The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

by Arlie Hochschild, Anne Machung

  For his part, Evan didn’t talk much about feeling grateful to Nancy. He avoided an Evan-Nancy comparison. He erased the distinction between Nancy and himself: his “I” disappeared into “we,” leaving no “me” to compare to “you.” For example, when I asked him if he felt that he did enough around the house, he laughed, surprised to be asked point-blank and replied mildly: “No, I don’t think so. No. I would have to admit that we probably could do more.” Then using “we” in an apparently different way, he went on: “But I also have to say that I think we could do more in terms of the household chores than we really do. See, we let a lot more slide than we should.”

  Nancy made no more comparisons to Bill Beaumont, no more unfavorable comparisons to the going rate. Without these frames of reference, the deal with Evan seemed fair. This did not mean that Nancy ceased to care about equality between the sexes. On the contrary, she cut out magazine articles about how males rose faster in social welfare than females, and she complained about the condescending way male psychiatrists treat female social workers. She pushed her feminism “out” into the world of work, a safe distance away from the upstairs-downstairs arrangement at home.

  Nancy now blamed her fatigue on “everything she had to do.” When she occasionally spoke of conflict, it was conflict between her job and Joey, or between Joey and housework. Evan slid out of the equation. As Nancy spoke of him now, he had no part in the conflict.

  Since Nancy and Evan no longer conceived of themselves as comparable, Nancy let it pass when Evan spoke of housework in a “male” way, as something he “would do” or “would not do,” or something he did when he got around to it. Like most women, when Nancy spoke of housework, she spoke simply of what had to be done. The difference in the way she and Evan talked seemed to emphasize that their viewpoints were naturally different and again helped push the problem out of mind.

  Many couples traded off tasks as the need arose; whoever came home first started dinner. In the past, Evan had used flexibility in the second shift to camouflage his retreat from it; he hadn’t liked “rigid schedules.” He had once explained to me: “We don’t really keep count of who does what. Whoever gets home first is likely to start dinner. Whoever has the time deals with Joey or cleans up.” He had disparaged a female neighbor who kept strict track of tasks as “uptight” and “compulsive.” A couple, he had felt, ought to be “open to the flow.” Dinner, he had said, could be anytime. The very notion of a leisure gap disappeared into Evan’s celebration of happy, spontaneous anarchy. But now that the struggle was over, Evan didn’t talk of dinner at “anytime.” Dinner was at six.

  Nancy’s program to keep up her gracious resignation included another tactic: she would focus on the advantages of losing the struggle. She wasn’t stuck with the upstairs. Now, as she talked she seemed to preside over it as her dominion. She would do the housework, but the house would feel like hers. The new living-room couch, the kitchen cabinet, she referred to as “mine.” She took up supermom-speak and began referring to my kitchen, my living-room curtains, and, even in Evan’s presence, to my son. She talked of machines that helped her, and of the work-family conflict itself as hers. Why shouldn’t she? She felt she’d earned that right. The living room reflected Nancy’s preference for beige. The upbringing of Joey reflected Nancy’s ideas about fostering creativity by giving a child controlled choice. What remained of the house was Evan’s domain. As she remarked: “I never touch the garage. Evan sweeps it and straightens it and arranges it and plays with tools and figures out where the equipment goes—in fact, that’s one of his hobbies. In the evening, after Joey has settled down, he goes down there and putzes around; he has a TV down there, and he figures out his fishing equipment. The washer and dryer are down there, but that’s the only part of the garage that’s my domain.”

  Nancy could see herself as the winner—the one who got her way, the one whose kitchen, living room, house, and child these really were. She could see her arrangement with Evan as more than fair—from a certain point of view.

