The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

by Arlie Hochschild, Anne Machung

  I found three types of ideology of marital roles: traditional, transitional, and egalitarian. Even though she works, the “pure” traditional woman wants to identify with her activities at home (as a wife, a mother, a neighborhood mom), wants her husband to base his identity on work, and wants less power than he has. The traditional man wants the same. The “pure” egalitarian wants to identify with the same spheres her husband does, and to have an equal amount of power in the marriage. Some want the couple to be jointly oriented to the home, others to their careers, or both of them to jointly hold some balance between the two. Between the traditional and the egalitarian is the transitional, any one of a variety of types of blending of the two. But, in contrast to the traditional, a transitional woman wants to identify with her role at work as well as at home, but she believes her husband should base his identity more on work than she does. A typical transitional wants to identify both with the care of the home and with helping her husband earn money, but wants her husband to focus on earning a living. A typical transitional man is all for his wife working, but expects her to do the lion’s share at home too. Most people I talked with were transitional in their beliefs.

  In actuality, I discovered contradictions between what people said they believed about their marital roles and how they seemed to feel about those roles. Some men seemed to me egalitarian on top but traditional underneath. Others seemed traditional on top and egalitarian underneath.1 Often a person’s deeper feelings were a response to the cautionary tales of childhood as well as to life as an adult. Sometimes these feelings reinforced the surface of a person’s gender ideology. For example, the fear Nancy Holt was to feel of becoming a submissive “doormat,” as she felt her mother had been, infused emotional steam into her belief that her husband, Evan, should share the second shift.

  On the other hand, the dissociation Ann Myerson was to feel from her successful career undermined her ostensible commitment both to her career and to a shared second shift. She wanted to feel as engaged with her career as her husband was with his. She thought she should love her work. She should think it mattered. In fact, as she confessed in a troubled tone, she didn’t love her work and didn’t think it mattered. She felt a conflict between what she thought she ought to feel and did feel. Among other things, her gender strategy was a way of trying to resolve that conflict.

  The men and women I am about to describe seem to have developed their gender ideology by unconsciously synthesizing certain cultural ideas with feelings about their past. But they also developed their ideology by taking opportunity into account. Sometime in adolescence they matched their personal assets against the opportunities available to men or women of their type; they saw which gender ideology best fit their circumstances, and—often regardless of their upbringing—they identified with a certain version of manhood or womanhood. It “made sense” to them. It felt like “who they were.” For example, a woman sizes up her education, intelligence, age, charm, sexual attractiveness, type of sexuality, her dependency needs, her aspirations, and she matches these against her perception of how women like her are doing in the job and marriage market. What jobs could she get? What men? If she wishes to marry, what are her chances for an equal marriage, a traditional marriage, a happy marriage, any marriage? Her courtship pool has very traditional men? She takes these into account. She looks at job prospects with the same eye. Then a certain gender ideology, let’s say a traditional one, “makes sense.” She will embrace the ideology that suits her perception of her chances. She holds to a certain version of womanhood (the “wilting violet,” say). She identifies with its customs (men opening doors), and symbols (lacy dress, long hair, soft handshakes, and lowered eyes). She tries to develop its “ideal personality” (deferential, dependent), not because this is what her parents taught her, not because this corresponds to how she naturally “is,” but because these particular customs make sense of her resources and of her overall situation in a stalled revolution. The same principle applies to men. However wholehearted or ambivalent, a person’s gender ideology tends to fit their situation.

  GENDER STRATEGIES

  When a man tries to apply his ideas about gender to the life unfolding before him, unconsciously or not he pursues a gender strategy.2 He outlines a course of action. He might become a “superdad”—working long hours and keeping his child up late at night to spend time with him or her. Or he might cut back his hours at work. Or he might scale back housework and spend less time with his children. Or he might actively try to share the second shift.

  The term “strategy” refers both to his plan of action and to his emotional preparation for pursuing it. For example, he may require himself to suppress his career ambitions to devote himself more to his children, or suppress his responsiveness to his children’s adoring appeals in the course of steeling himself for struggles at work. He might harden himself to his wife’s appeals, or he might be the one in the family who “lets” himself see when a child is calling out for help.

  I have tried to attune myself to fractures in gender ideology, conflicts between thought and feeling and to the emotional work it takes to fit a gender ideal when inner needs or outer conditions make it hard.

  As this social revolution proceeds, the problems of the two-job family will not diminish. If anything, as more and more women do paid work, these problems may well increase. If we can’t return to traditional marriage, and if we are not to despair of marriage altogether, it becomes vitally important to understand marriage as a magnet for the strains of the stalled revolution, and to understand gender strategies as the basic dynamic of marriage.

