The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home
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PENGUIN BOOKS
THE SECOND SHIFT
Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has co-edited one book and authored seven others, three of these New York Times Review Notable Books of the Year. She was won Guggenheim, Fulbright, Mellon, and Alfred P. Sloan awards, and her books have been translated into fourteen languages.
Newsweek describes The Second Shift as having the “detail and texture of a good novel”; Publishers Weekly noted that “the concept of the second shift … has entered the language”; and in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Kuttner described her “subtlety of … insights” and “graceful, seamless narrative,” and called The Second Shift the “best discussion I have read of what must be the quintessential domestic bind of our time.” The Financial Times said of the Time Bind, “there are wit, humour, and joy as well as portents of doom.” In Christine Stansell’s Washington Post review of The Commercialization of Intimate Life, she describes Hochschild’s “curious, roving mind, her big ideas … No one,” she writes, “has written about (family dilemmas) with Hochschild’s intelligence, originality, and on-the-ground knowledge.”
Hochschild has written for the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, O, The Oprah Magazine, Ms., the American Prospect, and Mother Jones, directed the U.C. Berkeley-based Alfred P. Sloan Center on Working Families, and lectures widely in Europe and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild. They have two sons and share the second shift on the weekly overnight visits of their two small granddaughters.
Anne Machung currently works as director of accountability for the University of California. She received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published articles on higher education and family in Change and Feminist Studies.
Other Books by Arlie Hochschild
The Outsourced Self
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich)
The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work
The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling
Coleen the Question Girl (a children’s story)
The Unexpected Community
THE
SECOND
SHIFT
Working Families and the Revolution at Home
ARLIE HOCHSCHILD
WITH ANNE MACHUNG
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1989
Edition with a new introduction published in Penguin Books 2003
This edition with a new preface published 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Arlie Hochschild, 1989, 2003, 2012
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 1940-
The second shift : working families and the revolution at home / Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: The second shift : working parents and the revolution at home. 1989.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 9781101575512
1. Dual-career families—United States. 2. Dual-career families—United States—Case studies. 3. Sex role—United States. 4. Working mothers—United States.
I. Machung, Anne. II. Title.
HQ536.H63 2012
306.872–dc23 2011043651
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Adobe Garamond Pro Designed by Alice Sorensen
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Adam
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 The Family Speed-up
CHAPTER 2 Marriage in a Stalled Revolution
CHAPTER 3 The Cultural Cover-up
CHAPTER 4 Joey’s Problem: Nancy and Evan Holt
CHAPTER 5 The Family Myth of the Traditional: Frank and Carmen Delacorte
CHAPTER 6 A Notion of Manhood and Giving Thanks: Peter and Nina Tanagawa
CHAPTER 7 Having It All and Giving It Up: Ann and Robert Myerson
CHAPTER 8 A Scarcity of Gratitude: Seth and Jessica Stein
CHAPTER 9 An Unsteady Marriage and a Job She Loves: Anita and Ray Judson
CHAPTER 10 The “His” and “Hers” of Sharing: Greg and Carol Alston
CHAPTER 11 No Time Together: Barbara and John Livingston
CHAPTER 12 Sharing Showdown and Natural Drift: Pathways to the New Man
CHAPTER 13 Beneath the Cover-up: Strategies and Strains
CHAPTER 14 Tensions in Marriage in an Age of Divorce
CHAPTER 15 Men Who Do and Men Who Don’t
CHAPTER 16 The Working Wife as Urbanizing Peasant
CHAPTER 17 Stepping into Old Biographies or Making History Happen?
Afterword
Appendix Research on Who Does the Housework and Child Care
Notes
Selected Reading
Nonprofit Organizations Engaged in Helping Working Families
Index
Preface
When I was thirty-one, a moment occurred that crystallized the concern that drives this book. At the time, I was an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the mother of a three-month-old child. I wanted to nurse the b
aby—and to continue to teach. Several arrangements were possible, but my solution was a pre-industrial one—to reintegrate the family into the workplace, which involved taking the baby, David, with me for office hours on the fourth floor of Barrows Hall. From two to eight months, he was nearly the perfect guest. I made him a little box with blankets where he napped (which he did most of the time) and I brought along an infant seat from which he kept a close eye on key chains, colored notebooks, earrings, and glasses. Sometimes waiting students took him out into the hall and passed him around. He became a conversation piece with shy students, and some returned to see him rather than me. I put up a fictitious name on the appointment list every four hours and fed him alone.
