The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (36 page)

Patriarchy has not disappeared, it’s changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, women are free with an overall unequal setup. In the old form, women were limited to the home but economically maintained there. In the new form, women earn the bacon and cook it too.

The modern oppression of women outside marriage reduces the power of women
inside
marriage as well. Married women become cautious, like Nina Tanagawa or Nancy Holt who look at their divorcing friends and say, “The extra month a year or a divorce? I’ll work the extra month.”

In conversation, both men and women expressed sympathy for the emotional pain of divorcing friends. But women told stories with more anxious interest, and more empathy for the plight of the woman. One evening at the dinner table, a mother of two who worked at word processing had this exchange with her husband, a store manager, and her former boss:

Her husband commented: “That’s true, but she was hard to get along with, and she had a drinking problem. She complained a lot. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for her, but there’s another side to the story.”

Surprised, the wife answered. “Yeah, but she was
had
! Don’t you think?”

Her husband said, “Oh, I don’t know. They both have a case.”

Earlier in our century, the most important cautionary tale for women was of a woman who “fell” from chastity before marriage and came to a bad end because no man would have her. Among working mothers of small children, and especially the more traditional of them, the modern version of the “fallen woman” became the divorcée. Needless to say, not all women fear divorce. But when life is made to seem so cold “out there,” women such as Nancy Holt and Nina Tanagawa may try to get warm inside unequal marriages.

A cycle is set in motion. Because men put more of their “male” identity in work, their work time is worth more than female work time—to the man and to the family. The greater worth of male work time makes his leisure more valuable, because it is his leisure that enables him to refuel his energy, strengthen his ambition, and move ahead at work. By doing less at home, he can work longer hours, prove his loyalty to his company, and get promoted faster. His aspirations expand. His pay rises. He earns exemption from the second shift.

The female side of the cycle runs parallel. The woman’s identity is less in her job. Since her work comes second, she carries more of the second shift, thus providing backstage support for her
husband’s work. Because she supports her husband’s efforts at work more than he supports hers, her personal ambitions contract and her earnings, already lower, rise more slowly. Her extra month a year contributes not only to her husband’s success but to the expanding wage gap between them, and so the cycle spins on.

The inequality in backstage support is hidden from view. One cannot tell from sheer workplace appearance who goes home to be served dinner and who goes home to cook, any more than we can tell rich from poor these days just by how people dress. Both male and female workers come to work looking the same. Yet one is “poorer” in backstage support than the other. One irons a spouse’s uniform, fixes a lunch, washes clothes, types a résumé, edits an office memo, takes phone calls, or entertains clients. The other has a uniform ironed, a lunch fixed, clothes washed, a résumé typed, an office memo edited, phone calls taken, and clients entertained.

There is a curious hierarchy of backstage “wealth.” The richest is the high-level executive with an unemployed wife who entertains his clients and runs his household; and a secretary who handles his appointments, arranges his travel, and orders anniversary flowers for his wife. The poorest in backstage support is the single mother who works full time and rears her children with no help from anyone. Between these two extremes lie the two-job couples.

In a study I did of the family life of workers in a large corporation, I discovered that the higher up the corporate ladder, the more home support a worker had. Top executives were likely to be married to housewives. Middle managers were likely to be married to a working spouse who does some or most of the housework and child care. And the clerical worker, if she is a woman, is likely to be single or a single mother and does the work at home herself.
⁴
At each of these three levels, men and women fared differently. Among the female top executives, 95 percent were married to men who also worked and 5 percent were single or single parents. Among male top executives, 64 percent were married to housewives, 23 percent were married to working wives, and 5 percent
were single or single parents. So compared to men, female top executives had less backstage support. As one female manager remarked: “It’s all men at my level and most of them are married to housewives. But even the ones whose wives work seem to have more time at the office than I do.” As women executives so often quipped, “What I really need is a wife.”

In the middle ranks, a quarter of the men were married to housewives, nearly half were married to working wives, and about a third were single. Among women in the middle ranks, half were part of two-job couples and carried most of the second shift. The other half were single or single parents. Among lower-level clerical workers, most were single or single mothers.

Being “rich” or “poor” in backstage support probably influences what traits people develop. Men who have risen to the top with great support come to be seen and to actually be “hard driving,” ambitious, and “committed” to their careers. Women with less support are vulnerable to the charge of being “uncommitted.” Sometimes, they do become less committed. But women such as Nina Tanagawa did not lack ambition or suffer from what the psychologist Matina Horner calls a “fear of success.” Rather, their “backstage poverty” raised the emotional price of success impossibly high.

In an earlier economic era, when men entered industrial life, their wives preserved—through the home—a link to a life they had known before. By “staying back,” such wives eased a difficult transition for the men who were moving into the industrial age. In a sense the Nancy Holts of America are like peasants new to factory life but no one is easing the transition for them.

