The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (2 page)

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 occurs 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?

Nearly all my women students want to have full-time jobs and rear children. How will this work out? Sometimes I ask women students, “Do you ever talk with your boyfriends about sharing child care and housework?” Often they reply with a vague “Not
really.” I don’t believe these lively, inquiring eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old students haven’t thought about the problem. I believe they are afraid of it. And since they think of it as a “private” problem, each also feels alone. At twenty-two, they feel they have time. But in a short ten years, many are likely to fall into a life like that of my harried bank clerk. I have explored the inner lives of two-job families in the faith that taking a very close look now can help these young women find solutions for the future that go far beyond an infant box and luck.

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks in many directions. First of all, thanks to the National Institutes of Mental Health for generous funding of this research and to Elliot Liebow of the Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems for administrative support. Many thanks to Troy Duster, chair of the Institute for the Study of Social Change, and longtime friend, for offering me an office, a file cabinet, and an atmosphere of warm support. My warm thanks to the research team that helped me conduct the research: Amanda Hamilton for help with preliminary interviews; Elaine Kaplan for interviewing and coding; Lynett Uttal for help with coding and statistical analysis; Basil Browne for help in distributing over 400 questionnaires to employees of a large Bay Area company; Brian Phillips for his excellent typing, and his encouragement even when the drafts seemed endless (“This one again? But I liked the last draft.”); Virginia Malcolm and Joanna Wool and Pat Frost for their interest in the project as well as their careful transcriptions; and thanks for additional pages of perceptive commentary from Pat Frost. For help in library research, thanks to Wes Ford and Grace Benveniste. For historical references, thanks to Susan Thistle. To my research assistant and collaborator, Anne Machung, my enormous thanks and a hug. Anne conducted nearly half of the interviews, did all that it took to keep the interviews confidential, did the lion’s share of some very complex coding, and put parts of our data on computer. She administered the project and helped a
continual stream of out-of-town scholars, curious students, and volunteers that knocked on the door of our office at the Institute for the Study of Social Change. I have fond memories of those Thursday afternoon discussion sessions with Anne Machung, Elaine Kaplan, Lynett Uttal, Wes Ford, and Junko Kuninobi, a visiting scholar from Japan. Although I did all of the on-the-scene observations and writing, the initial research has all our hearts in it. Only when the project came to a close and I sat down to write and think alone did the comradely “we” become the “I” with which I write.

For helpful readings of early, off-the-mark drafts, and for loving me as deeply as they have, I am ever grateful to my parents, Ruth and Francis Russell. For their good advice, thanks to Todd Gitlin, Mike Rogin, Lillian Rubin, and Ann Swidler. For rescuing me in my hour of need, my loving thanks to Orville Schell and Tom Engelhardt. Thanks also to Gene Tanke, whose support and help at an earlier stage means a great deal. And to Nan Graham of Viking Penguin, whose faith in me, editorial guidance, and emotional beauty mean more than I can say. Thanks also to Beena Kamlani, who saw this book through production with grace and competence.

I would like to thank the graduate students who attended my seminar in the Sociology of Gender in the spring of 1986, on whom I first tried out the idea that there is a “his” and “hers” of industrialization.

I also want to thank the couples in this study. Although they were busy, they generously allowed me into their homes and into their lives in the faith that this research would help couples in similar situations to understand more about themselves. To protect their identities, I have transposed episodes and changed identifying characteristics. Some people may not see themselves exactly as I did, but I hope they find a mirror here that is faithful to important aspects of their experience as pioneers on a new family frontier.

Thanks to Ayi Kwei Armah, who had faith and combed out
the knots with loving patience. Thanks also to Eileen O’Neill for her warm, loving care of Gabriel and David.

Thanks to my husband, Adam, whose idea it was to write this book. One weekend afternoon over ten years ago, as we were hiking up a mountain and I had talked for half the climb about women’s “double day,” Adam suggested on our way down, “Why not write about it?” For that idea, for the good-humored encouragement, and for the love I have felt all along our way, my deepest gratitude.

Thanks to my son David, who sets aside his schoolwork and political and ecological concerns to pitch in with the second shift and regale me with hilarious imitations of figures on the American political scene. Thanks also to Gabriel, who took time away from his dog-walking business and poetry writing to bring me cups of Dr. Chang’s herb tea. To inspire me, he even drafted some fictional case studies of Ted and Mary, Robin and Peter, Dick and Rosemary, Sally and Bill, and Asia and Frank, which are more gripping and action-packed than any the reader will find here. One day, he also left a note on my desk under the tea mug, with a small white bow attached, which said, “Congratulations for finishing, Mom.” No mother could ask for more.

Introduction

In a society marked by individualism, we often think of problems at home as matters of clashing personality (“He’s so selfish,” “She’s so anxious”). But when millions of couples are having similar conversations over who does what at home, it can help to understand just what’s going on outside marriage that’s affecting what goes on inside it. Without that understanding, we can simply continue to adjust to strains of a stalled revolution, take them as “normal,” and wonder why it’s so hard these days to make a marriage work.