The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

by Arlie Hochschild, Anne Machung

  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.

  I asked who did how much of a wide variety of household tasks. I asked who cooks. Vacuums? Makes the beds? Sews? Cares for plants? Sends Christmas or Hanukkah cards? I also asked: Who washes the car? Repairs household appliances? Does the taxes? Tends the yard? I asked who did most household planning, who noticed such things as when a child’s fingernails need clipping, cared more how the house looked or about the change in a child’s mood.

  INSIDE THE EXTRA MONTH A YEAR

  The women I interviewed seemed to be far more deeply torn between the demands of work and family than were their husbands. They talked with more animation and at greater length than their husbands about the abiding conflict between them. Busy as they were, women more often brightened at the idea of yet another interviewing session. They felt the second shift was their issue and most of their husbands agreed. When I telephoned one husband to arrange an interview with him, explaining that I wanted to ask him about how he managed work and family life, he replied genially, “Oh, this will really interest my wife.”

  It was a woman who first proposed to me the metaphor, borrowed from industrial life, of the “second shift.” She strongly resisted the idea that homemaking was a “shift.” Her family was her life and she didn’t want it reduced to a job. But as she put it, “You’re on duty at work. You come home, and you’re on duty. Then you go back to work and you’re on duty.” After eight hours of adjusting insurance claims, she came home to put on the rice for dinner, care for her children, and do laundry. Despite her resistance, her home life felt like a second shift. That was the real story and that was the real problem.

  Men who shared the load at home seemed just as pressed for time as their wives, and as torn between the demands of career and small children, as the stories of Michael Sherman and Art Winfield will show. But the majority of men did not share the load at home. Some refused outright. Others refused more passively, often offering a loving shoulder to lean on, an understanding ear as their working wife faced the conflict they both saw as hers. At first it seemed to me that the problem of the second shift was hers. But I came to realize that those husbands who helped very little at home were often indirectly just as deeply affected as their wives through the resentment their wives feel toward them, and through their need to steel themselves against that resentment. Evan Holt, a warehouse furniture salesman described in Chapter 4, did very little housework and played with his four-year-old son, Joey, at his convenience. Juggling the demands of work with family at first seemed a problem for his wife. But Evan himself suffered enormously from the side effects of “her” problem. His wife did the second shift, but she keenly resented it, and half-consciously expressed her frustration and rage by losing interest in sex and becoming overly absorbed with Joey. One way or another, most men I talked with do suffer the severe repercussions of what I think is a transitional phase in American family life.

  One reason women took a deeper interest than men in the problems of juggling work with family life is that even when husbands happily shared the hours of work, their wives felt more responsible for the home. More women kept track of doctors’ appointments, arranged play dates, and kept up with relatives. More mothers than fathers worried about the tail on a child’s Halloween costume or a birthday present for a school friend. While at work they were more likely to check in by phone with the baby-sitter.

  Partly because of this, more women felt torn between one sense of urgency and another, between the need to soothe a child’s fear of being left at day care, and the need to show the boss she’s “serious” at work. More women than men questioned how good they were as parents, or if they did not, they questioned why they weren’t questioning it. More often than men, women alternated between living in their ambition and standing apart from it.

  As masses of women have moved into the economy, families have been hit by a “speed-up” in work and family life. There is no more time in the day than there was when wives stayed home, but there is twice as much to do. It is mainly women who absorb this “speed-up.” Twenty percent of the men in my study shared housework equally. Seventy percent of men did a substantial amount (less than half but more than a third), and 10 percent did less than a third. Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning—jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. But, as one mother pointed out, dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o’clock, whereas the car oil needs changing every six months, any day around that time, anytime that day. Women do more child care than men, and men repair more household appliances. A child needs to be tended daily while household repair can often wait “until I have time.” Men had more control over when they make their contributions than women do. They may be very busy with family chores but, like the executive who tells his secretary to “hold my calls,” the man has more control over his time. The job of the working mother, like that of the secretary, is usually to “take the calls.”

  Another reason women may feel more strained than men is that women more often do two things at once—for example, write checks and return phone calls, vacuum and keep an eye on a three-year-old, fold laundry and think out the shopping list. Men more often cook dinner or take a child to the park. Indeed, women more often juggle three spheres—job, children, and housework—while most men juggle two—job and children. For women, two activities compete wi
th their time with children, not just one.