  THE ECONOMY OF GRATITUDE

  The interplay between a man’s gender ideology and a woman’s implies a deeper interplay between his gratitude toward her, and hers toward him. For how a person wants to identify himself or herself influences what, in the back and forth of a marriage, will seem like a gift and what will not. If a man doesn’t think it fits his male ideal to have his wife earn more than he, it may become his gift to her to “bear it” anyway. But a man may also feel like the husband I interviewed, who said, “When my wife began earning more than me I thought I’d struck gold!” In this case his wife’s salary is the gift, not his capacity to accept it “anyway.” When couples struggle, it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.

  FAMILY MYTHS

  As I watched couples in their own homes, I began to realize that they often improvise family myths—versions of reality that obscure a core truth in order to manage a family tension.3 Evan and Nancy Holt managed an irresolvable conflict over the distribution of work at home through the myth that they now “shared it equally.” Another couple unable to admit to the conflict came to believe “we aren’t competing over who will take responsibility at home; we’re just dreadfully busy with our careers.” Yet another couple jointly believed that the husband was bound hand and foot to his career “because the job demanded it,” while in fact his careerism covered the fact that they were avoiding each other. Not all couples need or have family myths. But when they do arise, I believe they often manage key tensions which are linked, by degrees, to the long hand of the stalled revolution.

  After interviewing couples for a while, I got into the practice of offering families who wanted it my interpretation of how they fit into the broader picture I was seeing and what I perceived were their strategies for coping with the second shift. Couples were often relieved to discover they were not alone, and were encouraged to open up a dialogue about the origins of their troubles.

  Many couples in this book worked long hours at their jobs and their children were very young: in this way their lot was unusually hard. But in one crucial way they had it far easier than most couples in America: most were middle class. Many also worked for a company that embraced progressive policies toward personnel, generous benefits and salaries. If these middle-class couples find it hard to juggle work and family, many other families across the n
ation—who earn less, work at less flexible, steady, or lucrative jobs, and rely on poorer day care—are likely to find it harder still.

  Anne Machung and I began interviewing in 1976, and accomplished most of our interviews in the early 1980s. I finished in 1988. About half of my later interviews were follow-up contacts with couples we’d talked to earlier; the other half were new.

  How much had changed from 1976 to 1988? In practice, little. But something was different, too. More couples wanted to share and imagined that they did. Dorothy Sims, a personnel director, summed up this new blend of idea and reality. She eagerly explained to me that she and her husband, Dan, “shared all the housework,” and that they were “equally involved” in raising their nine-month-old son, Timothy. Her husband, a refrigerator salesman, applauded her career and was more pleased than threatened by her high salary; he urged her to develop such skills as reading ocean maps and calculating interest rates (which she’d so far resisted learning) because these days “a woman should.” But one evening at dinner, a telling episode occurred. Dorothy had handed Timothy to her husband while she served us a chicken dinner. Gradually, the baby began to doze on his father’s lap. “When do you want me to put Timmy to bed?” Dan asked. A long silence followed during which it occurred to Dorothy—then, I think, to her husband—that this seemingly insignificant question hinted to me that it was she, not he or “they,” who usually decided such matters. Dorothy slipped me a glance, put her elbows on the table, and said to her husband in a slow, deliberate voice, “So, what do we think?”

  When Dorothy and Dan described their “typical days,” their picture of sharing grew even less convincing. Dorothy worked the same nine-hour day at the office as her husband. But she came home to fix dinner and to tend Timmy while Dan fit in a squash game three nights a week from six to seven (a good time for his squash partner). Dan read the newspaper more often and slept longer.

  Compared to the early interviews, women in the later interviews seemed to speak more often in passing of relationships or marriages that had ended for some other reason but in which it “was also true” that he “didn’t lift a finger at home.” Or the extra month alone did it. One divorcee who typed part of this manuscript echoed this theme when she explained, “I was a potter and lived with a sculptor for eight years. I cooked, shopped, and cleaned because his art took him longer. He said it was fair because he worked harder. But we both worked at home, and I could see that if anyone worked longer hours, I did, because I earned less with my pots than he earned with his sculpture. That was hard to live with, and that’s really why we ended.”

  Some women moved on to slightly more equitable arrangements in the early 1980s, doing a bit less of the second shift than the working mothers I talked to in the late 1970s. Comparing two national surveys of working couples, F. T. Juster found the male slice of the second shift rose from 20 percent in 1965 to 30 percent in 1981, and my study may be a local reflection of this slow national trend.4 But women like Dorothy Sims, who simply add to their extra month a year a new illusion that they aren’t doing it, represent a sad alternative to the woman with the flying hair—the woman who doesn’t think that’s who she is.

  * This is more true of white and middle-class women than it is of black or poor women, whose mothers often worked outside the home. But the trend I am talking about—an increase from 20 percent of American women in paid jobs in 1900 to 55 percent in 1986—has affected a large number of women.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The Cultural Cover-up

  IN the apartment across from the little study where I work there is a large bay window that never fails to catch my eye. Peering out from inside, wide-eyed and still, is a life-sized female mannequin in an apron. Her arms are folded and have been for years. She’s there guarding the place, waiting. She reminds me and other passersby that no one is home. Maybe she’s a spoof on the nostalgia for the 1950s “mom,” waiting with milk and cookies for the kids to come home in the era before the two-job family.

