The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (21 page)

As she talked about it, her wish to be a housewife seemed half serious and half not. In part, “staying home” was a sign of trusting Ray and in part a vacation from the strain of working two shifts. She also associated staying home with being middle class. If she was going to stay home, she said, she wanted her home to have a certain look, “a snazzy kitchen with wall-to-wall appliances.” Anita didn’t want to be under her husband’s thumb like Carmen Delacorte; she wanted time off, a long vacation, and a crack at the good life. If that meant depending on Ray, and if depending on Ray meant subordinating herself to him, well, that might be the cost of getting what you want. The question was how much she dared want it. On tiring days she did, on not-so-tiring days she didn’t. Meanwhile, Anita talked about staying home the way Seth Stein talked about cutting back at work. It was a fantasy.

In the meantime, the official truth was that Anita wanted a paid job, and her desire for a paid job led her to want and need Ray to share the second shift. When I asked Ray and Anita, in a joint interview, to describe how they divided the work at home, an old argument flared. Anita complained that Ray didn’t help. Ray countered that if Anita would quit working, she wouldn’t need help; the key to the problem, he said, was that Anita didn’t know
how not to work.
He was offering Anita the freedom he denied himself—the freedom not to work. In return, he said Anita should offer him freedom from housework except for weekend gardening and doing repairs.

Ray didn’t claim that his higher earnings excused him from the second shift. He argued that his work had a
different
meaning than hers. As he said: “I don’t mind her quitting and starting, quitting and starting. She can do that as long as she wants. I wouldn’t care if she never went back to work. But
I
would never consider doing that myself, because it’s
my
job that holds us together.”

As Ray saw it, he was working the way a
man
works: for the money. Whether he liked his job or hated it, he had to be committed to doing it. He wanted Anita to behave more like a woman. She didn’t
have
to be committed to work. She could trust him to do that. However much she actually worked, he wanted her to want to work less, and to like it less. He was offering her the chance to be casual about it.

So why did she reject this chance? Anita defended her right to like work and her right to get Ray’s help at home. “I’d pay two hundred dollars a month for child care, just to keep busy.” She said she’d feel bored staying at home all day.

Ray was baffled. “I can’t understand why she feels they’d miss her so much. I consider my job very valuable. It’s not that hers isn’t valuable, because it is; but mine provides the basic income for our house. So why does she feel they’d miss her so much that she can’t take some time off?”

“You never worked in an office before!” Anita snapped. “If you found an interesting job that you really liked, then you’d dedicate yourself to that job.” Ray retorted, “I don’t see how a group of women working in an office could be any different from the men at my job. What does your job have that mine doesn’t?” Anita’s job had a middle-class veneer. Ray conceded that. But it was still “just a clerical job.” His job was more stressful, hers less so. His was
outside, hers was inside. His was dirty, hers was clean. He dressed down for work, she dressed up. She read and typed and sat at a desk, but he steered a forklift all day and lifted heavy bags of cement. His, he felt, was the
harder
job.

Turning to me, Anita explained:

In light of this dispute, I compared their workdays. Ray described his typical day:

At work Ray had more control over the pace of his cargo loading than Anita had over her flow of bills. Ray’s foreman did not ride his men. In fact, he allowed a spirit of play: Ray and his coworkers wore cowboy hats and joked and razzed the boss, softening his orders in these ways. But Anita’s supervisor often questioned her if she was away from her desk for more than twenty minutes. In this way, their workdays reflected different supervisory styles that exist in most “male” and “female” jobs. A 1972 study by Robert Karasek, for example, showed that men and women report roughly equal workload demands in their jobs. However, women are likely to experience high demands for work performance while exercising less control over the pace of that demand. A telephone operator and a waitress typically have less control over the pace of their work than a meter reader or a telephone repairman. For this reason, Karasek concluded that women’s jobs are more stressful. In addition, women in service jobs like Anita’s actually suffer more stress-related coronary disease than the group popularly supposed to be at risk—top male executives.
¹

In addition, Ray had more leisure
during
his workday than Anita had during hers. He could, after all, spend an hour getting “half gassed”
with the boys, while Anita could not. The sociologist J. P. Robinson has found that, in general, working men enjoy about half an hour more leisure during their workday than do working women.
²

But to Ray, what mattered was the weight of his responsibility to provide. One family, Ray reasoned, didn’t need two who work like that. Just one. He was that one.

Anita didn’t back down, and this dispute about the second shift dogged them like it had the Holts, the Tanagawas, the Steins. Nancy cut back her hours. The Tanagawas and Steins hired a housekeeper. Ray brought ten-year-old stepdaughter, Ruby, in as a possible solution. Ruby, he said, could do the dishes and vacuum. She was old enough. It was good training. Besides, he said, he had helped his aunt with a lot of the housework when he was growing up.

