Robert was unusual in his desire to share the traditional world of men with women, to offer women the male “advantages.” But he was less enthusiastic about wanting to preserve the traditional world of women or share it. He preferred to pay a maid and a baby-sitter to do all that. The most important reason Ann felt Robert shared was that she felt he was honestly willing to share the remaining wedge of domestic work—if she wanted him to.
Robert adored Ann and he wanted to please her, and being willing to share, should she need him to, is one way he pleased her. Robert wasn’t an Evan Holt. He wasn’t a Peter Tanagawa. It was really okay with him to share. Whether she chose to share or not, Ann enjoyed a certain “adoration shield” that protected her from many disadvantages women suffer. As a result of this, what they did share was power.
But Ann did not want Robert to share the second shift. She wanted to think of him as doing half the work at home. She wanted to know he would share if she needed him to. But, even if he didn’t have to travel so much, Ann didn’t actually want Robert to do half.
ANN’S FLIP-FLOP SYNDROME
On this question of sharing the work at home, Ann listened to two contradictory inner voices. In her “better moments,” as she saw them, she wanted to relieve Robert of the work at home, to do it herself. When this voice spoke loudest, Ann spoke appreciatively about the heavy demands of his career and his need to relax: “Robert’s a real tinkerer. He becomes immersed in his trains, and builds radios too. It’s a wonderful hobby. When he’s absolutely exhausted from traveling, he’ll still get up at four in the morning to do his exercise and spend an hour working on his model trains.”
In her “worse moments,” as she saw them, Ann wanted Robert to share at home. When she wanted this, she would say such things as this: “Over time, Robert has become sloppier about helping at home.” Describing another “worse moment” she said: “Sometimes I tell him that he makes self-centered choices about what to do with his time. He spends hours on his trains, hours he could spend helping me with the children.” But eventually she saw her perceptions of Robert’s “sloppiness” or “selfishness” as lapses from a more “true,” sacrificial point of view.
Much to her own annoyance, Ann vacillated between her better moments and worse. As she described:
I flip-flop all the time. One day I want to be superloving. I honestly feel Robert can contribute more than I can. He’s better educated. He’s just plain smarter. He’s genuinely gifted, and when he’s able to apply himself, he can really accomplish something, can make a name for himself. I care about him having time to think. One of the contributions I can make is allowing him to make a valuable contribution before I’m burned out. I tell him, “I want to take the pressure off of you. You don’t have to worry anymore about coming home at six, or taking care of the children in the evenings. You need more time to work on your trains.” I go through this long spiel. I’m going to play this incredible role.
Then when I come home at six-thirty, take care of the kids, cook dinner, go to bed, get woken up by the baby, I get totally exhausted. I can’t stand it anymore. Then I dump on him for not keeping up his 50 percent and causing me to feel so harassed. He knows now this is just a phase. During this phase, he tries very hard to come home at six, help with dinner, the bath, and make an equal number of household-related calls. Then I feel guilty.
But sometimes my wanting-to-protect-him phase only lasts a day. Then I flip back. I say, “I’m well paid. I have authority. Just because I don’t take my work as seriously as you do doesn’t mean other people don’t take it seriously. So I only have to do 50 percent at home.”
When Ann was in the “flip” stage, she took the vantage point of Carmen Delacorte. When she was in the “flop” stage, she took the vantage point of Nancy Holt. But to Ann, Carmen’s view ultimately felt more admirable, and even if she couldn’t hold it for long, she aspired to. She felt exasperated with herself for not being able to stick to it. She also surprised herself: “I never would have thought I’d want to take a backseat to Robert’s career. I never used to have this view of marriage.”