  Perhaps the mannequin mom is the occupant’s joke about the darker reality obscured by the image of the woman with the flying hair—briefcase in one hand and child in the other. “There’s really no one home,” it seems to say, “only a false mother.” She invites us to look again at the more common image of the working mother, at what that image hides. The front cover of the New York Times Magazine for September 9, 1984, features a working mother walking home with her daughter. The woman is young. She is good-looking. She is smiling. The daughter is smiling as she lugs her mother’s briefcase. The role model is taking, the child is a mini-supermom already. If images could talk, this image would say, “Women can combine career and children.” It would say nothing about the “extra month a year,” nothing about men, nothing about flexible work hours. That would be covered up.

  There is no trace of stress, no suggestion that the mother needs help from others. She isn’t harassed. She’s busy, and it’s glamorous to be busy. Indeed, the image of the on-the-go working mother is very like the glamorous image of the busy top executive. The scarcity of the working mother’s time seems like the scarcity of the top executive’s time. Yet their situations are totally different. The busy top executive is in a hurry at work because his or her time is worth so much. He is in a hurry at home because he works long hours at the office. In contrast, the working mother is in a hurry because her time at work is worth so little, and because she has no help at home. The analogy suggested between the two obscures the wage gap between them at work and helps the gap between them at home.

  The Times article gives the impression that the working mother is doing so well because she is personally competent, not because she has a sound social arrangement. Indeed the image of her private characteristics obscures all that is missing in public support for the working parent. In this respect, the image of the working mother today shares something with that of the black single mother of the 1960s. In celebrating such an image of personal strength, our culture creates an ironic heroism. It extends to middle-class white women a version of womanhood a bit like that offered to poor women of color.

  In speaking of the black single mother, commentators and scholars have sometimes used the term “matriarch,” a derogatory term in American culture, and a term brought to popular attention by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial government report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In a section of the report entitled “Tangle of Pathology,” Moynihan cited figures showing that black girls scored higher on school tests than black boys. He also showed that 25 percent of black wives in two-job families earned more than their husbands, while only 18 percent of white wives did. Moynihan quotes social scientist Duncan MacIntyre: “… the underemployment among Negro men and compensating higher labor force propensity among Negro women … both operate to enlarge the mother’s role, undercutting the status of the male and making many Negro families essentially matriarchal.”1 The implication was that black women should aspire to the standards of white women: perform more poorly on educational tests and earn less than their mates. Reading this, black social scientists such as Elaine Kaplan pointed out that black women were “damned if they worked to support their families and damned if they didn’t.” Black women were cautioned against being so “matriarchal.” But as working mothers in low-paid jobs without much male support, they also legitimately felt themselves the victims of male underemployment. While at the bottom of the social totem pole, they were described as if they were at the top. These women pointed out that they “took charge” of their families not because they wanted to dominate, but because if they didn’t pay the rent, buy the food, cook it, and look after the children, no one else would. Black women would have been delighted to share the work and the decision making with a man. But in Moynihan’s report, the black woman’s dominance came to seem like the problem itself rather than the result of the problem.

  Similarly, the common portrayal of the supermom suggests that she is energetic and competent
because these are her personal characteristics, not because she has been forced to adapt to an overly demanding schedule. What is hidden in both cases is the extra burden on women. The difference between Moynihan’s portrayal of the black working mother as matriarch and the modern portrayal of the white supermom is an unconscious racism. The supermom has come to seem heroic and good, whereas the matriarch seems unheroic and bad.

  This same extra burden on women was also disguised in the Soviet Union, a large industrial nation that had long employed over 80 percent of its women, and who, according to the Alexander Szalai study (described in Chapter 1), work the extra month a year. In a now legendary short story entitled “A Week Like Any Other” by Natalya Baranskaya, Olga, twenty-six, is a technician in a plastics testing laboratory in Moscow and a wife and mother of two. Olga’s supervisor praises her for being a real Soviet Woman—a supermom. But when Olga is asked to fill out a questionnaire listing her hobbies, she answers, “Personally my hobby is running, running here, running there….” Like the black matriarch, and the multiracial supermom, the image of the real Soviet woman confines a social problem to the realm of personal character.

  Missing from the image of the supermom is the day-care worker, the baby-sitter, the maid—a woman usually in a blue collar position to whom some white collar couples pass much, although not all, of the work of the second shift. In the image, the supermom is almost always white and at least middle class. In reality, of course, day-care workers, baby-sitters, au pairs, nannies, maids, and housekeepers are often part of two-job couples as well. This growing army of women is taking over the parts of a mother’s role that employed women relinquish. Most maids and baby-sitters also stay in their occupations for life. But who can afford a house cleaner? In 2010, the median household income was about $50,000. There were 1,470,000 maids and house cleaners and 312,000,000 Americans. So for the average American, outsourcing is not a primary solution.