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.
Carmen was an ardent traditionalist. (One woman in my study was so eager to be the traditional wife that she tried to get pregnant “by accident” so she could drop out of college and marry, had the word “obey” put back into her marriage ceremony, worked “because my husband told me to,” dressed mainly in pink, and named her cat “Pretty Kitty.” But even this woman’s traditionalism was less ardent than Carmen’s.) Carmen very much looked up to Nancy Reagan and very much down on Gloria Steinem. Even within her Latino blue-collar culture of women trapped in low-paid, dead-end jobs, she was far more deeply convinced of her desire to stay home and submit to her husband. Women in her position often wished they worked shorter hours, at better jobs and pay, but most such women did want to work. Only 10 percent of women in this study could be counted as “traditional” in the sense of not wanting to ever work, although I suspect the numbers nationwide are larger. What so appealed to Carmen about being a traditional woman was being subordinate to Frank. As she told me excitedly: “I don’t want to be equal with Frank. I don’t want to be equal in work. I want to be feminine. I want to have frilly things. I don’t want to compete with men! Heck! I don’t want to do what my husband’s doing. Let him do it. Maybe that’s it—I want to be taken care of.”
Carmen went on: “I want Frank to know more than I do. I don’t want my children to be brought up thinking, ‘Oh, Mom knows it all, and Dad’s just a painting on the wall.’ I take pride in Frank knowing more. Maybe that’s wrong, but I take pride in it.”
A bright but uninspired student in high school, Carmen had gone no further, but had followed a narrow path of clerical jobs from which day care seemed a welcome relief. She considered her lack of higher education a virtue, for she thought it made her inferior to Frank—who “knew more” even though he had also ended his education the same way. Carmen applied the same principle in bed: the more Frank knew, the more dominant he was, the better. She said: “I don’t want to be his equal in bed. I want him to dominate me! I don’t want to dominate him. I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, this is the way you make love to me.’”
Carmen thought that dominating women were committing a serious sin—right up there with homicide and child abuse. One dangerous avenue to female dominance, she felt, was a successful career. Pursing her lips in disgust, she told me of an “overly” ambitious sister-in-law who got a Ph.D. in veterinary science—“a Ph.D. in bullshit,” she hissed—and as a consequence bossed people around and never married.
Carmen disliked ambitious women partly because she felt they were pushing her kind of women out of style. It was bad enough that rising prices were forcing women out of their homes; what was worse, the daytime TV soap operas she followed avidly while the children napped were featuring selfish career women who stole the allure from domestic-minded women. Today, Carmen’s kind of women were being portrayed as overweight, depressed, abandoned—as losers. Women who believed in being a housewife were the latest endangered species. Career-minded women were taking over everywhere. She saw the women’s movement as an upper-class fad. As Carmen put it, “Betty Ford is for women’s liberation, right? But has she mopped the floor yet? Beautiful nails, face lift, hair done, and I’m there nails broken, hair a mess, and I’m thinking, sure, lady, tell me all about it…. Instead of parading around, Gloria Steinem should sit down and watch a soap opera. They tell you the way it really is. She should take off her rose-colored glasses and really look.”
On the basis of these views it might at first seem that, by temperament, Carmen was a dependent person. But the truth was Carmen believed in the wilting violet. It was part of her gender ideology. She actively pursued it. This was probably because she feared that without some cultural constraint, she could end up dominating Frank.
Why did Carmen hold this view of the sexes and not some other? I think it might have worked like this: in young adulthood, she matched her qualifications with the real world—no college, no typing experience, and few interesting, well-paid, respectable jobs out there for women without these. As she explained in exasperation: “I’m not prepared to go out and sit on my butt and be a secretary. I know how to type, but not fifty words a minute. What am I going to do? Scrub floors? I should have prepared for such a career [typing] but I didn’t, okay? My mother gave me a good education but I didn’t take advantage of it. It’s my fault, okay? But I’m not on welfare and I’m not on food stamps. I’m trying to help my husband.” Carmen couldn’t support herself alone without dropping into poverty; better to support herself through marriage. If her husband needed her to work, fine. That’s how it was for families these days.
Several other high school—educated women in this study who were equally trapped in low-paid clerical or sales jobs did want to like their job and share the work at home. Lack of job opportunities didn’t totally predict women’s view
s on gender.
