The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (3 page)

After
The Second Shift
was published, I talked informally to many readers and in the 1990s conducted interviews with more working couples at a Fortune 500 company for
The Time Bind
, the following book. Based on these talks I began to conclude that for many couples the basic dilemma remains.

Among the variety of responses I encountered, one reader, Shawn Dickinson Finley, wrote a poem about one finding in this book, for the
Dallas Morning News:

In New York, an imaginative bride and groom made up marriage vows designed to avoid Finley’s dilemma. “I vow to cook dinners for Dhora,” the groom said, before a stunned and delighted gathering of family and friends. And with a twinkle, the bride replied, “And I promise to eat what Oran cooks.”

Other couples had become more seriously locked in an anguished struggle, not for time to relax but for time to work. One young Latino father of a two-year-old child explained, “My wife and I both work at low-paying jobs we love and believe in. [He worked for a human rights organization and she worked for an environmental group.] And we can’t afford a maid. We love Julio but he’s two and he’s a handful. I do a lot with him, which I love. [Here his voice was soft, and slow.] But it’s tough because my wife and I have no time for a marriage. It makes me think the unthinkable [Here his voice quavered.]: should we have
had
Julio?”

Some women found in these pages aid in an ongoing struggle. One working mother left xeroxed pages from the chapter on Nancy and Evan Holt on the refrigerator door. When her husband failed to notice, she placed the pages on his pillow in their bed. As she recounted, “He finally read about how Nancy Holt did all the housework and child care and expressed her resentment for doing so by excluding her husband from the love nest she made for herself and their child. The parallels began to hit him the way they had me.”

I was sad to learn about what some people imagined as solutions to their struggles. One woman declared, with straightened shoulders and hands on hips, “The house is a mess. It’s a pit. That’s my solution.” Another proudly responded to her husband’s refusal to help at home by making meals for herself but not for him. Yet another woman described placing second-shift requirements into her prenuptial agreement. If women are that upset and that armed, I wonder if these apparent “solutions” haven’t inadvertently
become a problem all their own. What we really need to do is solve the original problem. And where in the design of our jobs, in the hierarchy of our values, in the policies of our government is the nurturing social stage on which to do that? That’s the unanswered question behind this book.

THE
SECOND
SHIFT

CHAPTER
1

The Family Speed-up

S
HE
is not the same woman in each magazine advertisement, but she is the same idea. She has that working-mother look as she strides forward, briefcase in one hand, smiling child in the other. Literally and figuratively, she is moving ahead. Her hair, if long, tosses behind her; if it is short, it sweeps back at the sides, suggesting mobility and progress. There is nothing shy or passive about her. She is confident, active, “liberated.” She wears a dark tailored suit, but with a silk bow or colorful frill that says, “I’m really feminine underneath.” She has made it in a man’s world without sacrificing her femininity. And she has done this on her own. By some personal miracle, this image suggests, she has managed to combine what 150 years of industrialization have split wide apart—child and job, frill and suit, female culture and male.

When I showed a photograph of a supermom like this to the working mothers I talked to in the course of researching this book, many responded with an outright laugh. One day-care worker and mother of two, ages three and five, threw back her head: “Ha! They’ve got to be
kidding
about her. Look at me, hair a mess, nails jagged, twenty pounds overweight. Mornings, I’m getting my kids dressed, the dog fed, the lunches made, the shopping list done. That lady’s got a maid.” Even working mothers who did have maids couldn’t imagine combining work and family in such a carefree way: “Do you know what a baby
does
to your life, the two o’clock feedings, the four o’clock feedings?” Another
mother of two said: “They don’t show it, but she’s whistling”—she imitated a whistling woman, eyes to the sky—“so she can’t hear the din.” They envied the apparent ease of the woman with the flying hair, but she didn’t remind them of anyone they knew.

The women I interviewed—lawyers, corporate executives, word processors, garment pattern cutters, day-care workers—and most of their husbands, too—felt differently about some issues: how right it is for a mother of young children to work a full-time job, or how much a husband should be responsible for the home. But they all agreed that it was hard to work two full-time jobs and raise young children.

How well do couples do it? The more women work outside the home, the more central this question. The number of women in paid work has risen steadily since before the turn of the century, but since 1950 the rise has been staggering. In 1950, 30 percent of American women were in the labor force; by 2011, that had risen to 59 percent. Over two-thirds of mothers, married or single, now work; in fact more mothers than non-mothers work for pay. Women now make up half of the labor force and two-job marriages now make up two-thirds of all marriages with children.

But the biggest rise by far has been among mothers of small children. In 1975, only 39 percent of women with children six and under were in the civilian labor force—doing or looking for paid work. By 2009, that had risen to 64 percent. In 1975, 34 percent of moms of children three and under were in the labor force; in 2009 that had risen to 61 percent. And it was the same story for moms of children one and younger: 31 percent in 1975 and 50 percent in 2009. Since more mothers of small children are now in the labor force, we might expect more to be working part time. But that’s not what we find; in 1975, 72 percent of women worked full time and a bit more than that in 2009. Of all employed moms with babies under age one, 69 percent in 2009 worked full time.
¹

