Like many traditional couples, the Delacortes were a curious mixture of old and new. They thought, talked, and felt in traditional ways, but they had to live with the stubborn realities of modern life. They aspired to male rule, but had backed into gender democracy. Frank wanted to be the kind of man whose wife didn’t have to work, but in truth he needed her wage. Carmen wanted to take exclusive care of their home but she actually needed Frank’s help. Frank believed the kitchen was Carmen’s domain, but he worked there anyway. He enjoyed the idea of separate spheres for men and women, but often found himself beside Carmen picking canned goods off the supermarket shelf or working their hand calculator to monitor the relentless contest between their modest wages and steadily rising prices. Carmen wanted to strip her work of any meaning except financial. But the awkward fact was that she liked her work and it gave her a power she readily used, ironically, to “give” Frank his dominance and to “work” her subordination. As long as they needed Carmen’s wage, she would have a troubling power that subverted their shared ideal.
By discrediting cultural models of female assertion, by strictly confining her tendency to dominate to the female sphere, by “remembering William,” by raising Frank above her—Carmen pursued submission. She squelched her assertion outside the home and magnified feelings of dependence.
Their traditionalism fit neither the outer nor inner realities of their lives. The outer reality was that Frank needed Carmen to earn money and Carmen needed Frank’s help with housework and child care. The inner reality was that Frank was not dominant and Carmen was not submissive. What contained both contradictions was the family myth that “Frank did little around the house.”
Both the Delacortes and the Holts jointly shared a belief about how they divided the labor of the home, and in both cases, the belief was a myth. The Holts said that their upstairs-downstairs arrangement was equal. The Delacortes said theirs was unequal. Both stories reflected what the couple wanted to believe, which clashed, in turn, with some important reality and created a tension that their “cover story” hid and managed.
By itself, a gender ideology doesn’t tell us how much of the second shift the husband of a working mother does. In general, the traditional men in my study actually did slightly more around the house than transitional men who supported the idea of their wives working but felt those wives should also care for the home. Most strongly egalitarian men did share.
What tells us more about how much the husband of a working mother does at home is the interplay between the couple’s particular gender ideologies, the economic realities of their lives, and the gender strategies through which they reconcile these. Carmen was a tradition defender whose strategy of playing helpless got an untraditional result—a busy man in the kitchen. On the other hand, after her fierce feminist battle, Nancy ended up with a traditional result. In the Holt family, of course, it was Evan who played helpless.
Unlike Evan, Frank didn’t dissociate “fairness” from sharing the second shift—he wasn’t trying to be fair in Nancy’s sense. He didn’t, like some men who had committed themselves to fifty-fifty, try to get out of it by pretending to share. Nor did Frank claim to be in the grips of his career or to suffer more on-the-job stress. Without fanfare, he pitched in.
Nancy’s strategy was to push for a change. When that failed, she resorted to female wiles she didn’t believe in. Her sexual disinterest and her overabsorption with Joey were also daily reminders to Evan of the emotional costs of his refusal.
Nancy Holt’s experience tells how a woman tries to get a failed strategy behind her and feel all right about it. Carmen didn’t have that work to do. But both stories suggest ways in which early experience creates the emotional steam behind a certain version of womanhood and manhood. Both stories show ways of maintaining the façade of a gender identity when such things as the resistance of a spouse or the limits of a family budget undercut the essence of it.
As economic pressures force more reluctant, home-centered women into low-paid jobs in the expanding service sector, the Delacortes’ way of reconciling tradition with modern life may become more common. But what happened to Frank and Carmen may also happen to others. The last I heard, Frank had a falling out with his foreman and lost his job. As they drew together against this rough luck, they often said to themselves, “Thank God for Carmen’s job.”
CHAPTER
6
A Notion of Manhood and Giving Thanks: Peter and Nina Tanagawa
PETER Tanagawa, a dark-haired man of thirty-three with twinkly brown eyes that express exuberance, leans forward in the leather chair of the small office attached to a technical books store. Speaking in a low voice, he sums up something small but key: “Nina wants me to do more with the kids, to be more concerned with their education and development, be more of a family person. And I am! But not as much as she is.”
The issue of how much of a “family person” he should be was not new for Peter. Early on in their vibrant courtship, riding bicycles, talking for hours on end, Peter and Nina had explored their ideas about “men” and “women,” as couples do. Nina had wanted to anchor her identity at home, to ground only what was psychologically left over at work. In this she stood between Carmen Delacorte (who wanted to stay home and put Frank out in the world) and Nancy Holt (who wanted to balance herself and Evan equally between home and world). When Nina and Peter first met, each was attracted to the way the other felt about the roles of men and women. Peter’s career in book sales, they agreed, would take priority over any job Nina would pick up, but she’d want to pick up something. They were right for each other, both transitionals.
But tension developed. Like Nancy Holt, Nina Tanagawa pressed Peter to do more at home, and like Evan, Peter resisted. But because Nina started on more traditional footing, she was to turn to an irresistible job offer as the reason she was venturing further into the world, and as the reason he should do more at home.
As a child growing up in a close-knit Japanese community in Hawaii, Peter had been his mother’s favorite and distant from his father, who worked long hours and came home tired and distracted. Now, as a father himself (his two children, Alexandra and Diane, were five and three), he felt more engrossed in their lives—like a mother—and more discontent with his book business than his views of manhood would allow. He seemed to need Nina between himself and the children for things to feel right.
Nina, a stunning, slender blue-eyed blonde of thirty-three, is slightly shy in manner. When I interviewed her in the evening at home, she seemed still ready for the office, dressed in a white skirt and jacket—a fairy princess in a business suit. Like her father, Nina is resourceful and practical. Her mother, a lifelong housewife and busy volunteer, had been intermittently restless with her husband’s refusal to allow her to work. Nina had long expected to be the center at home. Yet she was now inadvertently drawn by her own success toward a desire to be the linchpin of Telfac’s personnel department. Gradually she was shedding the feminine identity she’d had when she was twenty—or was she?
PETER’S STRATEGY: EMOTIONAL SUPPORT INSTEAD OF INVOLVEMENT
Peter believes that Nina should tend the home not because her anatomy is her destiny, not because God intended men to dominate women, nor because Peter earns more money. Peter believes she should tend the home because she is more interested and competent in it and has freely chosen to put her time and energy into it. Nina agrees. Accordingly, she does 70 percent of the child care and about 80 percent of the housework. (They agree on this estimate.) Nina stays home if the children are sick; she retrieves a child’s forgotten jacket from a friend’s house; she waits for the new sofa to be delivered. Although Peter describes his daughters as “daddy’s girls” and he seems to me to do quite a bit around the house, they both agree that he has little responsibility for the daily work of caring for them.
One evening when I was visiting their home, Nina took the children upstairs to bed to say their prayers; Peter whispered to me, pleased and proud, “No
w they’re getting quality time.” Then, since I had asked both parents to go through the evening as they normally would, he settled down with the newspaper. He saw his parental role as supporting Nina’s. He mothered Nina; Nina mothered the children.
This did not mean Peter was not an able, interested father. Both agree he is more intuitive about the children’s feelings. For example, he is quick to sense just what favor to Diane had made Alexandra feel slighted. He knows when Alexandra is really hurt and when she is faking it. Often he tells Nina, and Nina does something about it. Nina tends the children’s physical needs, organizes their social lives, and in a kindly way administers them. An absence of warm communication with her own mother had left Nina slightly anxious about being a good mother herself, so she welcomes Peter’s appreciation, and Peter appreciates Nina’s mothering.
At one remove from the children, Peter is enormously interested in them. When he talks to me about himself, he weaves in extraneous reminders of his wife and children. Unlike many men, he describes his typical workday morning with a consensual “we”—as in “We get up at six.” When he describes a typical day, his work seems an interlude between more emotionally charged periods of time with his family:
Nina will get up first and take a shower. When the door closes, that’s my cue to get up. I go downstairs and make coffee for both of us, and while the water is heating, the paper arrives. I glance at the front page, the sports page, then read the business section, make the coffee, bring the paper and two cups of coffee upstairs, as she’s coming out of the bathroom. She and I both drink coffee. Then Nina brings out Diane, our youngest child. I start to change her clothes, and put her on her little potty seat. Then I towel her off so she’s fresh and put on her day clothes. Alexandra is getting up and I dress her in her school uniform—she needs the attention when she sees me doing it for Diane, it’s not that she needs the assistance. So I do it with that understanding.
In contrast, Peter’s description of his workday is brief and perfunctory: “I arrive at work at eight-thirty or nine. Then once I get there, it’s just another daily routine. I leave around five or five-thirty.” Once home, Peter disappears upstairs to change into his jeans (after work, Nina remains in her white business suit). He describes mealtime, bath time, and quality time all in spontaneous, appreciative, and loving detail, recalling just what Nina had packed in Alexandra’s lunchbox, exactly which clothes she had laid out for Diane.
In Nina’s account of her typical day, the morning is short, a matter of warmly, efficiently dispatched routine. The detail begins when she gets to the first morning meeting, the calls and appointments over an impending crisis at the company. She slows down to talk at length about the challenging issues that would come before an important committee next week, and about a bristling rivalry between two members of her staff. Just as Peter lives less intensely at his office than he had intended, Nina lives more intensely than she had intended at hers.
Far more than most men who did not share, Peter could visualize clearly just what sharing would be like. Recalling the preparations for Alexandra’s fifth birthday, he describes a vast array of tasks he has not done:
I’ve done nothing for Alexandra’s birthday party this weekend except wrap a few gifts. Nina’s the one who has had to write out the invitations, order the cake, buy Alexandra all her presents, figure out where we’re going, figure out the lunch menu for the kids. That has all been her responsibility, and I think she would like me to participate more in this. I did the decorations, blew up the balloons, threw the confetti all over the place. And I made all twenty-two sandwiches and set up the Betamax. But Nina still does 70 percent to my 30 percent.