A BRILLIANT HUSBAND AND A JOB THAT FEELS UNREAL
Why did Ann feel like Carmen Delacorte, that her husband’s job—and really his life—came first, when Frank and Robert, though very loving, did not talk in the same way about their wives? Carmen’s belief in male superiority is more easily understood as cultural programming: Given her strict Catholic upbringing, her lack of training and career opportunity, it was unsurprising that she held these beliefs. But Ann had all along been groomed to be the highly successful career woman she had become, and her belief in male superiority didn’t so neatly fit her circumstances.
When I put this question to her, Ann gave two answers. First, Robert was more intelligent, she said. He had been at the top of his college class. Now perhaps Robert was, in fact, more intelligent than Ann. It is still true today that most women marry men who are more educated and accomplished than themselves, while men marry women who are less so. Women marry “up” and men marry “down,” a pattern that the sociologist Jessie Bernard calls “the marriage gradient.” As a result of this pattern, there are two pools of unmarried people—highly educated and accomplished women and uneducated, low-status men. Perhaps the same pattern holds for intellectual development: If Robert is a genius, given this “marriage gradient,” he didn’t marry another genius. In the realm of intelligence, Robert may have been looking down and Ann looking up.
On the other hand, maybe Ann was just as smart as Robert. After all, she had earned straight A’s through college even while working thirty hours a week. Who knows what she might have done with thirty hours more study each week? Maybe Ann can’t bring herself to honor her own potential.
The second reason Ann gave for why Robert’s time mattered more was that her work felt unreal to her.
I fool people into thinking I take my work seriously. It’s not that I think males around me are more capable, or that their jobs are more meaningful. I just think it’s amazing that they take their work seriously. The work is not really helping anyone. It’s just a pile of paper with numbers.
I envy people who are committed to what they’re doing. It’s almost like envying people with religion; they seem happier. It’s strange; I expect men to go around taking their work very seriously, but when I meet a woman who takes a business career seriously, I can’t relate to her.
So having children almost provides me with a convenient out. I have to take something seriously. And I do take seriously what we’re doing this Saturday [shopping for the bureau]. I don’t question that. I might be afraid that my sense of unreality will creep into my life at home.
Ann’s sense that only home was real even caused her to want more children, to make them into her achievement. She explained: “If I’m going to be the parent at home, well, I want to have a real challenge. If I have half a dozen children, I can show that I can really do it well. Anybody can raise two.”
Why, I wondered, did her career feel unreal? As a child, Ann had moved a great deal. Living in a different town each year of high school, she found it hard to make friends; and from age fourteen on, work became her refuge from friendlessness. Her involvement in work became a sign of personal failure. Perhaps the unreality of her work also had to do with her fear that she was not “feminine enough.” All through her twenties and early thirties, Ann hadn’t wanted children. When she confessed this to her father, a Catholic father of six, he had stormed out of the room, throwing at her the remark, “One would question your femininity.” “I took that seriously. I said to myself, ‘Maybe that’s right.’” Then, too, maybe her work represented outdoing her father, a man with whom she strongly identified and who had done less well in the same profession. If work meant being unable to make friends, if it meant outdoing her father and being unfeminine, then she might have felt afraid of seeing her work as real.
Whatever the cause, Ann’s sense that Robert’s mind and work were more meaningful th
an hers led her to do the second shift while she worked full time, and eventually led her to quit. One episode seemed to say this very thing. During a visit to the Myersons’, I found Elizabeth and her mother sitting in Elizabeth’s walk-in clothes closet playing grocery store. Ann was passing a series of empty spice jars across the “counter” and Elizabeth was telling the “grocery clerk” what was in each one—marinated artichoke hearts, condiments, Hungarian paprika, raspberry conserves. Since her mother was already the grocery clerk, and since I was sitting on the floor apparently unemployed, Elizabeth made me into the nanny. “I hope you can carry my baby,” she said winsomely. Maybe because she saw herself in her daughter, Ann interjected with feeling, “But you’re the mother. You carry her.”
