hoping for a delighted response. For three days, Alexandra said nothing about it. Then, one evening, she asked nonchalantly if she might invite a girlfriend over the following Friday. As Peter drove Nina to work the next day, he said to her in a warm, excited tone, “Doesn’t that make it worth it, honey?”

By telling Nina that she could do “whatever she needed to do” but refusing to become more involved with Alexandra himself, Peter had effectively robbed Nina of the choice he had so lovingly offered, to work full time or not, as she saw fit. Ironically, he worked even harder at extending the market for technical books, work that bored him, while Nina curtailed the work she loved. Neither one saw anything strange about this.

Until this point, Nina had been the showcase woman in top management at a company that prided itself on personnel policies
that enabled mothers to work—flex time, part-time work, job sharing. Now Nina had a chance to show the world that workers can be good mothers and part-timers can have real careers. Her immediate boss assured her, “Don’t worry, we support you.”

But trouble began almost immediately. Nina had handled four departments; she gave up three. Word had it that management was saying, “What Nina does can’t be that important if she just works three days a week.” Her boss became more “realistic.” “I fought for you with the higher-ups, I’ve been holding them off,” he told her. “Now there’s only one thing I want from you—to work full time.” They had trained and groomed her; now they wanted their money’s worth.

Fellow employees gossiped about how “serious” she was. The longer your hours, they reasoned, the more serious and committed you were. Men whose lives ran on traditional tracks had a far better crack at passing this seriousness test than a woman like Nina, who already felt lucky to live with a man who had “taken a lot.” Despite its formal progressive policies, the company latently rewarded traditional marriages and punished other kinds. Nina summed up her predicament this way:

More and more, Nina was punished for being an uncommitted worker. First she was moved from her large office, facing the San Francisco Bay, to a tiny, windowless office. Then she was told to report to a peer instead of a higher-ranking officer “until she came
back full time.” Her participation in a company bonus program, all along assured her, was terminated. One older man—whose own marriage to a career woman had come to a stormy end and who had quietly resented Nina’s success for years—finally confessed to her, “When you went part time, I realized you weren’t serious.”

Some of her colleagues in upper management were happily remarried to women who, in second marriages themselves, were more cautiously dedicating themselves to the family. Others were married to wives who worked on timeless graduate degrees, or did volunteer work that offered them a private fantasy of a future public life but did not interfere with their husbands’ career. Some of these wives stayed home and seemed to have an easier life. A few men in upper management had career wives, but even they didn’t seem to face a dilemma like this one with Alexandra.

Nina was becoming keenly aware of how her male coworkers were, like Peter, protected from the crisis she faced. Were they sacrificing anything to make sure their children got all they needed? She noticed that male coworkers were happy to pin a “mother identity” on her; passing her in the halls, they often said, “Hi, Nina, how are the kids?” She used to give a happy reply. Now she noticed they seldom greeted
men
in this way.

One day when I visited Nina at work, I found her gazing at family photos on her desk. She told me that for the first time she felt like a stranger in her own company. She was taking a hard look at her job: “In my job I lay people off. I have to. We’ve been going through layoffs. I counsel people and help them solve problems. It hasn’t hit me until this year: they’re
good
people. They’re not poor performers. They’re people I can really relate to, people who’ve worked hard. It wasn’t their fault. Their division went under.”

As I looked at Nina now, I could see how her delicate, almost Cinderella-like look of innocence, combined with her sharp intelligence and high emotional control, could have convinced her boss that she was just the person to give employees bad news
kindly. Her helpful manner and mindfulness of corporate purpose had probably saved the company millions in lawsuits. How could a laid-off worker sue after dealing with someone so kind and helpful? I could imagine Nina as the velvet glove on the hard hand of the corporate profit motive. Now, in her spirit of detachment, she saw this too.

She held the company off while she looked for part-time jobs elsewhere. Before long, another computer company offered her a vice presidency, full time. Hearing of this offer, Nina’s company suddenly offered her a vice presidency too, with a higher salary and unbelievably high bonuses, again full time. She agonized about Alexandra. She talked and talked with Peter.

Then she accepted the job with her company. She told her boss she would not be able to work late on weekdays or on weekends, but she would work five days a week. As with her last success, she had a sinking feeling. But she told herself that this was a decision “for now”; she could quit if Alexandra’s problem got worse.

And it did. Not long after she accepted the new job, she opened Alexandra’s lunchbox and found another note from her teacher: “Dear Mrs. Tanagawa, I wanted you to know that Alexandra has made more friends at school. But I have to say that other things still concern me. Recently I assigned the children a story to write and Alexandra wrote a strange story about killing her sister and hating her mother.” Nina talked to Alexandra’s teacher, and within two weeks, engaged a family therapist. When I last saw them, Peter was still being supportive of Nina in “her” crisis.

Nina’s circle of relatives and friends offered no solution. Her “progressive” workplace offered no relief. She had started out a transitional, had pushed softly toward Nancy Holt’s position, and like Nancy, met resistance. The Holts’ family myth was that they shared the second shift. The Tanagawas’ myth disguised the fact that Peter
had
a gender strategy. His move was to push her into playing the supermom. He partly did this to preserve the marriage by shoring up the traditional male role on which he felt it depended. His solution was the problem. Currently, in about 20
percent of the nation’s two-job couples (though slightly fewer in my study), women earn more than their husbands. Though the tune may differ a little each time, the beat is usually the same and the problem hardly resolved. For Nina and Peter’s marriage is the stalled revolution in microcosm, and like it, their story is unfinished.

CHAPTER
7

Having It All and Giving It Up: Ann and Robert Myerson

A
ROUND
a walnut table in a small conference room of a rapidly growing electronics firm, a group of working mothers are gathered for a bag-lunch meeting. They are the “moms’ group” of a larger organization of women managers from the largest computer companies in Silicon Valley. Among themselves it is safe, it seems, to talk about the antifamily atmosphere of their workplaces, about the pull away from work at home, and about raising a small child. The subject of quitting first arises jokingly. “I might as well quit,” volunteers one mother of two in a jovial tone, “I’d probably turn into a mush brain and gain twenty pounds.” “What would we do staying home, if we didn’t have kids? Eat bonbons in the morning, work them off at the gym in the afternoon?” There is a round of easy laughter; if it weren’t for children, no one would want to stay home. But it is Ann Myerson, a thoughtful, tall, slender, red-haired thirty-four-year-old, and a highly paid vice president of a large firm, who first talks of leaving her job in a serious way: