The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

by Arlie Hochschild, Anne Machung

  I had begun by asking how he felt about taking time off to be with his children, but the topic had slid over to disreputable lawyers. Taking time off to be with his child at a play gym seemed to fit into the same mental category in Seth’s mind as working at a “fat farm.” Both discredited a man’s career, and so the man himself. Seth said he didn’t know any good lawyers who worked reduced hours in order to spend time with their young children: none.

  He explained:

  I’d like to get rid of the anxiety I have about being a lawyer. Jessica suggested a long time ago that we could both go into public law. Or we could travel and do the things we enjoy. If I could get rid of my anxiety about being a lawyer it would open up a lot of other opportunities. But I have to be doing what I am doing. I have to be that guy they turn to when the case is really tough. It’s a neurotic drive.

  Among his legal colleagues it was almost fashionable to be a “neurotic, hard-driving, Type-A guy” and personally a bit unhappy. Fellow lawyers quietly shared tips about how to resist their wives’ pleas that they spend more time at home. Seth told me that one doctor friend had advised, “Promise her you’ll take the kids to the zoo this Sunday.” Another had said, “I’ve put my wife off by promising her a four-day vacation this spring.” I could imagine these lawyers’ wives—Jessica among them—calling out from the wings, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, “Your children will only be young once! Young once. Young once….” Inside Seth’s legal fraternity, the career men sometimes joked about fantasies of taking time off for themselves; but they never talked about it seriously. They talked about it like cutting out coffee or mastering French. Curiously missing from Seth’s talk about his long hours was talk about his children.

  Given that his children were so young, why did he abdicate to the demands of his career with so little struggle? Perhaps a clue could be found in his boyhood in a highly achievement-oriented Jewish working-class family and neighborhood of New York in the 1950s. He described his sisters as “housewives who weren’t brought up to have careers.” He described his mother as a housewife and his father as a zealous Russian Jew who threw himself into one cause after another. As he explained, “There was a long period when he would have dinner and then go to a meeting every night. He was the chairman of this and that—Russian war relief, food, clothes to the Russians. Later he was a super-duper Zionist. He was always out there every night.”

  JESSICA: IF THAT’S HOW YOU WANT IT

  Even if Seth’s childhood had readied him to be an active father (which it had not), even if his legal colleagues had encouraged him (which they did not), in the end it may have been the very unhap-piness of his marriage that kept him out of his children’s lives.

  Seth wanted to see his long work hours as a sacrifice to his family. One day when he was feeling especially unappreciated, he burst out to Jessica: “I’m not sailing a yacht. I’m not on the tennis court. I’m not rafting down the Colorado River. I’m not traveling around the world. I’m working my goddamn ass off.” But Jessica listened coolly.

  From the beginning Jessica had been prepared to balance her law practice with raising a family. The only legal specialties she seriously considered were those she felt were compatible with taking time for a family; that excluded corporate law. But she did not want to be marooned in solitary motherhood, as her widowed mother had been while raising her. As she made compromises in her career, she wanted Seth to make them in his.

  After their first child, Victor, was born, Jessica established two patterns many women would consider desirable “solutions”: she cut back her hours at work and she hired a full-time housekeeper. Five years later, when I met her, she would talk cheerfully at dinner parties of having “the best of both worlds”—an adorable three-year-old, a five-year-old, and work she loved. She dropped Victor off at nursery school at nine and went to work. Then she picked him up at noon, gave him lunch, and left him at home with Carmelita, her housekeeper, while she returned to work until five. But there was a certain forced cheer in her account of her day that Seth was the first to explain:

  Jessica has been very disappointed about my inability to do more child-rearing, and about my not sharing things fifty-fifty. She says I’ve left the child-rearing to her. Her career has suffered. She says she’s cut twice as much time from her career as I’ve cut from mine. She complains that I’m not like some imaginary other men, or men she knows, who take time with their children because they want to and know how important it is. On the other hand, she understands the spot I’m in. So she holds it in until she gets good and pissed off, and then she lets me have it.

  Jessica didn’t need Seth to help her with housework; Carmelita cleaned the house and even did the weekend dishes on Mondays. Jessica didn’t need Seth for routine care of their children either; Carmelita did that too. But Jessica badly wanted Seth to get more emotionally involved with the children. Even if he couldn’t be home, she wanted him to want to be.

  Jessica did not adjust to his absence in the way nineteenth-century wives adjusted to the absence of husbands who were fishermen and sailors, or the way twentieth-century wives adjust to the absence of husbands who are traveling salesmen. She kept expecting Seth to cut back his hours and she led the children to hope for this too. She kept wanting Seth to feel that he was missing something when he went back to the office in the evening, as he sometimes still did. She acted as if she were co-mothering the children with a ghost.