All in all, Ann was less interested in sharing the work at home than Nancy Holt, Nina Tanagawa, and most of the women in this study. Most women wished their husbands did share the work at home, but didn’t put that wish first, or didn’t dare push. Due to a complex set of motives, Ann Myerson’s man wasn’t getting out of the second shift. She wasn’t letting him in.
At the end of our last visit, I asked Ann if she had any advice for young women about to enter two-job marriages. She mused for a while, then concluded that since she had given up having it all, she really had none. She moved in a perfunctory way over the agenda of liberal reforms—part-time work, flex time, job sharing—that would make it possible to have more time at home. Then she shared this parting thought.
It’s really sad that I have two girls. They’re going to be pulled into the same world I’ve coped with. They’re going to have to care about what I’ve had to care about. They’ll never have a chance to really make a contribution to anything unless they fight against the odds all the time. No matter how smart they are, how driven they are, they will ultimately feel the same conflict. I don’t think things are going to change so much that my girls won’t be torn. They might be able to succeed if they shut out the idea of having children and family. But then they would miss something. Society would react negatively to them. But if they do have children, they can’t manage to do it all and not be torn. I wind up thinking that my husband is an incredibly gifted person and it’s almost a shame he didn’t have a son. It would be nice to have a boy who didn’t have to face this conflict, who could just benefit from being a man, who could use all those brains. I suppose it’s sad I feel this way.
CHAPTER
8
A Scarcity of Gratitude: Seth and Jessica Stein
AT thirty-six, Seth Stein has been a husband for eleven years, a father for five, a practicing lawyer for eight, and a litigation attorney for the last six. He is tall, with broad, slightly stooped shoulders, and a firm handshake. We sit down for our interview at eight in the evening; normally at this hour, he tells me, he would be unwinding from a ten-hour day, beer in hand, slouched and unmoving in his TV chair, moving his thumb over the buttons of his hand-held remote TV channel control almost randomly. He would have had dinner with his wife and two small children at six-thirty or seven, perched himself on the periphery of his children’s activities for three-quarters of an hour, and this, now, would have been the first stretch of time he’d had to himself all day.
His unwinding, I discovered, was usually solitary. Once the children were in bed, his wife, Jessica, a lawyer specializing in family law, found herself free at last, and returned to her legal papers. (“Sometimes,” Seth said later, “I look over the papers in her study and think, ‘We’re both caught up in our professions.’”) The living room, with its modern Danish chairs and bright Indian tapestries standing out against white walls, is his private recovery room, a place where he “comes to” after the daily operations of his demanding career. For the first time all day, he takes off his glasses and loosens his tie.
I ask Seth to describe a typical day:
I get up at six-thirty. Into the bathroom, shower, get dressed, out of the house by seven-thirty. I might see the kids in passing—“Hi, how are you?” and give a kiss goodbye. Then my morning begins with meetings with my clients, and depending on whether we’re in the middle of a big litigation case, I’ll meet with the other lawyers on the case, check with the paralegals. I’m at the office until six, and I’m generally home by six-thirty at the latest to sit down and have dinner. Then I’ll go back at eight or eight-thirty for a few hours. I started coming home for dinner at six-thirty a year ago after realizing I’d missed the first two years of Victor’s growing up.
Jessica, a tall, willowy woman of thirty-six, who often dressed in graceful peasant blouses and long floral skirts, had reached that stage in her career, she felt, where she was sure enough of herself as a professional woman that she could abandon the “strong” dark suits she had worn to work earlier, and still wore in court. She grew up the daughter of a widowed waitress in Texas, and worked her way through the University of Texas law school. But there were few clues to the determination it must have taken to do this in the shy, expectant manner with which she approached my questions.
She and Seth had begun marriage intending to honor both law degrees equally. But after many reasonable discussions, Jessica had agreed that Seth’s career came first because “litigation law was more demanding.” These discussions did not seem like moves in his or her gender strategy, but attempts to “do the best thing” for each person and the family. Seth was happy about the outcome to these discussions but vaguely unhappy about his marriage. Jessica was unhappy about both.
