The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (30 page)

T
he two-job marriages I came to know seemed vulnerable to three kinds of tension. One tension was between the husband’s idea of what he and his wife should do at home and work, and his wife’s idea about that. Gender strategies clashed—as did those of the Holts and the Steins. Another existed as a shared desire to live an old-fashioned life—the wife at home, the husband working—and the real need for her salary. The Delacortes, for example, did not clash in their vision of life or ways of trying to realize it, but both suffered a conflict between ideal and reality. The third tension is more invisible, nameless, and serious: that between the importance of a family’s
need
for care and the
devaluation
of the work it takes to give that care.

Two-thirds of couples in this study, most of them married for seven to ten years, shared views on how men and women should be. Two-thirds were
both
traditional,
both
transitional, or
both
egalitarian. But a third had important differences of feeling—especially about who should do how much work at home. (And
note that couples who disagree violently don’t appear in this study since I didn’t talk with couples who were currently divorced.)

These marital clashes reflect a broader social tension—between
faster-changing women and slower-changing men.
Because changing economic opportunities and needs influence women more powerfully than men, women differ more from their mothers than men differ from their fathers. The “female culture” has shifted more rapidly than the “male culture”; the image of the go-get-’em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let’s-take-care-of-the-kids-together man. Men’s underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women’s feelings have changed about forging an identity at work.

Perhaps because couples with dramatic schisms have been purged from the group by divorce, the remaining marriages I saw of this type were usually not between a man who disapproved of his wife’s working and a woman who worked. They were marriages between men who were happy their wives worked but wanted them to take care of the home and women who wanted more help at home.

Whether they had to or not, these wives wanted to work. Many professionally trained wives felt their work was challenging, enjoyable, or worthwhile. But even women in low-level service jobs felt work gave them sociability, a sense of usefulness, and respect in the eyes of others, including their husband.

Tensions often showed up in each partner’s sense that he or she wasn’t getting credit or appreciation, that the other wasn’t grateful enough. The exchange of appreciation in these marriages became a sort of “dead letter office,” thanks sent to the “wrong address.” The question became: Where is my thanks? The big gift Jessica Stein offered Seth was to give up working full time. For Seth, the big gift was to give up leisure to work overtime. Their problem was not, I think, that they could not give. It was that Seth wanted to “give” at the office, and Jessica wanted to “receive” at home—to have Seth play catch with their younger son, play piano with the older one, while she escaped to her desk and perfect day elsewhere. A gift in the eyes of one was not a gift in the eyes of the
other. Each felt “taken advantage of.” In the end, each was left with a thin pile of thank-you notes. If measured in gifts exchanged, their marriage had quietly ended some time ago.

Countless other self-sacrifices—following a spouse to another city, looking after the ill parents of a spouse, paying college tuition for a stepchild, doing with less money all around—takes on value only as they are seen through a cultural viewpoint. Ray Judson wanted to offer Anita “the privilege of staying home.” Anita couldn’t accept. Peter Tanagawa wanted to offer Nina the same. Nina appreciated the offer but not as much as Peter would have liked. Nancy Holt wanted to offer Evan the benefits of her work, her salary, participation in her work friendships, any status that might rub off, dubious rewards to Evan. It is through the different appraisals of such “gifts” that the major social revolution of our time enters the private moments of marriage.

Once a tension between partners arises, the couple faces the question—how to resolve it?—or if they can’t do that, how to manage the failure to resolve it. Neither the Steins, the Judsons, nor the Holts actually did resolve the tension between them over the second shift. Each managed their unresolved tensions differently—the Steins by separating emotionally, the Judsons by separating physically, and the Holts by sharing a joint emotional life under the umbrella of their myth of the happy “upstairs-downstairs” solution.

Other myths also offered a way of allowing a joint emotional life under conditions of great tension. The Livingstons’ myth that “we’re not avoiding each other, we’re just so busy” obscured the frightening thought that they didn’t dare risk the very thing they said they missed—time together. Ann Myerson held to a more private myth: that Robert shared the second shift. This misrepresentation didn’t obscure a struggle between husband and wife; Robert didn’t think he was sharing at home these days. Ann’s belief obscured a subterranean struggle between the side of herself that wanted Robert to share and the less easily acknowledged but more powerful side that didn’t.

There are probably as many marital myths as there are motives to avoid conflict. But the conflict between husbands and wives over male participation at home seems the most widespread. The more couples clash in strategy but want to love each other happily anyway, the more they settle for containing their differences without, alas, resolving them. And the less they resolve their conflicts, the wider their unconscious search for the myths that help contain them. Couples pay a price in authenticity for their marital myths, the price they ultimately pay for coming of age in an era of the stalled revolution.

Even if this first tension between faster-changing women and slower-changing men is resolved, a second one may remain. There were families like the Delacortes whose ideas were “behind the times” in the sense that their ideals were suited to an economy long gone. Both agreed on what each should do at home, and on who deserved credit for what. They had the same exchange rate in their marital economy of gratitude. The strain they felt was due to a clash between a traditional ideal and a thin pocketbook. I found this pattern more common among blue-collar than white-collar couples.

