The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (31 page)

Among the families I’ve described, a number came close to divorce. Two months after I first interviewed them, Anita and Ray Judson separated. John and Barbara Livingston had been about to separate when they sought counseling. The Steins seemed divorced in spirit. In the study as a whole, one out of every eight couples had at some point thought seriously of divorce. Apart from the Livingstons, in every one of these couples, the man avoided the work at home.

Did they avoid their wives in the course of avoiding the second shift or avoid the second shift in the course of avoiding their wives? It was often hard to tell. But wives often felt their husbands’ refusal to help at home as a lack of consideration.

A twenty-six-year-old legal secretary, the mother of two and married to a businessman, said: “Patrick empties the garbage occasionally and sweeps. That’s all. He does no cooking, no washing,
no anything else. How do I feel? Furious. If our marriage ends, it will be on this issue. And it just might.” A thirty-year-old mother of two, who works at word processing, was more resigned: “I take care of Kevin [their son]. I do the house cleaning. I pay the bills. I shop for birthdays. I write the Christmas cards. I’m a single mother already.”

Tom O’Mally, a thirty-eight-year-old engineer, described a harrowing marriage and bitter divorce. For seven years of marriage to his first wife, Tom left all housework and care of their four sons to his wife, a school administrator. He said his wife reasoned with him about it, then argued. Then she tried lists. When that failed, she tried therapy. When that failed, she left, and Tom was faced for the first time with the sole care of their four sons. When asked what caused the divorce, he answered, “Lists.” As he explained:

“So were you doing some of the chores?” I asked.

With her Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday list, his ex-wife reminded me of Nancy Holt. But instead of accommodating to the
extra work at home, his wife kept the list but ended the marriage. Tom O’Mally then married a much younger, less-educated woman who stayed home to tend the house and children. He told his second wife, “
Anything
but a list!”

Men’s resistance to sharing the extra month a year is by no means the only cause of divorce, but it is often a source of tension underlying the others.

In a few cases, a certain reverse of this story occurred. A twenty-eight-year-old saleswoman, Diane Hatch, told of how a marriage of seven years ended when her baby was nine months old. Her husband had always supported her career, the marriage had been stable and the baby planned, she said. But when the baby arrived, and Diane wanted to stay home for six months to care for him, her husband objected, suddenly worrying—she felt needlessly—about their finances. As she put it, “I went back to a job I didn’t want before I was ready.”

At first blush, it seemed that Diane’s husband, Jim, was replacing the old adage “A woman’s place is in the home” with a new one: “A woman’s place is at work.” But Diane went on to explain matters in a way that cast a different light. She said her husband had suffered a blow at work, and she had criticized him strongly, adding one blow to another. He had been extremely involved with the birth of his son, and wanted to share the care of him. Perhaps if things were not going well at work, he wanted to devote more of his identity to being a father. It was when Diane began to crowd him out of his potential role at home that Jim began to urge her back to work. To the utter shock and dismay of family and friends, Jim walked out on his wife and nine-month-old baby. But this may have been why. Some men seek identity within the second shift.

In a telling 1983 study, Joan Huber and Glenna Spitze asked 1,360 husbands and wives: “Has the thought of getting a divorce from your husband (or wife) ever crossed your mind?” They found that more wives than husbands had thought about divorce
(30 percent versus 22 percent) and that wives thought about it more often. How much each one earned had no effect on thoughts of divorce. Nor did attitudes toward the roles of men and women. But the more housework a wife saw her husband do, the less likely she was to think of divorce. As the researchers noted: “For each of the five daily household tasks which the husband performs at least half the time, the wife is about 3 percent less likely to have thoughts of divorce.”
³
(The five tasks were meal preparation, food shopping, child care, daily housework, and meal cleanup.) The researcher also found that if a working wife thinks her husband
should
share housework, she is 10 percent more likely to have thoughts of divorce than if she does not believe this.

In another study, of 600 couples applying for divorce, George Levinger found that the second most common reason women cited for wanting divorce—after “mental cruelty”—was “neglect of home or children.” Women mentioned this reason more often than financial problems, physical abuse, drinking, or infidelity. Among middle-class women who filed for divorce, a man’s neglect of home or children was the single most common complaint, mentioned by nearly half. Both men and women mentioned neglect of home and children: 39 percent of the women, and 26 percent of the men.
⁴

Happy marriage is famously mysterious. But an added ingredient to it these days is some resolution of the extra month a year. As the role of the homemaker is vacated by many women, the homemaker’s work has been devalued and passed on to low-paid housekeepers, baby-sitters, and day-care workers. Like an ethnic culture in danger of being swallowed up by the culture of a dominant group, the contribution of the traditional homemaker has been devalued first by men and now by more women.

