The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (28 page)

In the history of American fatherhood, there have been roughly three stages, each a response to economic change. In the first, agrarian stage, a father trained and disciplined his son for employment, and often offered him work on the farm, while his wife brought up the girls. (For blacks, this stage began after slavery ended.) As economic life and vocational training moved out of the
family in the early nineteenth century, fathers left more of the child-rearing to their wives. According to the historian John Nash, in both these stages, fathers were often distant and stern. Not until the early twentieth century, when increasing numbers of women developed identities, beyond brief jobs before marriage, in the schoolhouse, factory, and office, did the culture discover the idea that “father was friendly.” In the early 1950s, popular magazines began to offer articles with such titles as “Fathers Are Parents Too” and “It’s Time Father Got Back into the Family.” Today, we are in the third stage of economic development but the second stage of fatherhood.

Men like Michael Sherman and Art Winfield lead the way into that third stage, but they’ve done so privately. They are tokens in the world of new fathers. Lacking a national social movement to support them in a public challenge to the prevailing ideal of manhood, they’ve acted on their own. Not until the other Michael Shermans and Art Winfields step forward, not until a critical mass of men becomes like them, will we end the painful stall in this revolution all around us.

CHAPTER
13

Beneath the Cover-up: Strategies and Strains

I
n the ten marriages I’ve described, the second shift became a forum for each person’s ideas and feelings about gender and marriage. When Evan Holt fixed dinner, Nancy Holt felt Evan was saying he loved her. When Robert Myerson cooked dinner, Ann half the time felt guilty she was failing to protect his more valuable career from family demands. When Frank Delacorte made the pesto sauce for the pasta, it meant Carmen “couldn’t.” When Peter Tanagawa roasted the chicken, it meant he was “helping Nina.” When Ray Judson barbecued the spare ribs, Anita imagined he did it because he liked to, not to help her out. When Seth and Jessica ate the meal the housekeeper cooked, Jessica figured it was her salary that paid the housekeeper, Seth’s salary that paid for the food. The personal meanings of the second shift differed greatly, but to most people they either meant “I am taken care of” or “I am taking care of someone.”

Some personal meanings leaned toward a traditional ideal of caring, and others toward a gender equal ideal. Indeed, a split between these two ideals seemed to run not only between social classes, but between partners within marriages and between two contending voices inside the conscience of a single person. The blue collar tended toward a traditional ideal, and the white collar tended toward a 50-50 one. Men tended toward the first ideal, women toward the second. And Ann Myerson flipped to the
one and flopped to the other. Most marriages were either torn by, or a settled compromise between, these two ideals. In this sense, the split between them ran through every marriage I came to know.

To be sure, I saw important differences in social class. And in the world at large there are far more couples who spend their Saturdays doing laundry, like the Delacortes or the Judsons, and fewer who spend them making out checks to the help like the Steins or the Myersons. The problems of the two-job family are tougher in the working class, but they are difficult in a different way among the affluent as well. What exacerbates the strain in blue-collar marriage is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor day care, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in the upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of careers in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between two ideals of manhood and womanhood runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.

Regardless of the ideal to which a couple aspires, the strain of working shifts often affects men nearly as much as women. It affects women who work the extra month a year in obvious ways—through fatigue, sickness, and emotional exhaustion. But one important finding of this study is that the strain clearly extends to men as well. If men share the second shift it affects them directly. If they don’t share, it affects them through their wives. Michael Sherman shared the emotional responsibility and time it took to do the work at home. He had to redefine his career ambitions, confront the high hopes of his family, and detach himself from the competition of his colleagues. Evan Holt and Seth Stein made no such adjustments, but they paid an enormous price nonetheless—Evan Holt through the resentments so woven into his sexual life and bond with his son, Joey, Seth through the disappearance of his wife and children into lives of their own.

When I began this research, I naively imagined that a person’s view of gender would cohere as a cognitive and emotional “piece.” I imagined this view would go with how he or she wanted to divide the second shift. Couples who believed in 50-50 would share more, those who believed in 70-30 would share less. But I discovered amazing fractures. Peter Tanagawa supported his wife’s career “a hundred percent,” but grew red in the face at the idea that she would mow the lawn, or that his daughters, when teenagers, would drive a car to school. Many men like Evan Holt lauded their wives’ careers. They pointed out that their wives wanted to work. It made their wives more interesting, and it gave the couple more in common. But when it came to a man’s part in the work at home, the underlying principle changed. For Robert Myerson the principle seemed to be that a man should share the work at home “if his wife asks him.” For Peter Tanagawa, a man should pitch in so long as she’s doing a bit more.
¹

More important were the contradictions between what a person said they believed about men and marital roles, and what they seemed to feel about them. Some people were egalitarian “on top” and traditional “underneath” like Seth Stein or traditional on top and egalitarian underneath like Frank Delacorte.