^*
In the United States we speak of farmers, not “peasants.” The term “farmer” connotes free ownership of land, and a certain pride, while the term “peasant” suggests the humility of a feudal serf. I draw the analogy between modern American women and the modernizing peasantry because women’s inferior social, legal, educational, and economic position had until recently been like that of peasants.

CHAPTER
17

Stepping into Old Biographies or Making History Happen?

T
HE
woman with the flying hair offers a picture of what it should be like to work and raise a family: busy, active, fun. But the female mannequin in the apron, wide-eyed and still, arms folded, peering outside my neighbor’s bay window, a picture of the falsely present mother is often a more real picture of life at home when two-job couples “cut back” at home and diminish their idea about what a child, a marriage, a home really needs. She is my neighbor’s joke but she also symbolizes a certain emotional reality when men don’t share the second shift.

As women have been catapulted into the economy, their pock-etbooks, their self-respect, their notion of womanhood, and their daily lives have been transformed. The “motor” of this revolution is the changing economy—the decline in the purchasing power of the male wage, the decline in “male” blue-collar jobs, and the rise in “female” jobs in the growing service sector. New ideas about manhood and womanhood have become a powerful prod, as well, by creating a new code of honor and identity for men and women that fits the evolving circumstances.

But the revolution has influenced women faster than it has men. The unevenness of this revolution has driven a wedge between such husbands and wives as Evan and Nancy Holt, Nina and Peter Tanagawa, Ray and Anita Judson. Home is far from a “haven in a heartless world,” as Christopher Lasch has noted; home has become a shock absorber of pressures far outside it.

The gender revolution is primarily
caused
by changes in the economy, but people
feel
it in marriage. In a parallel way, economic shifts have been the “motor” of changing relations between blacks and whites. As the number of unskilled jobs declines, as capital moves out of the central cities to suburbs or to cheap labor in Third World countries, blacks and whites are left to compete for the remaining jobs. It is in the back rooms of investment banks, personnel offices, and union halls that the strain between the races might be said to
originate.
But it is in the school yard, in the prison, on the street that racial tension is actually
felt.
Just as American blacks have “absorbed” a higher unemployment rate “for whites,” in the same sense, the growing number of working women have absorbed the contradictory demands of family and work “for men,” by working the extra month a year. But unlike most blacks and whites, men and women
live
together; the female absorption of a male problem becomes part of marriage, and strains it.

Although most working mothers I talked with did most of the work of the home, they felt more permission to complain about it than working women fifty or a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, American women lacked much permission to ask for a man’s help in “women’s work.” As Gwendolyn Hughes pointed out in 1925, in her book
Mothers in Industry
, earlier in the century supermoming wasn’t a “strategy,” it was a normal way of life. Today women feel entitled to ask for help at home. But most still have to ask.

At the time of my first interviews, more than half of the women I talked to were not trying to change their division of labor. They complained, they joked, they sighed fatalistically; they collected a certain moral credit for doing “so much,” but they didn’t press for change. Some of these women didn’t want their husbands to share because they didn’t believe it was right or because they were making up for having surpassed a certain “power mark.” Other women in the study wanted their husbands to share but didn’t press for it.

Some women who didn’t urge their husbands to share at home also didn’t “make room” for his hand at home; they played expert with the baby, the dinner, the social schedule. Something in their tone of voice said, “This is my domain.” They edged their husbands out, then collected credit for “doing it all.”

About a third of the women I talked to were in the course of pressing their husbands to do more. But another
third
of the women I talked to
had
at some point already pushed their husbands to share, didn’t get far, and wearied of trying. Some, like Adrienne Sherman and Nancy Holt, tried active renegotiation— holding long discussions, making lists and schedules, saying they can’t go on like this. Or they tried passive renegotiation—they played dumb or got sick.

For their part, 20 percent of the men felt they should share the responsibility and work at home and 80 percent did not. Men whose wives pressed them to do more often resisted by reducing their ideas about needs. They claimed they didn’t need the bed made, didn’t need a cooked meal, or didn’t need a vacation planned. Indeed, some men seemed to covertly compete with their wives over who could care the least about how the house looked, how the meal tasted, what the guests would think. Other men denied the fact they didn’t share by not acknowledging the extra kinds of work their wives did. Some men made alternative offerings to the home. Peter Tanagawa offered his wife great emotional support for her career instead of more help at home. Seth Stein offered his wife the money and status of his career instead of help at home. Others made furniture, or built additions on the house their wives could have done without.

Some men covertly referred their wives to “all the sacrifices” to their manhood they had already suffered—compared to other men, present and past. They made their wives feel “luckier than other women.” Unconsciously, they made a gift out of not being as patriarchal as they
could
be.

If there is one truth that emerges from all the others, it is that the most important injury to women who work the double day is
not the fact they work too long or get too tired. That is only the obvious and tangible cost. The deeper problem such women face is that they cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands. Like Nancy Holt, many women carry into their marriage the distasteful and unwieldy burden of resenting their husbands. Like some hazardous waste produced by a harmful system, this powerful resentment became hard to dispose of.