The baby’s presence was like a Rorschach test for people entering my office. Older men, undergraduate women, and a few younger men seemed to like him and the idea of his being there. In the next office there was a seventy-four-year-old distinguished emeritus professor; it was our joke that he would stop by when he heard my son crying and say, shaking his head, “Beating the baby again, eh?” Textbook salesmen with briefcases and striped suits were generally shocked at the unprofessional gurgles (and sometimes unprofessional odors) from the box. Many graduate student women were put off, partly because babies were out of fashion in the early 1970s, and partly because they were afraid that I was deprofessionalizing myself, women in general, and, symbolically, them. I was afraid of that too. Before having David, I saw students all the time, took every committee assignment, worked evenings and nights writing articles, and had in this way accumulated a certain amount of departmental tolerance. I was calling on that tolerance now, with the infant box, the gurgles, the disturbance to the dignity and sense of purpose of my department. My colleagues never seemed to talk about children. They talked to each other about research and about the department’s ranking—still “number 1” or slipping to “number 2”? I was just coming up for tenure and it wasn’t so easy to get. And I wanted at the same time to be as calm a mother for my son as my mother had been for me. In some literal way I had brought together family and work, but in a more basic way, doing so only made the contradictions between the demands of baby and career all the more clear.
One day, a male graduate student came early for his appointment. The baby had slept longer than usual and hadn’t been hungry at my appointed Barrows Hall time. I invited the student in. Since we had never met before, he introduced himself with extreme deference. He seemed acquainted with my work and intellectual tastes in the field, and perhaps responding to his deference, I behaved more formally than usual. He began tentatively to elaborate his interests in sociology and to broach the subject of my serving on his Ph.D. orals committee. He had the task of explaining to me that he was a clever student, trustworthy and obedient, but that academic fields were not organized as he wanted to study them, and of asking me whether he could study the collected works of Karl Marx under the rubric of the sociology of work.
In the course of this lengthy explanation, the baby began to cry. I slipped him a pacifier, and continued to listen all the more intently.
The student went on. The baby spat out the pacifier and began to wail. Trying to be casual, I began to feed him. At this point, he let out the strongest, most rebellious wail I had ever heard from this small person.
The student uncrossed one leg, crossed the other and held a polite smile, coughing a bit as he waited for this little crisis to pass. I excused myself and got up to walk back and forth with the baby to calm him down. “I’ve never taken the baby here all day before,” I remember saying, “it’s just an experiment.”
“I have two children of my own,” he replied. “Only they live in Sweden. We’re divorced and I miss them a lot.” We exchanged a human glance of mutual support, talked of our families more, and soon the baby calmed down.
A month later, when the student signed up for a second appointment, he entered the office and sat down formally. “As we were discussing last time, Professor Hochschild …” Nothing further was said about what had, for me, been an utterly traumatic little episode. Astonishingly, I was still Professor Hochschild. He was still John. Something about power lived on regardless.
In retrospect I felt a little like that character in Dr. Doolittle and the Pirates, the pushmi-pullyu, a horse with two heads that see and say different things. The pushmi head felt relieved that motherhood had not reduced me as a professional. But the pullyu wondered why children in offices were not occasionally part of the “normal” scene. Where, after all, were the children of my male colleagues?
