The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (41 page)

Thus, of all the marriages I studied, 60 percent were between husbands and wives who shared similar ideologies, and 40 percent were between husbands and wives who disagreed. The most common type of disagreement was between an egalitarian woman and a transitional man.

Chapter 14

1
. See William J. Goode, “Family Disorganization,”
Chapter 11
in
Contemporary Social Problems
, 4th ed., Robert K. Merton and Robert Nisbet (eds.) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Also see Louis Roussel,
Le Divorce et les Français
, Vol. II, “L’Expérience des Divorcés,” Travautet Documents, Cahier No. 72 (Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), pp. 26-29. In many ways, the fact that wives work both benefits and stabilizes marriage. In virtually all the research on women’s work, working women report themselves as happier, higher in self-esteem, and in better mental and physical health than do housewives. See Lois Hoffman and F. I. Nye,
Working Mothers
(San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1974), p. 209. A woman’s work also adds money to a marriage through the so-called dowry effect. By making a family richer, a woman’s wages may protect the family from the strains of poverty associated with marital disruption. See Valerie Kincade Oppenheimer, “The Sociology of Women’s Economic Role in the Family,”
American Sociological Review
42
(1977): 387-405; D. T. Hall and F. E. Gordon, “Career Choices of Married Women,”
Journal of Applied Psychology
58 (1973): 42-48.

2
. Ronald C. Kessler and James McRae,
Institute for Social Research Newsletter
, University of Michigan, 1978. See also S. S. Feidman, S. C. Nash, and B. G. Aschenbrenner, “Antecedents of Fathering,”
Child Development
54 (1983): 1628-36; M. W. Yogman, “Competence and Performance of Fathers and Infants,” in A. Macfarlane, ed.,
Progress in Child Health
(London: Churchill Livingston, 1983).

3
. Joan Huber and Glenna Spitze,
Sex Stratification: Children, Housework and Jobs
(New York: Academic Press, 1983).

4
. According to George Levinger’s study, men voiced fewer complaints. But the top four were mental cruelty (30 percent), neglect of home or children (26 percent), sexual incompatibility (20 percent), and infidelity (20 percent). For women, the top four were mental cruelty (40 percent), neglect of home or children (39 percent), financial problems (37 percent), and physical abuse (37 percent). (“Sources of Marital Dissatisfaction Among Applicants for Divorce,”
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
36 [1966]: 803-7.)

Chapter 15

1
. Other studies find that a man’s upbringing bears only a slight relationship to the amount of work at home he does as an adult. See Lois Hoffman, “Parental Power Relations and the Division of Household Tasks,” in F. I. Nye and L. W. Hoffman, eds.,
The Employed Mother in America
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), pp. 215-30; M. Bowling, “Sex Role Attitudes and the Division of Household Labor,” paper presented at the American Sociological Association, Chicago, 1975; Rebecca Stafford, Elaine Backman, and Pamela DiBona, “The Division of Labor among Cohabiting and Married Couples,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
39 (1977): 43-57; C. Perucci, H. Potter, and D. Rhoads, “Determinants of Male Family Role Performance,”
Psychology of Women Quarterly
3 (1978): 53-66; M. Roberts and L. Wortzel, “Husbands Who Prepare Dinner: A Test of Competing Theories of Marital Role Allocations,” unpublished paper, Boston University, 1979; S. Hesselbart, “Does Charity Begin at Home? Attitudes Toward Women, Household Tasks, and Household Decision-Making,” paper presented to the American Sociological Association, 1976; and Gayle Kimball,
50-50 Marriage
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).

2
. Surprisingly, most researchers find little or no relationship between the amount of time a man spends at paid work and the proportion of housework he does. See Robert Clark, Ivan Nye, and Viktor Gecas, “Husbands’ Work Involvement and Marital Role Performance,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
40 (1978): 9-21; Stafford, Backman, and DiBona (1977); Perucci, Potter, and Rhoads (1978). But also see John Robinson,
How Americans Use Time
(New York: Praeger, 1977), and Walker and Woods (1976). For a thorough review of the evidence, see Joseph H. Pleck,
Working Wives, Working Husbands
(Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985), p. 55.

3
. I found a slight—but not statistically significant—difference. Despite a good deal of research on the possible link between the wage gap between husband and wife and the leisure gap between them, I’m aware of only one researcher, the economist Gary Becker (A
Treatise on the Family
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981]), who found such a link. For more on research about this link, see the Appendix.

4
. Pleck (1985), p. 151.

5
. See Bob Kuttner, “The Declining Middle”
Atlantic Monthly
, July 1983; Paul Blumberg,
Inequality in an Age of Decline
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Michael Harrington and Mark Levinson, “The Perils of a Dual Economy,”
Dissent
32 (1985): 417-26; and Andrew Hacker, “Women Versus Men in the Work Force,”
New York Times Magazine
, December 9, 1984. For the argument that the labor market is
not
dividing into two parts, see Neal H. Rosenthal, “The Shrinking Middle Class: Myth or Reality?”
Monthly Labor Review
108 (1985): 3-10.

6
. Sheila B. Kamerman and Cheryl D. Hayes, eds.,
Children of Working Parents: Experience and Outcomes
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1983), p. 238.