If Evan Holt resisted his wife’s pressure to help at home but gave in on the “upstairs-downstairs” cover story, and if Peter Tanagawa resisted but gave in on his role as the main provider, then Seth Stein resisted and gave up nothing except, gradually, his wife.
Like Nancy Holt, Jessica had begun with a dream of sharing 50-50 and had been forced to give it up. Like Nancy, she remained married, but, unlike her, Jessica gradually began to detach from her husband.
Curiously, Seth had none of the traditional man’s attitudes toward “women’s work.” If he’d had the time, he could have done the laundry or sewing without a bit of shame. His manhood was neither confirmed nor denied by what he did at home, for what he did there didn’t matter. Instead, his sense of self and of manhood rose and fell with the opinions of his legal community. Loaded as his career was with this meaning for his manhood and self, Seth’s career told him what he had to do.
Yet, this connection between manhood and career was hard for Seth to see. He actually had little to say about what it meant to “be a man.” “People are people, that’s about it,” he would say about these matters. All that occurred to him consciously, it seemed, was how nervous it made him on those rare occasions when he took time off. Meanwhile, fellow lawyers were saying that Seth “had a lot of balls” to break into the fierce competition among litigation lawyers in such a crowded urban market.
While Seth’s obsession about his career did not seem desirable to either him or Jessica, it seemed normal and acceptable and had three effects on his family. First, what occurred at the imperial center of his career determined what happened out in the “colony” of his home. Second, although neither of them quite articulated this, Seth’s dedication to his career led him to feel he deserved her nurturance more than she deserved his. Because he worked the longest hours, and because long hours seemed a manly way of earning nurturance, Seth felt he had “first dibs.” Third, his career led him to suppress his emotional attachment to his children, although not his ultimate concern for them. He loved them, but day to day he left it to Jessica to think about what they needed and felt. As he saw it, these were not a result of a gender strategy, but the normal attitude of a top-notch professional. And indeed, his gender strategy was built into the very clockwork of male-dominated careers. It was not simply Seth’s personal attitudes that were at issue, but the normal hours of work in his office, the calls, the gossip that reminded each worker of the overwhelming importance of work to self-esteem, and a whole urgency system based on the exclusion of li
fe at home.
Seth and Jessica had married when they were law students. They share the memory of studying together in the library for exams and being interrupted by a fellow student and friend asking, “Shall we go out for Chinese? Italian?” Six years after their marriage, Victor was born, and two years after that, Walter. As with the Tanagawas, the Steins’ firstborn strained the couple’s energy, but the second-born provoked a crisis.
Quietly but inexorably a conflict arose between Seth’s capitulation to the clockwork of his career and the enormous demands of his young babies and anxious wife. Seth felt Jessica had to handle the second shift. The problem was to prevent her from resenting it. To lighten her resentment, Seth dwelled on his sacrifices of leisure: it wasn’t so easy to work eleven-hour days. For Jessica, the problem was how she could get Seth to want to share. To make a case for sharing the second shift, Jessica focused on the sacrifices she made of her hard-won career: it wasn’t that easy to do. Their notions of “sacrifice” began to clash. Neither one felt much gratitude toward the other.
I asked Seth whether he’d ever considered cutting back his eleven-hour day while Victor and Walter were young. “It’s not a question of what I want,” he explained patiently, “I can’t. I couldn’t share my work with a group of incompetent lawyers just to get a night off. It would blow my reputation! When you come to a desirable area like this, the legal competition is fierce.” His conversation moved spontaneously from lawyers who cut back their hours to be with family to a top lawyer friend who one day abandoned law to play second trumpet in a third-rate orchestra, and a brilliant friend who became a cosmetic surgeon at a Beverly Hills “fat farm” for rich socialites. To Seth, these men were spectacular dropouts from their reputable worlds, a reminder of how low a man could fall.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 13