Part of me felt envious of the smooth choicelessness of those male colleagues who did not bring their children to Barrows Hall but who knew their children were in loving hands. I sometimes felt this keenly when I met one of these men jogging on the track (a popular academic sport because it takes little time) and then met his wife taking their child to the YMCA kinder-gym. I felt it too when I saw wives drive up to the building in the evening in their station wagons, elbow on the window, two children in the back, waiting for a man briskly walking down the steps, briefcase in hand. It seemed a particularly pleasant moment in their day. It reminded me of those summer Friday evenings, always a great treat, when my older brother and I would pack into the back of our old Hudson, and my mother with a picnic basket would drive up from Bethesda, Maryland, to Washington, D.C., at five o’clock to meet my father, walking briskly down the steps of the government office building where he worked, briefcase in hand. We picnicked at the Tidal Basin surrounding the Jefferson Memorial, my parents sharing their day, and in that end-of-the-week mood, we came home. When I see similar scenes, something inside rips in half. For I am neither and both the brisk stepping carrier of a briefcase and the mother with the packed picnic supper. The university is still designed for such men and their homes for such women. Both the woman in the station wagon and I with the infant box are trying to “solve” the work-family problem. As things stand now, in either case women pay a cost. The housewife pays a cost by remaining outside the mainstream of social life. The career woman pays a cost by entering a clockwork of careers that permits little time or emotional energy to raise a family. Her career permits so little of these because it was originally designed to suit a traditional man whose wife raised his children. In this arrangement between career and family, the family was the welfare agency for the university and women were its social workers. Now women are working in such institutions without benefit of the social worker. As I repeatedly heard career women in this study say, “What I really need is a wife.” But maybe they don’t need “wives”; maybe they need careers basically redesigned to suit workers who also care for families. This redesign would be nothing short of a revolution, first in the home, and then at places of work—universities, corporations, banks, and factories.
In increasing numbers women have gone into the workforce, but few have gone very high up in it. This is not because women cool themselves out by some “auto-discrimination.” It is not because we lack “role models.” Nor is it simply because corporations and other institutions discriminate against women. Rather, the career system inhibits women, not so much by malevolent disobedience to good rules as by making up rules to suit the male half of the population in the first place. One reason that half the lawyers, doctors, businesspeople are not women is because men do not share the raising of their children and the caring of their homes. Men think and feel within structures of work which presume they don’t do these things. The long hours men devote to work and to recovering from work are often taken from the untold stories, unthrown balls, and uncuddled children left behind at home.
Women who do a first shift at work and all of a second shift at home can’t compete on male terms. They find that their late twenties and mid-thirties, the prime childbearing years, are also a peak period of career demands. Seeing that the game is devised for family-free people, some women lose heart.
Thus to look at the system of work is to look at half the problem. The other half occur
s at home. If there is to be no more mother with the picnic basket, who is to take her place? Will the new working woman cram it all in, baby and office? Will the office take precedence over the baby? Or will babies appear in the daily lives, if not the offices, of male colleagues too? What will men and women allow themselves to feel? How much ambition at work? How much empathy for children? How much dependence on a spouse?
Five years after David was born, we had our second child, Gabriel. My husband, Adam, didn’t take either of our boys to his office, but overall, we have cared for them equally, and he cares for them as a mother would. Among our close friends, fathers do the same. But ours are highly unusual circumstances—middle-class jobs, flexible work schedules, a supportive community. These special circumstances make women like me and my friends “lucky.” Some women colleagues have asked me, lids lowered, “I’ll bet you really struggled to get that.” But the truth is I didn’t. I was “lucky.”
Once the occupant of an infant box in my office, David is now a busy working father himself. Do working mothers have more help from partners than they did when David was a baby? Is the problem solved?
If I listen to what my students have told me, the answer is no. The women students I talk with don’t feel optimistic that they will find a man who plans to share the work at home, and the women whose partners fully share still consider themselves “unusual,” while the women whose partners don’t share consider themselves “normal.”
I began to think about this matter of feeling “lucky” again while driving home from my interviews in the evening. One woman, a bank clerk and mother of two young children, who did nearly everything at home, ended her interview as many women did, talking about how lucky she felt. She woke at 5:00 a.m., crammed in housework before she set off for the office, and after she got back, asked her husband for help here and there. She didn’t seem lucky to me. Did she feel lucky because her husband was doing more than the “going rate” for men she knew? As I gradually discovered, husbands almost never talked of feeling “lucky” that their wives worked, or that they “did a lot” or “shared” the work of the home. They didn’t talk about luck at all, while this bank clerk and I seemed to be part of a long invisible parade of women, one feeling a little “luckier” than the other because their man did a bit more at home. But if women who have an equal deal feel “lucky” because it is so rare and precious and unusual and precarious an arrangement to have—if all of us who have some small shard of help are feeling “lucky”—maybe something is fundamentally wrong with the usual male outlook on the home, and with the cultural world of work that helps create and reinforce it. But if sharing work at home, as I shall argue, is vitally linked to marital harmony, should something so important hinge on luck? Wouldn’t it be far better if ordinary men and women lived in “lucky” structures of work and believed in ideas about men and women that brought that “luck” about?