Like Frank Delacorte, Peter probably did more to make the children have a good time than he wanted to imagine. One evening when I was having dinner with them, Diane began to whimper and suddenly threw up some purple chewing gum. The two parents spontaneously leapt to their feet; Peter rushed to Diane, and Nina rushed for the mop. Peter comforted the child: “It’s okay, Diane. Your tummy’s okaaaay.” After cleaning up the floor, Nina took Diane’s clothes off to be washed. Nina seemed like the maid of the house—putting in a load of laundry, changing a lightbulb, packing the lunches, calling the sitter. Peter was the nanny, the understander and comforter. To reconcile the conflict between their views about men and women and the inner reality of their personalities, they developed a family myth: Nina was “naturally more interested in and better with children.”
NINA’S COLLISION COURSE
In 1973, Nina Tanagawa was one of five women in her entire college class to go on to earn a master’s degree in business administration. In the early 1970s, when just a few companies were beginning to see the profit in female talent from top business schools, Nina was hired to work in the personnel department of Telfac, a large and expanding computer company. The job was enjoyable, challenging, and it paid enough to put Peter through business school.
Nina leapt with astonishing speed through the managerial ranks from one promotion to another, until her salary put her in the top half of 1 percent of women nationally. She was five years younger than the youngest employee at her level in the company, and one of the top three women in the entire company; the other two had no children. By either female or male standards, she was a fabulous success.
After Nina had worked for five years in the company, the Tanagawas began their family. First came Alexandra. Nina took a year off to stay home with her. Looking back, she felt it had been the right thing to do. She sang songs to Alexandra, wallpapered her room in candy stripes, and sewed her tiny jumpers. But Nina also admitted to feeling bored taking care of the baby alone at home; she shouldn’t have felt bored, she thought, but she did. She also thought she was becoming boring to Peter. So her reason for going back to work, as she told me, was to “be a better wife.” Then, when her boss called to ask if she wanted to come back to work part time, she hired a housekeeper/baby-sitter and, despite her reservations, jumped at the chance.
When there was a fall in the computer market, Nina was put in charge of the company’s “unhiring” program in several offices, and her hours increased. In the evenings, after Alexandra was in bed, she would read reports and write memoranda about her “unhired clients.” To maintain her managerial image, she arrived half an hour earlier than her staff in the morning and stayed half an hour later at night. When staff members stayed late, she bit her tongue and left first. Under the watchful eyes of conscientious coworkers and subordinates, her work hours steadily increased. As Nina recalled: “I came back to work three days a week, then four days a week. But the job grew too rapidly. I was running—go, go, go! I’d drop into bed at night and realize I’d been working for seventeen hours a day.”
After about two years of this, their second child, Diane, was born. This time she stayed home for six months before she once again received a call from her boss and once again went back. But this time there was more to do at home and less of her to go around. As Nina put it: “The house got messier. There was that much more laundry with two kids, more dinner action and noise.”
She had hired a housekeeper who said, “No windows, no floors and I leave at five-thirty.” So after long sieges of work during the week, Nina became the consummate housewife and mother on Saturdays. On Sunday mornings, when Peter played tennis, Nina washed the children’s hair, cut their fingernails, and cleaned house. As she put it wryly, “Peter lets me take over a lot.” In one sense, though, it was a relief to take over.
All the top brass of Nina’s computer company were workaholics, actually or virtually single. At first she tried to pretend to be as involved as they were. But one day, just as Nina was beginning to feel she couldn’t pretend anymore, her boss burst into her office with a broad smile: “Congratulations! You’ve just been promoted!” Well-wishers crowded into her office to celebrate, and Nina felt pleased and flattered. But as she drove home that night, what would prove a lengthy depression was already taking hold. She recalled hearing a speake
r at an office seminar on work and family life declare, “I don’t know of a working mother who can balance a career, children, and marriage; one of these has to give.” Nina remembered secretly thinking, I’m proving you wrong. Now she wasn’t sure.
Peter supported Nina’s career, in the way transitional men do. He talked with her about her problems at work, he soothed her brow at night. He worried about her health. He did a bit more here, a bit more there at home. But even these bits seemed to take reminders. As Nina put it: “I say to him, ‘Do you want to bathe the kids tonight or do you want to clean up the kitchen?’ Because if I don’t, he’ll go watch TV or read the paper.”
Nina hinted that she needed help. But she put it in such a way that her job, not she, was doing the asking. Unlike Nancy, she didn’t say a word about “fairness.” She stuck to the job offer: she didn’t want to say yes but how could she possibly say no?
Peter heard the hints, but took them as signs of “Nina’s problem.” So in time, Nina let her fatigue speak to him. Great rings appeared around her eyes. She had grown almost alarmingly thin. She even began to move and talk listlessly. Finally, she confided to Peter that she was getting close to a certain emotional edge. Instead of having a nervous breakdown, however, she got pneumonia and took the first ten days of pure rest she had taken since Diane’s birth. It was as if her illness had said what she herself could not: “Please help. Be a ‘mother’ too.” Although Peter was concerned about Nina, he considered the problem to be a conflict between her career and her motherhood.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 10