  As a couple, Nancy and Evan together explained their division of the second shift in ways that disguised their struggle. Now they rationalized that it was a result of their two personalities. For Evan, especially, there was no problem of a leisure gap; there was only the continual, fascinating interaction of two personalities. “I’m lazy,” he explained. “I like to do what I want to do in my own time. Nancy isn’t as lazy as I am. She’s compulsive and very well organized.” The comparisons of his work to hers, his fatigue to hers, his leisure time to hers—comparisons that used to hurt—were melted into freestanding personal characteristics, his laziness, her compulsiveness.

  Nancy now agreed with Evan’s assessment of her, and described herself as “an energetic person” who was amazingly “well organized.” When I asked her whether she felt any conflict between work and family life, she demurred: “I work real well overnight. I pulled overnighters all through undergraduate and graduate school, so I’m not too terribly uncomfortable playing with my family all evening, then putting them to bed, making coffee, and staying up all night [to write up reports on her welfare cases] and then working the next day—though I only go into overdrive when I’m down to the wire. I don’t feel any conflict between my job and Joey that way at all.”

  Evan was well organized and energetic on his job. But as Nancy talked of Evan’s life at home, he neither had these virtues nor lacked them; they were irrelevant. This double standard of virtue reinforced the idea that men and women cannot be compared, being “naturally” so different.

  Evan’s orientation to domestic tasks, as both described it now, had been engraved in childhood, and how could one change a whole childhood? As Nancy often reminded me, “I was brought up to do the housework. Evan wasn’t.” Many other men, who had also done little housework when they were boys, did not talk so fatalistically about “upbringing,” because they were doing a lot of it now. But the idea of a fate sealed so very early was oddly useful in Nancy’s program of benign resignation. She needed it, because if the die had been cast in the dawn of life, it was inevitable that she should work the extra month a year.

  This, then, was the set of mental tricks that helped Nancy reconcile believing one thing and living with another.

  HOW MANY HOLTS?

  In one key way the Holts were typical of the vast majority of two-job couples: their family life had become the shock absorber for a stalled revolution whose origin lay far outside it—in economic and cultural trends that bear very differently on men and women. Nancy was reading books, newspaper articles, and watching TV programs on the changing role of women. Evan wasn’t. Nancy felt benefited by these changes; Evan didn’t. In her ideals and in reality, Nancy was more different from her mother than Evan was from his father. Nancy had gone to college; her mother hadn’t. Nancy had a professional job; her mother never had. Nancy had the idea that she should be equal with her husband. In her mother’s youth, that had seemed like a strange, dreamlike idea. Nancy felt she and Evan should have similar responsibilities. Her mother hadn’t imagined that was possible. Evan went to college, his father (and the other boys in his family, though not the girls) had gone too. Work was important to Evan’s identity as a man as it had been for his father before him. Indeed, Evan felt the same way about family roles as his father had felt in his day. The new job opportunities and the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s had transformed Nancy but left Evan pretty much the same. And the friction created by this difference between them moved to the issue of the second shift as metal to a magnet. By the end, Evan did less housework and child care than most men married to working women—but not much less. Evan and Nancy were also typical of nearly 40 percent of the marriages I studied in their clash of gender ideologies and their different ideas about sacrifice. By far the most common form of mismatch was like that between Nancy, an egalitarian, and Evan, a transitional.

  But for most couples, the tensions between strategies did not so quickly tense up. Nancy pu
shed harder than most women to get Evan to share, and she lost more overwhelmingly than the few other women who fought that hard. Evan pursued his strategy of passive resistance with more quiet tenacity than most men, and he allowed himself to become far more marginal to his son’s life than most fathers. The myth of the Holts’ equal arrangement also seemed more odd than other family myths that encapsulated equally powerful conflicts.

  Beyond their upstairs-downstairs myth, the Holts tell us a great deal about the subtle ways a couple can encapsulate the tension caused by a struggle over the second shift without resolving the problem or divorcing. Like Nancy Holt, many women struggle to avoid, suppress, obscure, or mystify a frightening conflict over the second shift. They do not struggle like this because they started off wanting to, or because such struggle is inevitable or because women inevitably lose, but because they are forced to choose between equality and marriage. And they choose marriage. When asked about ideal relations between men and women in general, about what they want for their daughters, about what they’d like in their own marriage, most working mothers wished their men would share the work at home.