  Beyond doing more at home, women also devote proportionately more of their time at home to housework and proportionately less of it to child care. Of all the time men spend working at home, more of it goes to child care. That is, working wives spend relatively more time “mothering the house”; husbands spend more time “mothering” the children. Since most parents prefer to be with their children to cleaning house, men do more of what they’d rather do. More men than women take their children on “fun” outings to the park, the zoo, the movies. Women spend more time on maintenance, such as feeding and bathing children, enjoyable activities to be sure, but often less leisurely or special than going to the zoo. Men also do fewer of the “undesirable” household chores: fewer wash toilets and scrub the bathroom.

  As a result, women tend to talk more intently about being overtired, sick, and “emotionally drained.” Many women I could not tear away from the topic of sleep. They talked about how much they could “get by on” … six and a half, seven, seven and a half, less, more. They talked about who they knew who needed more or less. Some apologized for how much sleep they needed—“I’m afraid I need eight hours of sleep”—as if eight was too much. They talked about the effect of a change in baby-sitter, the birth of a second child, or a business trip on their child’s pattern of sleep. They talked about how to avoid fully waking up when a child called them at night, and how to get back to sleep. These women talked about sleep the way a hungry person talks about food.

  All in all, if in this period of American history, the two-job family is suffering from a speed-up of work and family life, working mothers are its primary victims. It is ironic, then, that often it falls to women to be the “time and motion expert” of family life. Watching inside homes, I noticed it was often the mother who rushed children, saying, “Hurry up! It’s time to go,” “Finish your cereal now,” “You can do that later,” “Let’s go!” When a bath was crammed into a slot between 7:45 and 8:00 it was often the mother who called out, “Let’s see who can take their bath the quickest!” Often a younger child will rush out, scurrying to be first in bed, while the older and wiser one stalls, resistant, sometimes resentful: “Mother is always rushing us.” Sadly enough, women are more often the lightning rods for family aggressions aroused by the speed-up of work and family life. They are the “villains” in a process of which they are also the primary victims. More than the longer hours, the sleeplessness, and feeling torn, this is the saddest cost to women of the extra month a year.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Marriage in a Stalled Revolution

  EACH marriage bears the footprints of economic and cultural trends which originate far outside marriage. The offshoring of industrial jobs and decline of unions which erode the earning power of men, an expanding service sector which opens up jobs for women, new cultural images—like the woman with the flying hair—that make the working mother seem exciting, all these changes do not simply go on around marriage. They occur inside marriage, and transform it. Problems between husbands and wives, problems which seem “individual” and “marital,” are often individual experiences of powerful economic and cultural shock waves that are not caused by one person or two. Quarrels that erupt, as we’ll see, between Nancy and Evan Holt, Jessica and Seth Stein, and Anita and Ray Judson result mainly from a friction between faster-changing women and slower-changing men, rates of change which themselves result from the different rates at which the industrial economy has drawn men and women into itself.

  There is a “his” and “hers” to the economic development of the United States. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was mainly men who were drawn off the farm into paid, industrial work and who changed their way of life and identity. At that point in history, men became more different from their fathers than women became from their mothers. Today the economic arrow points at women; it is women who are being drawn into wage work, and women who are undergoing changes in their way of life and identity. Women are departing more from their mothers’ and grandmothers’ way of life, men are doing so less.*

  Both the earlier entrance of men into the industrial economy and the later entrance of women have influenced the relations between men and women, especially their relations within marriage. The earlier increase in the number of men in industrial work tended to increase the power of men, and the present growth in the number of women in such work has somewhat increased the power of women. On the whole, the entrance of men into industrial work did not destabilize the family whereas in the absence of other changes, the rise in female employment has accompanied a rise in divorce.

  The influx of women into the economy has not been accompanied by a cultural understanding of marriage and work that would make this transition smooth. Women have changed. But most workplaces have remained inflexible in the face of the family demands of their workers, and at home, most men have yet to really adapt to the changes in women. This strain between the change in women and the absence of change in much else leads me to speak of a stalled revolution.

