The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (29 page)

Supermoming was a way of absorbing into oneself the conflicting demands of home and work. To prepare themselves emotionally, many supermoms develop a conception of themselves as “on-the-go, organized, competent,” as women without need for rest, without personal needs. Both as a preparation for this strategy and as a consequence of it, supermoms tended to seem out of touch with their feelings. Nina Tanagawa reported feeling “numb.” And Barbara Livingston said again and again, “I don’t know what I feel.”

After trying hard to change Evan, Nancy Holt reluctantly cut back her hours at work. As she’d all along planned to do after her second child, Carol Alston willingly cut back hers. After a hopeless succession of quarrelsome baby-sitters, Ann Myerson quit her job. To some women, cutting back felt like a defeat, as it did to Nancy Holt and Ann Myerson. To others, it felt like a great triumph.

Women often prepared emotionally for cutting back by detaching themselves from work-centered friends, renewing friendships with family-centered friends, and generally gathering support for entering a more solitary life at home.

Especially for women in high-powered careers but really for most women who cut back, one major emotional task was to buoy
flagging self-esteem. After taking time off for her first baby, Carol Alston felt depressed, “fat,” “just a housewife,” and wanted to call down the supermarket aisles, “I’m an MBA! I’m an MBA!”

Yet another set of strategies involved cutting back on ideas about “what needs to be done” for the house, the child, the marriage, or oneself, and on efforts to meet those needs.

Cutting back on housework was clear, intentional, and almost across the board for those without maids. Traditional working mothers often began the interview with apologies for the house and felt its state reflected on themselves personally. They either felt badly when the house was messy, or thought they should and it was a wrench to disaffiliate their self-esteem from the look of it.

Egalitarian women did the opposite. They tried hard
not
to care about the house, and proudly told me about things they’d let go. As Anita Judson said with a triumphant laugh, “I’m not the type to wash walls.” Others questioned the need to make beds, vacuum, clean dishes, pick up toys, or even make meals. As Carol Alston explained, “We eat big lunches, and I’m trying to diet, so dinner’s not a big deal.”

On the whole, women cared more about how the house looked than men did. When they didn’t care, they exerted more effort in trying not to care.

After the birth of their first child, every couple I interviewed devoted less attention to each other. Most couples felt as if they were “waiting” to get more time together. As Robert Myerson commented: “We have no time together alone. We’re hanging on until the girls get older.” But when marriage became the main or only way of healing past emotional injuries—as it was for John Livingston—it was
hard
to wait.

In the race against time, parents could inadvertently cut back on children’s needs as well. For one thing, they cut corners in physical care. One working mother commented: “Do kids have to take a bath every night? We bathe Jeremy every other night and then otherwise wash his face and hands. Sort of sponge him off. He’s surviving.” Another mother questioned a child’s need to change clothes every day: “Why can’t kids wear the same pants three or four days in a row? When I was a girl, I had to change into fresh clothes every day, and my favorite clothes went by so quickly.” Another mother shared her philosophy of eating greens: “Joshua doesn’t eat greens anyway. So we fix something simple—soup and a peanut butter sandwich. He won’t die.” Another mother sheepishly complained of housewifely standards for preparing Halloween costumes: “God, these mothers that have their Halloween costumes sewn in September! I go ‘Oh no! It’s Halloween,’ and I dash out and buy something.” Another working mother lowered the standard for considering a child sick. “I send James to day care when he has a cold. I don’t have backup and the other mothers are in the same boat. All the kids there have colds. So he gets their colds. He might as well give them his.”

Sadly enough, a few working parents seemed to be making cuts in the emotional care of their child. Especially when parents received more from their own parents than they are giving their children, they were managing guilt. Trying to rationalize her child’s long hours in day care, one working mother remarked about her nine-month-old daughter that she “needed kids her age” and “needs the independence.” It takes relatively little to cut back on house care, and the consequences are trivial. But not so the needs of a baby.

Some couples who could afford it hired a housekeeper. Others called on mothers, mothers-in-law, or other female relatives for child care though in many cases these women worked as well. Surprisingly
few called on their older children, as Ray Judson did, to share house cleaning or care of younger children.

The main outside help, of course, came from baby-sitters. Sometimes mothers tried to make the baby-sitter “part of the family” or at least to create a strong friendship with her, unconsciously perhaps to assure her loyalty and goodwill. Carol Alston left her six-month-old baby with a “wonderful baby-sitter” for eleven hours a day, and gave the sitter a great deal of credit: “My son should call her ‘mother.’ She’s earned it.” Carol often invited her sitter and husband to dinner and on outings and exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts. But it was hard for Carol to allay the sitter’s doubts that Carol befriended her only
because
she baby-sat the children.

Finally, most women cut back on their own needs. They gave up reading, hobbies, television, visits with friends, exercise, time alone. When I asked her what she did in her leisure, Ann Myerson replied, “Pay bills.” When I asked a bank clerk about her “leisure,” she answered “time at my terminal.” I interviewed no working mothers who maintained hobbies like Evan Holt or Robert Myerson. It was part of the culture of the working mother to give up personal leisure.

Over time, most women combined several strategies—cutting back, seeking outside help, supermoming. There was a big divide between wives who urged their husbands to share the second shift (like Nancy Holt and Adrienne Sherman) and wives who didn’t (like Nina Tanagawa and Ann Myerson).