If more mothers of young children are stepping into full-time
jobs outside the home, and if most couples can’t afford household help, how much more are fathers doing at home? As I began exploring this question I found many studies on the hours working men and women devote to housework and child care. One national random sample of 1,243 working parents in forty-four American cities, conducted in 1965–66 by Alexander Szalai and his coworkers, for example, found that working women averaged three hours a day on housework while men averaged seventeen minutes; women spent fifty minutes a day of time exclusively with their children; men spent twelve minutes. On the other side of the coin, working fathers watched television an hour longer than their working wives, and slept a half hour longer each night. A comparison of this American sample with eleven other industrial countries in Eastern and Western Europe revealed the same difference between working women and men in those countries as well.
²
In a 1983 study of white middle-class families in greater Boston, Grace Baruch and R. C. Barnett found that working men married to working women spent only three-quarters of an hour longer each week with their kindergarten-aged children than did men married to housewives.
³

Szalai’s landmark study documented the now familiar but still alarming story of the working woman’s “double day,” but it left me wondering how men and women actually felt about all this. He and his coworkers studied how people used time, but not, say, how a father felt about his twelve minutes with his child, or how his wife felt about it. Szalai’s study revealed the visible surface of what I discovered to be a set of deeply emotional issues: What should a man and woman contribute to the family? How appreciated does each feel? How does each respond to subtle changes in the balance of marital power? How does each develop an unconscious “gender strategy” for coping with the work at home, with marriage, and, indeed, with life itself? These were the underlying issues.

But I began with the measurable issue of time. Adding together the time it takes to do a paid job, housework, and child care, I
averaged estimates from the major studies on time use done in the 1960s and 1970s, and discovered that women worked roughly fifteen hours longer each week than men. Over a year, they worked an
extra month of twenty-four-hour days.
Over a dozen years, it was an extra year of twenty-four-hour days. Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time caring for both house and children. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a “leisure gap” between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a “second shift” at home.

Studies show that working mothers have higher self-esteem and get less depressed than housewives, but compared to their husbands, they’re more tired and get sick more often. In Peggy Thoits’s 1985 analysis of two large-scale surveys, each of about a thousand men and women, people were asked how often in the preceding week they’d experienced each of twenty-three symptoms of anxiety (such as dizziness or hallucinations). Thoits found working mothers more likely than any other group to be “anxious.”

In light of these studies, the image of the woman with the flying hair seems like an upbeat cover for a grim reality, like those pictures of Soviet tractor drivers smiling radiantly into the distance as they think about the ten-year plan. The Szalai study was conducted in 1965–66. I wanted to know whether the leisure gap he found back then still existed or whether it has disappeared. Since most married couples work two jobs, since more will in the future, since most wives in these couples work the extra month a year, I wanted to understand what this “extra month” means for each person, and what it does to love and marriage in an age of high divorce.

With my research associates Anne Machung and Elaine Kaplan, I interviewed fifty couples very intensively, and I observed in a
dozen homes. We first began interviewing artisans, students, and professionals in Berkeley, California, in the late 1970s. This was at the height of the women’s movement, and many of these couples were earnestly and self-consciously struggling to modernize the ground rules of their marriages. Enjoying flexible job schedules and intense cultural support to do so, many succeeded. Since their circumstances were unusual they became our “comparison group” as we sought other couples more typical of mainstream America. In 1980 we located more typical couples by sending a questionnaire on work and family life to every thirteenth name—from top to bottom—of the personnel roster of a large, urban manufacturing company. At the end of the questionnaire, we asked members of working couples raising children under age six and working full-time jobs if they would be willing to talk to us in greater depth. Interviewed from 1980 through 1988, these couples, their neighbors and friends, their children’s teachers, day-care workers, and baby-sitters form the heart of this book.

When we called them, a number of baby-sitters replied as one woman did: “You’re interviewing
us
? Good. We’re human too.” Or another, “I’m glad you consider what we do work. A lot of people don’t.” As it turned out, many day-care workers were themselves juggling two jobs and small children, and so we talked to them about that, too.

We also talked with other men and women who were not part of two-job couples, divorced parents who were war-weary veterans of two-job marriages, and traditional couples, to see how much of the strain we were seeing was unique to two-job couples.

I focused on heterosexual, married couples with children under age six, their child-care workers, and others in their world from the top to the bottom of the social class ladder. But the second shift is front and center for many other kinds of couples as well—the unmarried, gay, and lesbian couples, nonparents, and parents of older children. In particular, gay and lesbian partners are more likely than heterosexual ones, research suggests, to share the second shift—gay partners by specializing in tasks, lesbians by doing similar tasks.
⁴

I also watched daily life in a dozen homes during a weekday evening, during the weekend, and during the months that followed, when I was invited on outings, to dinner, or just to talk. I found myself waiting on the front doorstep as weary parents and hungry children tumbled out of the family car. I shopped with them, visited friends, watched television, ate with them, walked through parks, and came along when they dropped their children at day-care, often staying on at the baby-sitter’s house after parents waved good-bye. In their homes, I sat on the living-room floor and drew pictures and played house with children. I watched as parents gave them baths, read bedtime stories, and said good night. Most couples tried to bring me into the family scene, inviting me to eat with them and talk. I responded if they spoke to me, from time to time asked questions, but I rarely initiated conversation. I tried to become as unobtrusive as a family dog. Often I would base myself in the living room, quietly taking notes. Sometimes I would follow a wife upstairs or down, accompany a child on her way out to “help Dad” fix the car, or watch television with the other watchers. Sometimes I would break out of my peculiar role to join in the jokes they often made about acting like the “model” two-job couple. Or perhaps the joking was a subtle part of my role, to put them at ease so they could act more naturally. For a period of two to five years, I phoned or visited these couples to keep in touch even as I moved on to study the daily lives of other working couples—black, Chicano, white—from every social class and walk of life.