  A society which did not suffer from this stall would be a society humanely adapted to the fact that most women work outside the home. The workplace would allow parents to work part time, to share jobs, to work flexible hours, to take parental leaves to give birth, tend sick children, and care for well ones. As Dolores Hayden has envisioned in Redesigning the American Dream, it would include affordable housing closer to places of work, and perhaps community-based meal and laundry services. It would include men whose notion of manhood encouraged them to be active parents and householders. In contrast, a stalled revolution lacks social arrangements that ease life for working parents, and lacks men who share the second shift.

  If women begin to do less at home because they have less time, if men do little more, if the work of raising children and tending a home requires roughly the same effort, then the questions of who does what at home and of what “needs doing” become key. Indeed, they may become a source of deep tension in marriage, tensions I explore here one by one.

  The tensions caused by the stall in this social revolution have led many men and women to avoid becoming part of a two-job couple. Some have married but clung to the tradition of the man as provider, the woman as homemaker. Others have resisted marriage itself. In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich describes a “male revolt” against the financial and emotional burden of supporting a family. In Women and Love, Shere Hite describes a “female revolt” against unsatisfying and unequal relationships with men. But the couples I focused on are not in traditional marriages and are not giving up on marriage. They are struggling to reconcile the demands of two jobs with a happy family life. Given this larger economic story and the present stalled revolution, I wanted to know how the two-job family was doing.

  As I drove from my classes at Berkeley to the outreaching suburbs, small towns, and inner cities of the San Francisco Bay to observe and ask questions in the homes of two-job couples, and back to my own two-job marriage, my first question about who does what gave way to a series of deeper questions: What leads some working mothers to do all the work at home themselves—to pursue what I call a supermom strategy—and what leads others to press their husbands to share the load at home? Why do some men genuinely want to share housework and child care, others fatalistically acquiesce, and still others resist?

  What do each husband’s ideas about manhood lead him to think he “should feel” about what he’s doing at home and at work? What does he really feel? Do his real feelings conflict with what he thinks he should feel? How does he resolve this conflict? The same questions apply to wives. What influence does each person’s strategy for handling the second shift have on his or her children, job, and marriage? Through this line of questioning, I was led to the complex web of ties between a family’s needs, the sometime quest for equality, and happiness in modern marriage.

  We can describe a couple as rich or poor and that will tell us a great deal about t
heir marriage. We can describe them as Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, black, Chicano, Asian, or white and that will tell us something more. We can describe their marriage as a combination of two personalities, one “obsessive compulsive,” say, and the other “narcissistic,” and again that will tell us something. But knowledge about class, ethnicity, and personality takes us only so far in understanding who does and doesn’t share the second shift, and whether or not sharing makes marriage happier.

  When I sat down to compare one couple that shared the second shift with another three that didn’t, many of the answers that would seem obvious—a man’s greater income, his longer hours of work, the fact that his mother was a housewife or his father did little at home, his ideas about men and women—all these factors didn’t really explain why some women work the extra month a year and others don’t. They didn’t explain why some women seemed content to work the extra month, while this made others deeply unhappy. When I compared a couple who was sharing and happy with another couple who was sharing but miserable, it was clear that purely economic or psychological answers were not enough. Gradually, I felt the need to explore how deep within each man and woman gender ideology goes. For some, men and women seemed to be egalitarian “on top” but traditional “underneath,” or the other way around. I tried to sensitize myself to the difference between shallow ideologies (ideologies which were contradicted by deeper feelings) and deep ideologies (which were reinforced by such feelings). I explored how each person reconciled ideology with the rest of life. I felt the need to explore what I call gender strategies.

  THE TOP AND BOTTOM OF GENDER IDEOLOGY

  A gender strategy is a plan of action through which a person tries to solve problems at hand, given the cultural notions of gender at play. To pursue a gender strategy, a man draws on beliefs about manhood and womanhood, beliefs that are forged in early childhood and usually anchored to deep emotion. He makes a connection between how he thinks about his manhood, what he feels about it, and what he does. It works in the same way for a woman. Each person’s gender ideology defines what sphere a person wants to identify with (home or work) and how much power in the marriage one wants to have (less, more, or the same amount).