A more internal motive seemed to be involved as well. Like Nancy Holt, Carmen wanted to avoid the fate of her mother. If Nancy was in flight from her mother’s self-belittling life as a housewife, Carmen Delacorte may have become a traditionalist in response to her mother’s tough life as an “independent woman.” Her mother was a model of a self-made career woman, and to Carmen a dangerous one. Carmen’s mother was a spunky, gifted woman who married at eighteen, got pregnant at twenty, and divorced at twenty-two. The marriage had been a disaster. Her father never sent child support and called Carmen for the first time in thirty years the day he died of cancer. Carmen described her mother’s life with empathy: “In that society, when a woman becomes divorced or a widow, there is nothing else to do except ‘dress the saints’ [put clothes on the statues of saints in the church on holidays] for the rest of your life. You don’t get remarried. You don’t date. When my mother got divorced, she was a young woman, so her father started to run her life.”
Alone with her baby, Carmen’s mother ventured to the United States working her way up from assistant file clerk to file clerk to junior auditor to senior auditor in an expanding insurance company. The two lived in a tiny apartment with two other divorced Latino women and their children, until Carmen’s mother got remarried (when Carmen was sixteen) to a cabinetmaker who drank too much.
Reflecting on how she would have fared in her mother’s situation, Carmen visibly recoiled. “I would never want my mother’s life! Never, never! I don’t think I could be like my mom because my mom didn’t have anybody to fall back on.”
Gloria Steinem would have drawn entirely different lessons from the struggles of a single mother, and in fact did. The trials of Carmen’s mother would have seemed textbook examples of why society should finally prevent wife battery, discourage the double standard, and ensure that divorced men continue to support their children. But sizing up her situation, Carmen drew a cautionary lesson: Don’t go out on your own. If her mother had only submitted more to her husband, hidden her intelligence, checked her initiative, maybe Carmen’s father would have stayed. The equation seemed to be this: it’s a cold world for women outside of marriage. So a woman has to marry. If she is to succeed in marriage, she can’t be the dominant type. To avoid dominance, she should try to feel subordinate, and if she can, she should project an image that is delicate, fragile, and innocent of much knowledge. If Carmen could manage to feel or to seem this way, she reasoned, Frank would always stay. For her, women were by nature as likely to be bright and powerful as men; but it was their duty as women to press their natural personality and I.Q. into the “wilting violet” mold. For her, female subordination was not sexism. It was a shield against it.
Once established, certain things followed from Carmen’s line of thinking. One had to do with her relationship with Frank, the other with the second shift. Given her perception of what she could do, she wanted to be traditional. That called on her to be demure, soft-spoken, sweet, passive, and quiet. But, in fact, Carmen was loud, colorful, engaging, active, willful, and bright. In her occasional heated discussions with Frank, neighbors in the apartment below could hear Carmen’s loud voice rising with rhetorical flourish, falling, and coursing through long explanations of something. Then they heard Frank’s voice: low, mild, appeasing, steady. In the supermarket, Frank politely followed the unspoken traffic rules of shopping-cart life, but Carmen bumped carts that blocked her way. She sometimes took the offensive in family quarrels. She had, for example, pushed Frank to “stand up for himself” when his father chided him for giving up a promising job he once had as a bank clerk. But the morning after such occasions, she scolded herself for having the “wrong” personality for the kind of woman she aspired to be.
In her youth, she told me: “I had a boyfriend everybody loved, and we thought we were going to marry. But I was awfully dominating. He left me and I always thought he would come back, but he didn’t. Mother always says, ‘Don’t forget William.’”
Married life after the first three years was harmonious, but Carmen and Frank had had one telling showdown. One day, Frank was complaining that Carmen had shown poor judgment in making a payment on a new chair (which could wait) before paying the rent (which could not). According to Carmen, “Frank said to me, ‘Since I’m making the most money, I can make most of the decisions.’ I said, ‘What?! Wait a minute! Forget it! Just because you’re making more money doesn’t mean anything. I’m still working.’ I told him, ‘Do you really believe that?’ And he said with a smile, ‘Well, not really. I just thought I’d give it a try.’”
All in all, for Frank, the veneer of Carmen’s submission would do. He liked Carmen, plucky as she was. Her spunk was no big deal; he wasn’t threatened in the least. Getting her personality in line with her ideology was her dilemma, not his.
