Nina was changing. But had her opinion of him as a man altered? In truth, Peter didn’t want to change, but he also didn’t quite dare especially now that Nina was earning much more than Peter. Nina felt fortunate to be able to add so much money to the family coffers. As she noted: “My salary would make it possible for Peter to get out of technical books, if he wanted, and go into psychology. Sometimes he talks about wanting to become a therapist. He’d be wonderful at it. I’ve reminded him he can if he wants. We can afford it.” By offering to be the main provider for a while so he could get into work he loved, Nina was offering Peter a gift.
Peter appreciated the spirit of Nina’s gift, and the opportunity. Her salary also allowed them a new home, a new car, and a private school for Alexandra—even when he was not quite settled in his career. But Peter felt uneasy about Nina’s salary. He certainly didn’t feel as grateful to Nina as she would have felt to him, had their salaries been reversed. This was not because Peter thought Nina was competing with him. He put it this way: “Nina is successful, but she isn’t ambitious. I’m more ambitious than she is. Nina also isn’t competitive, maybe just a little, and I am, just a little.” So the problem was not Nina’s ambition or competitiveness. It was that Nina’s higher earnings shamed him as a man. Friends and relatives— especially older males—would think less of him if they knew his wife earned more, he wanted their good opinion.
So he could not gracefully accept Nina’s gift. In fact, he and Nina treated her salary as a miserable secret. They did not tell his parents; if Peter’s father found out, Peter said, “he would die.” They didn’t tell Nina’s father because “Nina outearns him.” And they didn’t tell Peter’s high school buddies back home because, Peter said, “I’d never hear the end of it.” Over lunch one day, Nina told me in a near whisper: “I was interviewed for an article in Businessweek, and I had to call the fellow back and ask him please not to publish my salary. When he interviewed me I was proud to tell him my salary, but then I thought, I don’t want that there—because of Peter.”
Nina was giving Peter the kind of gift that, under the old rules, a man should give a woman: relief from pressure to provide. Peter wanted to give Nina “the choice of whether to work or not.” He wanted her to want to work—sure, why not?—but not to need to work. But Nina did not need that particular gift: given her combination of skill and opportunity, she would always choose to work.
With his notion of manhood under new pressure, Peter made one of those unarticulated “moves” that serve the goal of preserving a man’s relation to a man’s sphere, and his notion of the right amount of marital power. He summoned the feeling that it was not Nina who gave him the gift of her high salary. It was he, Peter, who was giving the important gift. People out there in the world Peter came from and cared about ridiculed men whose wives outearned them. They shook their heads. They rolled their eyes. In order to live with Nina’s salary, he had to absorb an assault on his manhood. As Peter said, looking me in the eye, “Only one in a hundred men could take this.” Nina was lucky to be married to such an unusual man. And Nina gave him credit: she thought Peter was unusual too. Her salary was hard to take. She was lucky.
Curiously, because Peter and Nina allowed them to, it was their parents, the guys in Peter’s office, his buddies at home, society out there—not the two of them privately—who defined the value of the gifts they exchanged. What was it that had ultimately lowered Nina’s credit with Peter and reduced her side in their balance of gratitude? One thing was their joint appreciation of the injury he had suffered to his male pride—an appreciation based on their feeling that a man should be able to base his pride on traditional grounds. And this pride hinged on the attitude of others. In this way, the outside came inside. She owed him one.
On the surface, Peter adapted to her salary; it was “fine”; he wished her well. But, given this concession to his older view of himself as a man, he wanted her gratitude. After all, it was she who had passed on the pressure from her irresistible opportunities at Telfac to him and the family.
Through this invisible “move”—to expect Nina to be grateful to him—Peter unwittingly passed the strain of a larger social change (of which the call for female executives at Telfac in the early 1970s was one sign) back to Nina—through their marital economy of gratitude. Now she owed him gratitude for “being willing to take it.” Like a great storage closet crowded with objects that would otherwise clutter the house, her indebtedness made the rest of their relationship more tidy. Peter supported and took pride in Nina’s work—but only by storing in this hidden emotional closet the tension between his unchanged idea of himself and Nina’s new salary. It was like a bite taken but not swallowed.