In part, men’s strategies parallel women’s, and in part they differ. Some men are superdads, the full or near equivalent to supermoms—John Livingston, for example. When their children were young, other men cut back their emotional commitment or hours at work—like Michael Sherman and Art Winfield. Many men let
the house go more, lowered their expectations about time alone with a wife, cut out movies, seeing friends, hobbies. In these ways, some men’s strategies paralleled women’s.

But for men, the situation differed in one fundamental way. By tradition, the second shift did not fall to them, and it was not a “new idea” that they should do paid work. In the eyes of the world, they felt judged by their capacity to support the family and earn status at work, and got little credit for helping at home, so most men were not pressuring their wives to get more involved at home. They got pressured. That was the big difference. Of the 80 percent of men in this study who did not share the work at home, a majority mentioned some pressure from their wives to do so.

Most men resisted. But their wives’ pressure often evoked a number of underlying feelings. “Underneath” Ray Judson’s objections to sharing was the fear of losing control of his wife if he wasn’t the number one earner. Beneath Peter Tanagawa’s resistance was his fear of losing status as a man with the guys back in the valley. Evan Holt feared Nancy was trying to boss him around and get out of caring for him.

For some men, avoiding work at home was a way of “balancing” the scales with their wives. A man may decline to pitch in at home to compensate for his wife’s more rapid advance at work, or in other ways gaining “too much” power. (Women do this “balancing” too.) Underlying all these extra reasons to resist sharing was, finally, the basic fact that it was a privilege to have a wife tend the home. If a man shared the second shift, he lost that privilege.

At least at first, most men gave other reasons for not wanting to share: their career was too demanding. Their job was more stressful. When these rationales didn’t go over, resistant men resorted to the explanation that they weren’t “brought up” to do housework.

Some 20 percent of men expressed the genuine desire to share the load at home, and did. A few men expressed the genuine desire to share but said their wives “took over” at home. As a teacher, and mother of two, put it, “My husband does all the baking. He’d share everything, if I let him.” Some men who shared resisted at
first but grew into it later. But most of these men ended up feeling like Art Winfield: “I share housework because it’s fair and child-rearing because I want to.”

Other men resisted, and in a variety of ways. Some did tasks in a distracted way. Evan Holt forgot the grocery list, burned the rice, didn’t know where the broiler pan was. Such men withdrew their mental attention from the task at hand so as to get credit for trying and being a good sport, but so as not to be chosen next time. It was a male version of Carmen Delacorte’s strategy of playing dumb.

Many men also waited to be asked, forcing their wives to take on the additional chore of asking itself. Since many wives disliked asking—it felt like “begging”—this often worked well. Especially when a man waited to be asked and then became irritated or glum when he was, his wife was often discouraged from asking again.

Some men made “substitute offerings.” Peter Tanagawa supported Nina in her every move at work and every crisis at work, and his support was so complete, so heartfelt, that it had the quality of a substitute offering.

Consciously or not, other men used the strategy of “needs reduction.” One salesman and father of two explained that he never shopped because “he didn’t need anything.” He didn’t need to take clothes to the laundry to be ironed because he didn’t mind wearing a wrinkled shirt. When I asked who bought the furniture in their apartment, he said his wife did, because “I could really do without it.” He didn’t need much to eat. Cereal was fine. Seeing a book on parenting on his desk, I asked if he was reading it. He replied that his wife had given it to him, but he didn’t think one needed to read books like that. Through his reduction of needs, this man created a great void into which his wife stepped with her “greater need” to see him wear clean, ironed shirts, to eat square meals, live in a furnished home, and be up on the latest word on child-rearing.

Many men praised their wives for how well organized they were. The praise seemed genuine but it was also convenient. In the context of other strategies, like disaffiliating from domestic
tasks or reducing needs, appreciating the way a wife bears the second shift can be another little way of keeping her doing it.

How much a working father actually shares housework and parenting depends on the interaction between a husband’s gender strategy (with all its emotional meanings) and the wife’s gender strategy (with all of its emotional meanings). What he does also, of course, depends on outer circumstances as well—shift hours, commute time, lay-off scares—and the meanings these hold for each.

Many couples now
believe
in sharing, but at this point in history few actually do. A new marriage humor targets this tension between promise and delivery. In Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strip, a “liberated” father is sitting at his word processor writing a book about raising his child. He types: “Today I wake up with a heavy day of work ahead of me. As Joannie gets Jeffrey ready for day care, I ask her if I can be relieved of my usual household responsibilities for the day. Joannie says, ‘Sure, I’ll make up the five minutes somewhere.’”

But what often tips the balance between a wife’s gender strategy and her husband’s is the debits and credits in their marital economy of gratitude. Ann Myerson, Nina Tanagawa, Carol Alston, and most wives I talked with seemed to feel more
grateful
to their husbands than their husbands felt toward them. Women’s lower wages, the high rate of divorce, and the cultural legacy of female subordination together created a social climate that made most women feel lucky when their husbands shared “some.” Beneath the cultural “cover-up,” the happy image of the woman with the flying hair, there is a quiet struggle going on in many two-job marriages today. Feeling that change might add yet another strain to their overburdened marriage, feeling already “so lucky,” many women kept cautiously to those strategies that avoid much change in men.

CHAPTER
14

Tensions in Marriage in an Age of Divorce