But Ruby, already feeling low on the family totem pole, interpreted this assignment as a sign she wasn’t valued. She refused to do the dishes and vacuuming and proposed instead to weed the garden—maybe with Ray? The logic Ray had already applied to Anita when she asked him to share the housework, he now applied to Ruby: “I’m sure not going to wait hand and foot on somebody I’m working for already.” Ruby sought support in her grandmother next door, who prodded Ray further: Why couldn’t Rudy weed the flower beds instead of cleaning house? He felt pressured by his mother-in-law. Anita herself was next door more and more these days. And the kinswomen were ganging up on him.

As he became increasingly alienated from Anita and his children, Ray began to drink too much, and the drinking precipitated some bad fights. Anita and the children moved next door into her mother’s house. Now Ray was forced to confront the one thing he had all along dreaded most: the possibility that Anita would leave. And indeed, Ray and Anita were to separate and reunite, separate and reunite, over the next years. The last I heard, they were apart.

The official reasons Ray gave for not sharing the second shift were that he provided most of the income, took his job more seriously, and
worked harder. The first statement was true, the second hard to say, and the third was false. But his official reasons also seemed to coincide with a private agenda: to dampen Anita’s desire to work, to increase her dependency on him and try to reduce the chance that she might leave.

For her part, the drinking and the fights made Anita feel unsafe. She fought Ray continually over the value of her work. Hers was not a glamorous career, but she clung to it tenaciously, because her mother had warned her, “You’ve got to think about yourself, your work,” and at heart Anita was unsure of her union with Ray. If the marriage was to continue, she felt, her work would help Ray “respect her.” Earning money kept Ray “on his toes,” which in turn improved their marriage. If the marriage was not to continue, she would need her job even more than she needed it now.

In their views of manhood and womanhood, the Judsons were a mismatch. Ray was transitional; Anita wavered between traditional and egalitarian—knowing only that she
didn’t
want the transitional woman’s responsibility for both spheres. This clash caused them trouble in the exchange of marital gifts. Anita offered Ray the “gift” of her wage for her family. Sensing she might be preparing to leave, Ray turned it down. For his part, Ray offered Anita the choice to work or not. Disliking the double shift if she worked and sensing a danger in staying home, Anita challenged this choice. Their public myth—though not one they privately believed—was that the second shift was simply an issue of Anita’s badgering Ray because she had “too much to do.” Certainly this was true, but it was not the whole truth. The issue had an umbilical link to the meaning for each of Anita’s work.

Anita’s job gave her the modest financial independence she would need if her marriage deteriorated. It was an insurance policy: she worked in self-defense. Early in their marriage, she had tried to trust Ray, tried to avoid divorce. It had been impossible to openly confess that she wanted to work “just in case.”

But the possibility of divorce had all along entered the life of their marriage. In this, Anita’s dilemma may speak to an increasing
number of women. As a black woman she could not look back to a long tradition of marriage as a woman’s path to financial security, for most black men have long been barred from higherpaying jobs. For at least a century, the experience of white women in America was different because marriage to a man, almost any man, could lift them to a class higher than that in which their own job would place them. But more and more working- and middle-class white women now face the situation black women have long faced. Now they, too, cannot rely as much as in the past on marriage.

Gradually over the last century, the economic footing that marriage has provided women and their children has become less secure. Half of all marriages in America end in divorce, and despite a short-term dip in that rate, experts expect it to remain as high as it is now. In addition, after divorce, the income of most men rises while that of women drops. A third of divorced women never remarry. Of the two-thirds who eventually do, many divorce again. For most women, then, a shaky marriage raises the prospect of economic insecurity, and for many, outright poverty.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earn 83 percent of the median wages of men. Women age 35 to 44 earn about $200 less a week than men, but their wages rose 12 percent in the last decade, while those of men rose 1.2 percent. And in 2008, young, childless women in most of America’s biggest cities actually earned 8 percent more than comparable men.
³

Still there remains what Joan Williams calls a “maternal wall.” Compared to their male counterparts, mothers earn 27 percent less. Partly they earn less because they take jobs more compatible with family, work shorter hours, take more time off, and are less willing to move the whole family to a higher-paying job.
⁴
But women also work differently these days. Male jobs took a bigger hit in the Great Recession of 2008, causing wives’ jobs to become a more important part of the family budget. And for women like Anita there is something else. Anita lived a married life but secretly imagined becoming divorced. She resisted pressure from
Ray to quit because she feared the prospect of losing her place at work, divorcing and falling into a financial trap. Yet the official reality was that their marriage “was for keeps.” So Anita hid her pragmatic motive for working, claiming instead to work because “she loved it,” because she “needed to keep busy,” because “they needed her at the office.” As divorce has spread, more and more uncertain women are led to seem married but to ponder work and family in unmarried ways.