  But many wish it instead of want it. Other goals—like keeping peace at home—come first. Nancy Holt did some extraordinary behind-the-scenes emotion work to prevent her ideals from clashing with her marriage. In the end, she had confined and miniaturized her ideas of equality successfully enough to do two things she badly wanted to do: feel like a feminist, and live at peace with a man who was not. Her program had worked. Evan won on the reality of the situation, because Nancy did the second shift. Nancy won on the cover story; they would talk about it as if they shared.

  Nancy wore the upstairs-downstairs myth as an ideological cloak to protect her from the contradictions in her marriage and from the cultural and economic forces that press upon it. Nancy and Evan Holt were caught on opposite sides of the gender revolution occurring all around them. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s masses of women entered the public world of work—but went only so far up the occupational ladder. They tried for equal marriages, but got only so far in achieving it. They married men who liked them to work at the office but who wouldn’t share the extra month a year at home. When confusion about the identity of the working woman created a cultural vacuum in the 1970s and 1980s, the image of the supermom quietly glided in. She made the “stall” seem normal and happy. But beneath the happy image of the woman with the flying hair are modern marriages like the Holts’, reflecting intricate webs of tension, and the huge, hidden emotional cost to women, men, and children of having to manage inequality. Yet on the surface, all we might see would be Nancy Holt bounding confidently out the door at 8:30 a.m., briefcase in one hand, Joey in the other. All we might hear would be Nancy’s and Evan’s talk about their marriage as happy, normal, even equal—because equality was so important to Nancy.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The Family Myth of the Traditional: Frank and Carmen Delacorte

  AS he begins his interview with me, Frank Delacorte is speaking from his personal chair, a lounger with armrests and a footrest that extends when he leans back. In this modest living room, it is the only chair with armrests. Some men I interviewed sat in chairs turned closely toward the television, suggesting a desire for solitary retreat and recovery. Frank’s chair faced outward toward the room, suggesting membership, its size and prominence suggesting authority. It is the centerpiece of the room, the provider’s chair. I am seated on the sofa, tape recorder beside me, interviewing a man who, as it was to turn out, holds more traditional views on men and women than Evan Holt, but who does more work at home with far less struggle.

  Frank is a slender man of twenty-nine with long, ropey, muscular arms, neatly groomed dark hair, and thoughtful brown eyes. In a modest but deliberate way, he describes himself and his marriage: “I look at myself as pretty much of a traditionalist. It’s the way I am inside. I feel the man should be the head of the house. He should have the final say. I don’t think he should have the only say; my father was the head but a lot of times my mother got her way. But I feel like this is my role in life, and I don’t see any reason to want to change it.” He pauses and gives a small but not apologetic shrug of the shoulders. He has chosen his words slowly—as if saying something so fundamental it is normally beyond words.

  Frank earns $12,000 a year gluing together the pressboard sides of boxes in a factory. Pressboard isn’t the real wood he loves to work with. He dislikes the powerful smell of chemicals in the glue and worries whether they might be hazardous. By trade, he says, he is a cabinetmaker, but when his father-in-law’s small cabinetmaking business where he had worked failed, Frank was forced into factory work. Though he was scanning the want ads these days for a betterpaying job, and had even interviewed for one on a lunch break, nothing had come through. But his marriage was happy, he thanked God. He has been married for six years to Carmen, now in the bedroom watching a love story on television.

  The third of six children in a Nicaraguan blue-collar family, Frank had moved often, as a child, with his mother and siblings to be near his father, a merchant seaman who worked out of various port cities. He remembers his mother and father—he describes them jointly as “they”—as “stern” and “somewhat cold.” He doesn’t want to complain, but he feels there had not been enough affection to go around. He considers carefully whether he has the right to complain—because his parents had had a hard life, too—but he tentatively concludes that he wished it had not felt as cold growing up in their home. He wanted to establish a warmer family, and with his marriage to Carmen, he already had.