Their traditionalism did not mean that husbands shirked the second shift. Traditional men did slightly more at home than transitional men, partly because they felt guilty they could not be the sole provider. Some husbands also cared for the house because their wives worked a different shift and they were the only ones home. Traditionalism didn’t stop such men from helping; it only meant they
didn’t feel good
about it and that it counted as more of a favor.

The tension for tradition defenders lay not in the second shift
itself but in the fact that their wives worked. And some of their wives felt pushed into working and hated it. Some didn’t feel it was right to blame their husbands, but still clung to their “right” to stay home. Like Carmen, most tried not to complain. But in this very effort, they were managing a conflict between the ideals—separate sexual spheres, male rule—and the reality of their lives. These wives wanted to seem more different and unequal than they were. Hence, Carmen’s strategy of “playing dumb” to draw Frank into the kitchen while leaving his male identity at the kitchen door.

Couples unaffected by the first two sources of tension could still be vulnerable to a third—the assimilation of women to the values of the dominant male culture. I have focused on men crossing the “gender divide” to pitch in with work their mothers used to do. But a troubling trend moves in the opposite direction—women pitching in at the office and acting like their work-consumed fathers. Men and women may share the work at home but do altogether less of it. A strategy of cutting back on the housework, the children, the marriage may be on the rise, with corresponding thinned-out ideas about what people “need.”

Among couples who shared, some were oriented primarily toward work, both playing “father.” Others were more oriented toward the family, both playing “mother.” The first were cutting back equally on family life; the second were cutting back equally on career.

Middle-class couples who put family first often felt at odds with the “commitment norm” in their careers, as did Adrienne and Michael Sherman (the parents of the twins who got into the
motor oil). Adrienne struggled against her chairman’s view of the ideal scholar, Michael with the hopes of his proud parents and priorities of his colleagues. Both struggled with their own inner desire to make scientific discoveries and write great books. They both tried to avoid being total “father.”

Other couples seemed to capitulate to a workaholism à deux, each spouse equitably granting the other the right to work long hours, and reconciling themselves to a drastically reduced conception of family life. One thirty-seven-year-old woman lawyer, married to another lawyer, each of whom was trying to make partner in different firms, commented:

To others, such a siege seemed normal. For example, a thirty-two-year-old accountant married his wife with the understanding that the house “didn’t matter,” they could eat out, cater parties, and engage a “wonderful nanny” for the children. They equitably shared an aversion to anything domestic. Since the “wonderful nanny” tended the children, cleaned house, and cooked meals, the couple had little of the second shift to share.

In their single-minded attention to career, these couples also focused less than others on their children. Their homes were neater; there were fewer paintings stuck to the refrigerator door, fewer toys in the hallway. The decor in the living and dining rooms was more often beige or white. The space where the children played was more clearly separated from the rest of the house.

Such couples shared in whatever family life there was
to
share. Sometimes such marriages degenerated into rivalry. One highly successful businessman and his wife, a lawyer, the parents of a five-year-old son, began to compete for who could be more away from home than the other. As the wife explained: “I found myself doing things all workaholics do—deliberately creating a situation where I had to be at work late. You fritter away time during the day knowing you won’t get all your work done. That way, when Jim called, I could tell him I had to work late without lying.” Each thought of staying home or caring for the child as a defeat. Caring less was a victory. Not until the couple separated did the wife look back at this competition with regret and begin to devote real attention to her son.

In the first group of marriages—like that between Nancy and Evan Holt—tension focused on a clash between the husband’s view of his role at home and his wife’s. In the second group of marriages—like that between Carmen and Frank Delacorte—the tension centered on finding an acceptable way for a man to do a woman’s work. In the third group of marriages, the tension centered on the gap between the care a family needs to thrive and the devaluation of the work of caring for it.

The first tension could be resolved if the Evans of the world shared the second shift. The second tension could be resolved if the Franks could earn enough so the Carmens could stay home. But beneath these issues lay a basic question—tying a shoe, arbitrating a quarrel, reading a story—how much self should go into it?

Over the last thirty years in the United States, more women have gone out to work, and more have divorced. According to the sociologist William Goode, working women divorce at a higher rate
than housewives in the former Soviet Union, Germany, Sweden, and France. Indeed, in France, working women have twice the divorce rate of housewives. So some conclude that women’s work
causes
divorce. In one national survey, Joseph Pleck and Graham Staines found that working wives were more likely than housewives to say they wished they had married someone else and more likely to have considered divorce. But people who conclude that it is women’s work that causes divorce look only at what
women
are doing—earning money, feeling more independent, thinking better of themselves, expecting more of men.
¹

My research suggests something else. Since
all
the wives I studied worked outside the home, the fact that they worked did not account for why some marriages were happy and others were not. What did contribute to happiness was the husband’s willingness to do the work at home. Sharing the second shift improved a marriage regardless of what ideas either had about men’s and women’s roles. A national study of over a thousand married couples conducted by Ronald Kessler and James McRae also found that working wives suffered less distress if their husbands helped with the home and children.
²