7
. See Norma Radin, “Primary Caregiving and Role Sharing Fathers of Preschoolers,” in M. E. Lamb, ed.,
Nontraditional Families: Parenting and Child Development
(Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1982), and her “The Role of the Father in Cognitive/Academic Intellectual Development,” in M. E. Lamb, ed.,
The Role of the Father in Child Development
, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1981); Norma Radin and Graeme Russell, “Increased Father Participation and Child Development Outcomes,” in Lamb,
Nontraditional Families
, pp. 191-218; H. B. Biller, “The Father and Personality Development: Paternal Deprivation and Sex-Role Development,” in M. E. Lamb,
The Role of the Father in Child Development
(New York: Wiley, 1976); A. Sagi, “Antecedents and Consequences of Various Degrees of Paternal
Involvement in Child-Rearing: The Israeli Project,” in Lamb,
Non-traditional Families
, pp. 205-32; and Michael E. Lamb, ed.,
The Father’s Role: Applied Perspectives
(New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1986). In Robert Blanchard and Henry Biller’s study of forty-four white third-grade boys, they compared boys whose fathers were absent before they were five, absent after five, present for less than six hours a week, and present for more than two hours a day. The boys were similar in their age, I.Q., social class, and the presence of male siblings. The boys who saw their fathers the most did much better on the Stanford Achievement Tests (which measure comprehension of verbal, scientific, and mathematical concepts) than did boys whose fathers were involved less than six hours a week, and did much better than boys whose fathers were totally absent (“Father Availability and Academic Performance Among Third-Grade Boys,”
Developmental Psychology
4 [1971]: 301-15).

8
. Carolyn and Philip Cowan found that a father’s involvement increased his daughter’s sense of being master of her fate and improved her scores in math (“Men’s Involvement in Parenthood: Identifying the Antecedents and Understanding the Barriers,” in P. Berman and F. A. Pedersen, eds.,
Fathers’ Transitions to Parenthood
[Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum, 1986]).

9
. See Mark W. Router and Henry B. Biller, “Perceived Personality Adjustment Among College Males,”
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
40 (3) (1973): 339-42.

Chapter 16

1
. Alice Kessler-Harris,
Out to Work
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Also see Julie A. Mattaie Bradby,
An Economic History of Women in America
(New York: Schocken Books, 1982).

2
. Louis Harris and Associates, “Families at Work,” General Mills American Family Report, 1980-81. Other research also shows that even working-class women who do not have access to rewarding jobs prefer to work. See Myra Ferree, “Sacrifice, Satisfaction and Social Change: Employment and the Family,” in Karen Sacks and Dorothy Remy, eds.,
My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me
(New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 61-79. Women’s paid work leads to their personal satisfaction (Charles Weaver and Sandra Holmes, “A Comparative Study of the Work Satisfaction of Females with Full-Time Employment and Full-Time Housekeeping,”
Journal of Applied Psychology
60 [1975]:
117-28) and—if a woman has the freedom to choose to work or not—it leads to marital happiness. See Susan Orden and N. Bradburn, “Working Wives and Marriage Happiness,”
American Journal of Sociology
74 (1969): 107-23.

3
. See U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Current Population Reports: Households, Families, Marital Status and Living Arrangements
, series P-20, no. 382 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985). Also see
Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. National Data Book, Guide to Sources
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985). Spousal support is awarded in less than 14 percent of all divorces, and in less than 7 percent of cases do women actually receive it. See Lenore Weitzman,
The Divorce Revolution
(New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1985).

4
. These findings are based on questionnaires I passed out to every thirteenth name on the personnel roster of a large manufacturing company. Of those contacted, 53 percent replied. The results show that the typical form of a worker’s family life differs at different levels of the corporate hierarchy. The traditional family prevails at the top. Dual-work families prevail in the middle, and single-parent families and singles prevail at the bottom, as the chart below shows:

Chapter 17

1
. “What Do Cal Freshmen Feel, Believe, Think?”
Cal Report
5 (March 1988): 4. In her study of Barnard senior women, Mirra Komarovsky found only 5 percent wanted to become housewives (
Women in Colleges: Shaping New Feminine Identities
[New York: Basic Books, 1985]).

2
. See Anne Machung, “Talking Career, Thinking Job, Gender Differences in Career and Family Expectations of Berkeley Seniors,”
Feminist Studies
15 (1), Spring 1989.

3
.
Public Opinion
, December-January 1986.

4
. Machung (1989).

5
. For more on the role of Soviet men in housework and child care, see Michael Paul Sacks, “Unchanging Times: A Comparison of the Everyday Life of Soviet Working Men and Women Between 1923 and 1966,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
, November 1977, pp. 793-805; and Gail Lapidus, ed.,
Women, Work and Family in the Soviet Union
(New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1982).

Afterword

1
. Katrina Alcorn,
Huffington Post
Internet Post, April 8, 2010, “Peaceful Revolution: If You Give a Mouse a Prozac…”

2
. Tina Fey, “Confessions of a Juggler,”
The New Yorker
, February 14, 2011, p. 64.

3
. Compared with the 1980s, fewer mothers are married, have preschool kids, and work full time. If we follow the statistics, it seems more have quit, cut back hours, or divorced. Still, whether married, cohabiting, or divorced, most mothers of preschool children—six out of ten mothers of children under three—are in the labor force. And of those, only a quarter (27 percent) work part time. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, Table 6, “Employment Status of Mothers with Own Children Under 3 Years old by Single Year of Age of Youngest Child, and Marital Status, 2007-2009 Annual Averages.”

4
. The combined weekly work hours of married couples has risen by 20 percent—from fifty-six hours a week in 1969 to sixty-seven hours in 2000. Based on a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, the figures apply to couples ages twenty-five to fifty-four. “Working in the 21st Century” (
http://www.bls.gov/opub/working/page17b.htm
). According to a 2009 Time Use survey, employed men work now, as in the past, about an hour more than employed women, and even among full-time workers (men average 8.3 hours and women 7.5). “American Time Use Survey” 2009 (
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/status.nr0.htm
). On hours of work for employed women and men, 1980 to 2009, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Department of Labor, “Women in the Labor Force, 2010,” Table 21 (
http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-table21-2010.pdf
).