Sometimes the deep feelings that evolved in response to early cautionary tales
reinforced
the surface of a person’s gender views. For example, Carmen Delacorte’s dread—that she would face the same struggles her mother had as a disparaged single mother—strongly reinforced her idea that women should find male protection through submission to them. On the other hand, Nancy Holt’s fear of becoming a “doormat,” like her mother, infused emotional steam into her belief that Evan ought to share 50-50 at home. Ray Judson’s childhood loss of his mother and his current fear of losing
his wife reinforced his idea that a man needs to get a woman dependent on him so that she won’t take off.

For other people, covert feelings seemed to subvert the surface of their gender ideology. For example, Ann Myerson described herself growing up as a tomboy who believed girls were “just as good as boys.” A hard-driving career woman who didn’t begin to consciously want children until she was thirty-two, Ann felt similar to her husband, Robert, in her needs and desires. Yet for some reason, her role at the office didn’t feel real while her role at home did. Rather than reinforcing her surface attitudes, this underlying feeling prompted her ambivalent “flip-flop” syndrome.

Similarly, on the surface, John Livingston had always been for sharing the provider and homemaker role. But when his daughter, Cary, was born, he felt that Barbara withdrew her attention from him, leaving him abandoned, dependent, and angry. When Barbara returned to her job, he resented her working. But, he felt guilty about resenting her work. In this way his ideology established a certain feeling rule—you shall feel good about your wife working. Yet this feeling rule clashed with his actual feeling—anger that Barbara was so unavailable. Since it was John’s habit to withdraw when he was angry, he withdrew. This withdrawal and Barbara’s upset in response to it spiraled into the conflict which, in their “overbusyness,” they avoided.

The first year of Cary’s life, John withdrew emotionally from Barbara and established himself as second to Barbara in the care of Cary, and as champion of the idea that “someone” needed to care for her more. Insofar as work permitted, he did not resist sharing the second shift; he did it, but he resisted forgiving Barbara for her emotional withdrawal from him. All the minute ways in which John sought to interrelate what he thought (his gender ideology), what he felt (upset by Barbara’s withdrawal), and what he did (to work long hours and to cut back on time for the marriage)—this complex of thought, feeling, and action together—constitute his “gender strategy.” And the interplay of his gender
strategy and that of his wife determined how they actually divided the second shift.

Everyone I interviewed, in one way or another, developed a gender strategy. In some, the surface of a gender ideology strongly conflicted with underlying feelings, in others they didn’t. In some, the feeling rule was “We
should want
to share the second shift,” “We shouldn’t be angry about
having
to share, or angry at the deprivations it might entail” (for example, the Shermans). In others, the feeling rule was to feel ashamed to “have to” share it (the Delacortes). But what a man or woman wanted to do usually did not completely explain what they did. For always a dance was in motion with another.

Most women who wanted 50-50 did one of two things. They married men who planned to share at home or they actively tried to change him afterward. Before she had children, Adrienne Sherman took the risky step of telling her husband, “It’s share or it’s divorce.” She staged a sharing showdown and won. After she had Joey, Nancy Holt initiated a major crisis in the marriage but backed away from a showdown. Both women confronted their husbands, and caused great upheaval as a result. Other women initiated a series of smaller prods. When she was eight months pregnant and her husband was working nearly all the time, Carol Alston recalls sitting her husband down on the front stairs as he came home from work and saying, “I won’t have this baby if you don’t emotionally prepare for it with me.” Though she didn’t really mean she wouldn’t have the baby, she was making an important point. Still other women initiated exhaustive talks, which brought their men around.

Over half the working mothers I interviewed had tried one way or another to change roles at home. One reason the effort is so common among women is that they bear the weight of a contradiction between traditional views about men and women and modern circumstances.
Unless they assume the extra work of trying to change a common habit, it is usually they who work the extra month a year. If women lived in a culture that presumed active fatherhood, they wouldn’t need to devise personal strategies to bring it about.

Women also tried to change marital roles indirectly. This was a primary strategy for traditional working mothers who desperately needed help at home but who couldn’t call on a husband to share the load because they didn’t believe in such a thing. Facing such a dilemma, Carmen Delacorte “played helpless” at cooking rice, paying bills, and sewing. Some women, like Nina Tanagawa, used physical illness as a half-conscious signal of distress. One highly successful businesswoman, Susan Pillsbury (a woman who described herself as “sharing equally” with her husband), told this story:

Even women who abhorred “female wiles” sometimes resorted to them. Nancy Holt felt it demeaned women to withhold sex from their husbands in order to angle for something they wanted. But when Evan persistently refused to share, Nancy did withhold sex, and felt remorse about doing so.

In contrast to strategies designed to change roles, supermoming was a way of doing both shifts
without imposing
on their husbands. About a third of mothers pursued this strategy. They put in long hours at the office but kept their children up very late at night to get time with them. Many believed that the extra month was theirs to work. Others wished their husbands would share but didn’t feel they had enough moral credits in the “marital bank” to persuade them to do more.