Nina’s sense that Peter was doing her a favor in being that “one in a hundred” guy also had a bearing on the second shift. She told me:
I’ve wondered if my salary bothers him. Because if we’re having a disagreement over something, he sometimes says he thinks I’m acting high and mighty—like “Who do you think you are?” I said to him once, “You never used to say that.” And he told me, “I do think you’ve gotten much more assertive than you used to be.” Peter might equate my assertiveness with my income. I don’t know if the money has anything to do with it, or if I’m just tired of doing all the housework.
Peter made it clear in conversations with me that Nina’s salary was painful. He felt he couldn’t be the man Nina would still love thirty years from now if he both earned less than she did and also shared the second shift. In his heart of hearts, Peter didn’t really care about his career success. What he did care about was his marriage to Nina, and for things to feel right between them, she could not be that far ahead at work, that disengaged from home. Peter wanted to be involved in family life, but only if Nina were more involved. He was doing more at home now than when they first married. He wanted credit for all the changing he had done. He felt perilously close to the line that marked the limits of his ability to change, and which he guarded by his move to win credit for sacrificing honor, credit for being the one to adapt when, as Nancy Holt said, usually women do that.
One sign of this line emerged as a surprise in an interview. I had asked Peter to look at a long list of household chores—laundry, sewing, car repairs, and so on—and tell me who did each one. Expecting a series of perfunctory replies, I was taken aback—as he was himself—when we came to lawn mowing. “Lawn mowing!” he burst out suddenly. “I do the mowing!” He jabbed the page with his finger and exclaimed:
We share the weeding, but I do the mowing! I do not like the idea of a woman doing the mowing. I think a father, if he’s got the time to mow the lawn and edge it, should not let his daughter do that, or his wife. I think it’s lazy! I don’t like it. I don’t like parents that ask their children to do things when they either could or should do it themselves. I wouldn’t want to see my wife mowing the lawn. The logical extension of that is that I don’t want people seeing my daughter do that either! And another thing—I don’t think girls should drive cars in high school. I wouldn’t let Alexandra or Diane drive a car in high school. No way!
In the woman he deeply loved, in the home that mattered most, and in the world of work, a whole gender revolution was under way. But old-fashioned customs still held for Peter Tanagawa’s lawn and car.
CAUTIONARY TALES OF DIVORCE
Nina felt “lucky.” Peter was “one in a hundred men.” But behind her sense of luck lurked a cautionary tale. Just as Carmen Delacorte was chastened by the memory of her mother’s struggle as a single mother, as Nancy Holt was haunted by her mother’s depression, so Nina was chilled by tales of divorce among contemporary friends. Several female colleagues at work had seen their marriages wrecked on the shoals of the second shift and had been thrown down the social class ladder, where some got stuck, and others struggled back up at the expense, Nina felt, of their children. Recently, two close friends exactly Nina’s age, both in fulltime jobs, both with children the ages of Alexandra and Diane
, were suddenly abandoned by their husbands—or so it seemed to Nina and Peter. One of these women stayed with them a week, bringing her devastating story with her. Nina responded with empathy, horror, and a certain fascination. “My friend is gorgeous. But she said she wasn’t feeling good about herself,” Nina related, “so she got a face lift. She’s younger than me! Her husband went out and got a younger woman, even more gorgeous.” Outside the safety of their love nest lay this cool marketplace of romantic partners, the men choosing, the women being chosen for youth, looks, the absence of children. It was frightening.