In the era of a stalled revolution, one way to reverse this devaluation is for men to share the care of their children not simply as a matter of justice but of wisdom. A South African miner forced
under Apartheid to work eleven months a year in the gold mines, visiting his family in the Homelands (reservations for blacks) only one month a year, said this: “I need to work to support my family, but I miss them terribly, especially my children. I miss the chance for me to bring my children up.”

CHAPTER
15

Men Who Do and Men Who Don’t

O
NE
out of five men in this study were as actively involved at home as their wives. Some, like Greg Alston, shared in a “male” way, doing such things as carpentry; others, like Art Winfield, in a “female” way, as people imagined these ways to be. Since the men who shared the second shift lived happier family lives, I wondered what conditions produced such men. How do men who share
differ
from other men?

They were no more likely than other men to have “model” fathers who helped at home. Their parents were no more likely to have trained them to do chores when they were young. Michael Sherman and Seth Stein both had fathers who spent little time with them and did little work around the house. But Michael became engrossed in raising his twin boys, whereas Seth said hello and good-bye to his kids on his way to and from an absorbing law practice. Sharers were also as likely to have had mothers who were homemakers or who worked and tended the home as non-sharers.

Wives of sharing men eagerly offered complex explanations for why their husbands were so “unusual.” Yet each story differed from the next. For example, one woman explained:

Another wife offered a different explanation: “Dwight is unusually involved at home because his father was away so much in the navy, and his mother stayed home to take care of the kids by herself. I think it was seeing her handle all that by herself that made him want to share, and I thank his mother for training him.”

The “upbringing stories” of such wives often focused on the impact of their husband’s mother. But the only recurring theme I could discover had to do with the son’s disaffiliation from a detached, absent, or overbearing
father.
John Livingston’s father, as he sadly described him, was a recluse who ignored his son. Michael Sherman’s father alternately praised and forgot his. Art Winfield’s biological father disappeared entirely. Many men had bad memories of their fathers, but the men who ended up sharing child care differentiated themselves from their fathers; seeing them as bad examples they vowed
not
to be like. The
most
involved father—Art Winfield, the father who played with the children at his adopted son’s day-care class—was both disenchanted with his real father, a “bad” model of fatherhood, and ardently devoted to his kindly stepfather, a “good” model. What seemed important was the combination of how a man identified with his father and what that father was like—not how much the father had helped around the house.

But most people believed that it was “upbringing”—how much a man helped around the house as a boy—that made the difference.
¹
Evan Holt, who did his hobbies “downstairs” while his wife cared for the “upstairs,” said he was just acting the way he was
“brought up” to act. But Evan didn’t do many other things he was brought up to do, like go to church, avoid using credit cards, or wait to have sex until after marriage. In these areas of life he was his own man. Around the house, he said he was just doing what his mother taught him. The “upbringing” story seemed like a cover for a more illusive psychological predisposition.

Men like Art Winfield and Michael Sherman seemed to have two characteristics in common: they were reacting against an absent or self-centered father, and at the same time, they had sufficiently identified with some male to feel
safe
empathizing with their mothers without fear of becoming “too feminine.”

Did the men who shared the work at home love their wives more? Were they more considerate? It’s true, egalitarian men had more harmonious marriages, but I would be reluctant to say that men like Peter Tanagawa or Ray Judson loved their wives less than Art Winfield or Michael Sherman, or were less considerate. One man who did very little at home said, “Just last week I suddenly realized that my wife’s life is more valuable than mine because my son needs her more than he needs me.” Men who shared were often devoted to their wives, but so were men who didn’t.

Two external factors also did
not
distinguish men who shared from men who didn’t: the number of hours they worked or how much they earned. Husbands usually work a longer “full-time” job than wives. But in the families I studied, men who worked fifty hours or more per week were just
slightly
less likely to share housework than men who worked forty-five, forty, or thirty-five hours a week. In addition, fifty-hour-a-week
women
did far
more
child care and housework than men who worked those hours. Other national studies also show that the number of hours a man works for pay has little to do with the number of hours he put in at home.
²

At first, I also assumed money would loom large. The man who shared, I thought, would need his wife’s salary more than other men, would value her job more, and also her time.

American wives in two-job couples in 1989 and 2006 averaged about one dollar for every three their husbands earn, and this average prevailed among the families I studied too.

In 1980 a wife in a two-job couple, like those in this study, earned thirty-three cents for every dollar her husband earned; today, such women earn seventy-six cents per husband dollar. Earlier many marriages reflected the labor force itself—a pilot married a flight attendant, a secretary married a boss, a dental assistant married a dentist—while today more couples marry those in similar jobs. But when couples’ jobs differ, as they often still do, it is usually the wife who has the less-well-paid—but steadier—job, and the husband who has the higher-paid but unsteady one. Men more typically work in the automotive industry or construction trades, for example, which are more vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, and recession. And among men and women in fulltime jobs in 2010, women earned eighty-one cents for every dollar a man earns.