  Frank Delacorte held to the views of most other working-class men I talked to. Middle-class men often expected their wives to “help” support the family while they themselves expected to “help” at home. They often thought their wife’s work was “good for her,” and that “she had a right to it if she wanted it.” Middle-class men often saw themselves as equal partners playing different roles. Although their higher salaries gave them greater potential power, it was a point of male honor not to press this advantage, not to talk about it, just to have it. Some would occasionally crack jokes about keeping the wife “barefoot and pregnant,” or commanding her to “fetch my pipe and slippers,” their jokes consolidating the fact that women’s oppression, at their class level, was a matter of history.

  In contrast, Frank used the language of “letting my wife work.” For him, it was a point of male honor to show loving consideration toward one whom God had given a subordinate role in marriage. Because the Delacortes needed Carmen’s income to live, Frank actually held less economic power than most middle-class men. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, both Delacortes wanted Frank to be “the man of the house,” and to have the “final say” over whether Carmen worked. These days, Frank’s traditional ideal was too expensive for his pocketbook.

  He did not link his desire to be “the man of the house” with the need to compensate for racial discrimination, a link I sensed in a few other interviews with minority men. Had Frank been Irish or German, rather than Latino, he might have had a better crack at a union job. Most of his coworkers in the nonunion, low-paid jobs at the box factory were Latino. But Frank did not require his relationship with Carmen to make up for racial injustice.

  Frank had anticipated a conflict between his pocketbook and his traditionalism even before he married Carmen. With some effort to be candid, he explained:

  I wasn’t that ready to get married. Actually, at that time I was feeling inadequate, since I didn’t have the kind of job I wanted to have yet. I guess I’m not the most ambitious person in the world [light, nervous laugh]. Yeah, Carmen was much more anxious to get married than I was. I was really very hesitant for a while. I felt I might disappoint her, probably financially. Carmen was working at the time. She told me, “If you add our salaries together, really there’s plenty to live on. Between the two of us, we shouldn’t have any trouble.” And that was true! I finally gave in. She rea
lly asked me to marry her, rather than me asking her.

  Frank would marry Carmen when she wanted to marry and she would accept her need to work with good grace, even though she wanted to stay home and be a “milk and cookies mom.” The compromise did not take place after the marriage, as it did with the Holts, but before, as a premise of it. The compromise was not, as for the Holts, between a husband’s ideas about a man’s role and his wife’s. The Delacortes agreed on that. Their compromise was between a traditional ideal they shared, and a pocketbook too thin to permit them to realize it.

  So from the beginning, it was understood that if the fickle fluctuations of the market in wood cabinets made Frank lose his job or take a pay cut, Carmen would not blame these things on Frank; they would face them together. More important, Frank’s inability to earn all the money—to be “male” in that way—would not be his moral burden alone. Carmen would not, like some wives, assume the right to resent having to work. Carmen had a sister-in-law and a cousin, both working mothers, who did resent having to work and they made life miserable for their husbands because of it. Not Carmen; to her, the deal was: “We’ll need my salary but I won’t rub it in.” Like most middle-class feminists, Nancy Holt had wanted to work and felt she should want to work. It had never occurred to her to reserve a right to resent having to work; she insisted on a different right: that she be honored in leisure out of deference for her legitimate career. But Carmen felt strongly that the only real work was at home. Having divergent views about womanhood, Nancy and Carmen also held to different notions of what were the right and wrong feelings to have about work, child-rearing, and the proper emotional gifts between husband and wife.

  The two women had opposing feeling rules. Carmen thought she should dislike her work and feel it as unimportant. Nancy thought she should enjoy her work and find it important. Carmen felt she should feel grateful for whatever extra help Frank gave around the house; Nancy considered 50 percent of the second shift as Evan’s rightful job and found it hard to feel grateful for less.