Just as Nina and Peter were speculating about what had gone haywire in their friend’s marriage, Peter’s father dropped a bomb closer to home. After forty years of marriage, he announced that he was divorcing Peter’s mother and taking up with a blond Caucasian twenty years younger than he. What was going on? Had the marriage been that unhappy all along? In the wake of this shock, Peter and Nina turned to reaffirming conversations about how much fun their courtship had been, how their love had deepened.
But Nina vaguely sensed a vital link between these divorces in the outside world and what she was asking of Peter at home. The cold winds outside made the hearth seem warm. As she reflected in a serious tone:
These divorces have had an interesting effect on our relationship because, of course, you start examining something that’s close to home. I do think women—I should say men as well, but actually I mean women—start nagging about little things like picking up clothes. I realize that little things can build up. Peter’s father poured out to me things that go back for years. His wife would continually nag him about little things, like not hanging up his suit at night. I harp at Peter about helping the kids. He’ll let me ask him before he does it, and I don’t like to have to ask him to help. If I’m continually harping, maybe I should make some adjustments.
She could ask him more nicely, and less often. They could get more outside help. She could cut back her work hours, do more of the second shift. The “as if” world of divorcees that Peter and Nina would enter if they did divorce also subliminally lowered Nina’s credits at home. She was beautiful, well-off, and unusually blessed in chances to remarry. But it was apparently still more scary for a woman like her to be “out there” than it was for a man like him. Life was harder, pickings were slimmer. Divorce was a cautionary tale for them both, but more for her.
So warned, Nina made up for outearning Peter and injuring his male pride by working the extra month a year herself. Peter participated in home life in the spirit of one who leans curiously over a neighbor’s fence but avoids getting too involved in the neighbor’s affairs. He entered “Nina’s sphere,” but from the safe vantage point of the active witness, the helpful adviser.
ALEXANDRA’S FRIENDS
Difficulties arose with their dark-haired Alexandra, an observant, somber child who seemed older than her five years. From the first, these difficulties were defined as a “Nina-Alexandra” problem. Peter had routed his own feelings for Alexandra through Nina. Alexandra glumly explained to me one day, “I’m driven to school by Annie’s mom, Sarah’s mom, Jill’s mom. My mom doesn’t drive.” Alexandra distinguished between school friends (friends she played with at school) and home friends (friends invited home). She had school friends but no home friends. She explained that in order to invite friends home, you needed a mother at home. By all three—Nina, Peter, and Alexandra—it was considered a truth that a girl can’t make home friends without a mother at home.
If Peter had an urge to plunge more fully into the children’s routines, he controlled it. If he had a different urge, to leave it to Nina, he acted on it. He helped Alexandra unreverse her printed B’s and D’s. He read Dr. Seuss books to her, and buttoned her dress in the mornings. But the rest of quality time, he said with anxious reverence, was up to Nina. In this way he again shaped his inclinations so as to separate himself from the ultimate responsibility for the second shift but to identify lovingly with each family episode through the medium of his wife.
Sensing her father’s gaze toward her mother, Alexandra turned to Nina. When Alexandra began to compare her lot to that of school friends with mothers who stayed home, it was to her mother that she addressed a silent protest. It was Nina who felt guilty.
If Mommy wasn’t going to be home, it seemed, Alexandra wasn’t going to “be home” either—not in conversation, not in weekend play. One day, Alexandra came home with a note in her lunchbox addressed to Nina from Alexandra’s teacher. As Nina recalled: “The teacher said that even though this was Alexandra’s second year at school, she still had no friends.”
On the following Saturday, a week before Valentine’s Day, something worse happened. Nina had taken Alexandra to a stationery store to buy valentine cards for her classmates. Alexandra picked the prettiest card for herself because, as she explained in a low voice, “I don’t think anyone at school is going to give me one.”
Sometimes a way of life collapses because of a small stunning episode. So it was with the valentine card. That night, Nina told Peter, “We have a crisis.” The incident had been tiny, but they agreed it wasn’t minor. “Handle it the best way you can, honey,” he said, “I’m a hundred percent behind you.”