USING ONE SIDE OF TRADITIONALISM TO GET AROUND THE OTHER
Carmen wanted to be submissive. She wanted Frank to earn the bread while she tended the home. When I asked her what she would do with a million dollars, she laughed raffishly and began naming all the pieces of furniture she’d buy and describing the grand apartment house she’d buy for her mother. Then, slowing down, she carefully explained how the money would not affect the separation of male and female spheres: “With that kind of money you would have teas, coffees, showers, benefits to go to. Then I’d have the kids over for Kool-Aid. I’d just be Mom.” If they had a million dollars, and if Frank didn’t have to work, would he stay home? I asked. “Absolutely not! The children would not respect him if he stayed home. He’d hate himself and after a while he’d hate me. And if I didn’t want to do the housework, I’d pick on him to do it. At least he should get in the car and play golf for two hours, do something outside the house.”
But back in the real world a practical problem arose: How could Carmen manage all of the second shift? After her first baby was nine months old, Carmen started caring for other children in her home again. Despite her views on women, her needs were no different from those of other working moms: she desperately needed Frank’s help. But this need aroused strongly contradictory feelings. On one hand, she really needed help. On the other hand, the house was supposed to be “her turf.” She said she didn’t care much about Frank’s sharing the second shift—his help might be nice but it wasn’t worth a big fuss. Besides, it might seem dominating of her to make him help in the kitchen. Indeed, to the extent that Frank was not in the kitchen, Carmen was proud. When Carmen described their division of housework, it was as if she had to concede how much Frank helped. She interpreted his involvement in her housework as her failure, and in this respect differed from other women who boasted about all their husbands did at home. Carmen described Frank’s contribution to shopping, paying the bills, cleaning up, in the manner of a confession: “Okay, Frank and I are equal in the sense that we do some of the housework together.” But she immediately began to talk about the dangers of sexual equality. “Equality” made a wild leap to “competition” and another long leap to antagonism and divorce.
How was she to manage the contradiction between the desire to keep Frank out of the kitchen and the need to have him in it? She left her submissive persona intact by continuing to claim that Frank was “really the boss.” But she also solved her problem by putting an old female custom to new use: she played helpless. It was a stroke of genius; playing helpless allowed her to remain the submissive wife at the front door while also bringing Frank into the kitchen through the back.
The only cost of this strategy might be the low opinion others held of her competence, but that wasn’t a problem. She never asked Frank for help directly, so when he did help, it wasn’t because it was his role, but because Carmen couldn’t do it. Frank cooked the rice when he got home from work—not because he liked to do it, not because he was especially good at it, but because he could cook the rice better than Carmen could. Frank paid the bills because Carmen paid the wrong ones first. Frank sewed (when Carmen’s mother didn’t sew for th
em) because Carmen couldn’t sew. Frank worked the automatic teller for Carmen because she “always forgot” the account’s code number. Frank drove them on shopping trips because Carmen couldn’t drive. Responding to one calculated incompetence after another, Frank had come to do nearly half of the second shift. Perhaps Carmen drew the line there, or maybe Frank did. Half would not have seemed right.
The myth that Carmen was “helpless” saved Frank’s male pride: he could now enter the kitchen as an act of chivalry “to help a lady out.” And it saved Carmen’s female pride: she could tacitly request that Frank share her feminine terrain without being any less of a woman. The myth of female helplessness wouldn’t have worked for all traditional men, and it would have appalled egalitarian men. But it was useful to Carmen and Frank.
A STRATEGY OF INCOMPETENCE
Incompetence was one way to induct traditional men into the second shift. Sickness was another. Carmen had arthritis that “acted up” and prevented her from carrying heavy things. It wasn’t clear that she used sickness like she used helplessness. But curiously, other traditional women I talked with seemed to get sick more often than egalitarian women. And when they got sick, it followed a certain pattern. Insisting that every task at home was theirs, they worked heroically until they finally fell ill with exhaustion. They didn’t stop; their illness stopped them. Sometimes it was pneumonia, sometimes migraines, a bad back, arthritis. Then their husbands, primed to help out in an emergency, “lent a hand.” Upon recovering, the woman returned to her double load, plunged full steam ahead, and eventually became sick again. Getting sick could have something in common with “getting” incompetent: both were ways of receiving indirectly what many egalitarian women received directly—a man’s labor in the second shift. The 11 percent of women in this study who reported themselves as traditional all reported being ill more often than their husbands, and more often than other women.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 9