The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (11 page)

But for most couples, the tensions between strategies did not so quickly tense up. Nancy pushed 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

A
S
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:

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.

Carmen, twenty-nine, a pretty, black-haired, heavy-set day-care
worker, spoke to me with a spirited voice and dancing hands. She wanted me to know that she did not work because she
wanted
to. That was a point of pride. As she explained: “The only reason I’m working is that every time I go to the grocery store the bill is twenty dollars more. I’m not working to develop myself. I’m not working to discover my identity. No way!” She wasn’t
that
kind of woman, the new kind, the kind who’s off seeking her real self in some office on the thirtieth floor of some high-rise. Ironically, although she didn’t want to like her work, she rather did. She chuckled with obvious enjoyment as she described each child she cared for. A few professional women illustrated the opposite dilemma. One struggling feminist writer despondently confessed, “I
want
to love my work, but I don’t.” Ironically, it was a blessing that Carmen had to work; she got to enjoy her work even if she wasn’t supposed to.

Carmen referred to her day-care job as a “business I run out of my home,” not to be confused with “being a baby-sitter.” Like every day-care worker and baby-sitter I interviewed, Carmen was painfully aware of the low esteem in which the women in America who tend children are held: “They don’t think you’re anything if you’re a baby-sitter.” For women in more “male” and middle-class occupations, this issue of self-esteem didn’t arise.

Frank tried to save his pride by explaining to people that Carmen was “really at home.” This was not exactly a myth, but it was slightly misleading. One notch above him in social class, Frank’s foreman, Bill, could afford to keep his wife home and to tout the correctness of doing so with a certain cutting conviction. Frank drove to work with Bill every day, and next to rising prices, the topic of women came up most often. Frank coughed and explained with some unease: “We were talking about needing extra money, and I told him about the business that Carmen has, and I said, ‘You know, you’ve got a house. Your wife could have a business like Carmen’s. It’s not too bad.’ His attitude was ‘No! No! No! I don’t want anybody to say she’s taking care of children.’ He
feels he lives the way most people should live—the husband working, the wife at home.” Frank believed that Bill opposed the idea of his wife working not because it was too low for her, but because it was too low for
him.
It would rob him of the one luxury that distinguished a foreman from a worker—the domestic services of a full-time wife. I asked Frank how he felt about his foreman’s remark and he said, “I definitely felt he put me down.”

While she cared for their own year-old child, Delia, Carmen earned about $5,000 a year providing day care for four two-year-old children of neighboring mothers who worked. She was one of the many women who have become part of an emergent female underclass of day-care workers, baby-sitters, maids, au pairs, and companions for the elderly—who accomplish for little pay and status the work performed in a bygone era by the woman of the house. Ironically, it was this declining role of housewife that Carmen aspired to fill. She, too, was proud to work at home. Frank never denied that she earned money working at home. But saying “Carmen was home” helped him preserve a notion of himself as sole provider, that was, these days, harder and harder to keep up.