THE COMPANY LOYALTY TEST
A week later, Nina asked her boss if she could take a cut in pay and work only three days a week, and he said she could. She broke the good news to Alexandra at dinnertime, hoping for a delighted response. For three days, Alexandra said nothing about it. Then, one evening, she asked nonchalantly if she might invite a girlfriend over the following Friday. As Peter drove Nina to work the next day, he said to her in a warm, excited tone, “Doesn’t that make it worth it, honey?”
By telling Nina that she could do “whatever she needed to do” but refusing to become more involved with Alexandra himself, Peter had effectively robbed Nina of the choice he had so lovingly offered, to work full time or not, as she saw fit. Ironically, he worked even harder at extending the market for technical books, work that bored him, while Nina curtailed the work she loved. Neither one saw anything strange about this.
Until this point, Nina had been the showcase woman in top management at a company that prided itself on personnel policies that enabled mothers to work—flex time, part-time work, job sharing. Now Nina had a chance to show the world that workers can be good mothers and part-timers can have real careers. Her immediate boss assured her, “Don’t worry, we support you.”
But trouble began almost immediately. Nina had handled four departments; she gave up three. Word had it that management was saying, “What Nina does can’t be that important if she just works three days a week.” Her boss became more “realistic.” “I fought for you with the higher-ups, I’ve been holding them off,” he told her. “Now there’s only one thing I want from you—to work full time.” They had trained and groomed her; now they wanted their money’s worth.
Fellow employees gossiped about how “serious” she was. The longer your hours, they reasoned, the more serious and committed you were. Men whose lives ran on traditional tracks had a far better crack at passing this seriousness test than a woman like Nina, who already felt lucky to live with a man who had “taken a lot.” Despite its formal progressive policies, the company latently rewarded traditional marriages and punished other kinds. Nina summed up her predicament this way:
Working three days a week is barely holding them off. I thought that maybe with the four-day weekend, I could at least meet my carpool obligations. And I’d have more time with Alexandra. If I go back to full time pretty soon, I’ll be okay. But if I keep this up much longer, I won’t be. I may already be out. My boss says, “You’re walking alone right now. You’re not committed here.” Which isn’t true. I am committed to the company—on a part-time basis.
More and more, Nina was punished for being an uncommitted worker. First she was moved from her large office, facing the San Francisco Bay, to a tiny, windowless office. Then she was told to report to a pe
er instead of a higher-ranking officer “until she came back full time.” Her participation in a company bonus program, all along assured her, was terminated. One older man—whose own marriage to a career woman had come to a stormy end and who had quietly resented Nina’s success for years—finally confessed to her, “When you went part time, I realized you weren’t serious.”
Some of her colleagues in upper management were happily remarried to women who, in second marriages themselves, were more cautiously dedicating themselves to the family. Others were married to wives who worked on timeless graduate degrees, or did volunteer work that offered them a private fantasy of a future public life but did not interfere with their husbands’ career. Some of these wives stayed home and seemed to have an easier life. A few men in upper management had career wives, but even they didn’t seem to face a dilemma like this one with Alexandra.
Nina was becoming keenly aware of how her male coworkers were, like Peter, protected from the crisis she faced. Were they sacrificing anything to make sure their children got all they needed? She noticed that male coworkers were happy to pin a “mother identity” on her; passing her in the halls, they often said, “Hi, Nina, how are the kids?” She used to give a happy reply. Now she noticed they seldom greeted men in this way.
One day when I visited Nina at work, I found her gazing at family photos on her desk. She told me that for the first time she felt like a stranger in her own company. She was taking a hard look at her job: “In my job I lay people off. I have to. We’ve been going through layoffs. I counsel people and help them solve problems. It hasn’t hit me until this year: they’re good people. They’re not poor performers. They’re people I can really relate to, people who’ve worked hard. It wasn’t their fault. Their division went under.”
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 11