  A SCARCITY OF GRATITUDE

  The Steins’ different views about their responsibilities at home led them to want to be appreciated in ways that did not correspond. Seth wanted Jessica to identify with his ambition, enjoy the benefits of it—his large salary, their position in the community—and to accept gracefully his unavoidable absence from home. The truth was, Jessica did understand the pressures of his work as only a fellow lawyer could. But he didn’t seem to want to be home, and he wasn’t. For her part, Jessica wanted to be appreciated for the sacrifices she made in her career, and for her mothering. She worked twenty-five hours a week now, fifteen billable hours, but had been keen to develop a larger family law practice and perhaps write a book.

  Seth ignored this sacrifice—indeed, was it a sacrifice? Wouldn’t a twenty-five-hour-a-week job be nice? He was also too tired at the end of the day to notice much of what had gone on in his absence. A man like Peter Tanagawa may not have done much of the second shift, but he cast an appreciative eye on all his wife did; Seth was too exhausted to notice.

  The clash of ideas about what deserved appreciation led each to resent the other. As Seth put it, “We both feel ripped off.” For example, Jessica had recently complained that she’d passed up a chance to go to a family law conference in Washington, D.C., because Seth couldn’t stay with the kids. On a different occasion, Seth had been too engrossed in a litigation case to take the chance to go sailing on the bay with friends. Jessica didn’t imagine this was hard for him; she figured he was “sneaking in more work.”

  Small events sometimes symbolize bigger ones. So it was with a birthday gift Seth bought Jessica. As he explained: “For her birthday I bought her this gold chain, because I know she likes gold chains. But she felt I hadn’t gotten her the kind of chain she really wanted, so she was mad. And I was mad that she didn’t appreciate the trouble I’d gone to in order to get it. We were both furious.” Which was the real conflict—that over the gift of the gold chain with the round links that Seth was able to find on a lunch break or the one with the oblong links that Jessica had had her eye on? Or was it a conflict over getting too much of your career, or getting too little? Having to be away from home, or getting stuck there?

  THE NURTURANCE CRUNCH

  The Steins’ misunderstanding over gifts led to a scarcity of gratitude, and the scarcity of gratitude led to a dearth of small gestures of caring, especially from Jessica to Seth. Increasingly, they were feeling out of touch. When I asked Seth what he was not getting from Jessica, he replied in a surprising way, slipping in and out of
lower-class grammar:

  Nurturing. She don’t take care of me enough. But the deal was so straightforward from day one that I’m not bitter. But when I do reflect on it, that’s the thing I reflect on: I ain’t got a wife taking care of me. Every once in a while I’ll be upset about it and long for someone who might be sitting around waiting to make me comfortable when I get home. Instead, Jessica needs her back massaged just as much as I do. No, she don’t take care of my MCP needs—which I can’t help having, growing up in this kind of society. I’m just a victim of society—so I can have those needs and not feel guilty. I just can’t express them!

  Why the sudden ungrammatical English? Did he mean to make a joke? To mock himself? Or perhaps he was conveying a feeling there was something wrong with him for wanting what he wanted. With a neat little acronym—MCP (male chauvinist pig)—he was summing up the accusations he felt Jessica might throw at him for insisting on his terms of appreciation, his view of manhood.

  From time to time, Seth fantasized about having the “right” kind of wife—Jessica without the career motivation. When I asked him, later in our interview, if he ever wished that Jessica didn’t work, he shot back: “Yes!” Did he feel guilty for wishing that, I asked. “No!” He wanted Jessica the person, and he felt willing and able to appreciate her enormously, on his terms.

  In the meantime, each one felt unappreciated and angry: Seth’s acquiescence to career demands that left no emotional energy for his children angered Jessica. Jessica’s withholding of nurturance angered Seth. Now they avoided each other because they were so angry. The less Seth was around, the less they would face their anger.

  WEARING MOTHERHOOD LIGHTLY

  Eventually Jessica accepted Seth’s long hours and more wholeheartedly colluded in the idea that he was the helpless captive of his profession and neurotic personality. This was her cover story. But as she did this, she made another emotional move—away from the marriage and family. She did not bolt from motherhood into a workaholism of her own, as some women I interviewed did. But neither did she embrace motherhood. Instead, she wore it lightly. She bought new educational games for Walter and she helped Victor with his piano lessons. But there was a certain mildness in her manner, an absence of talk about the children, an animation when she spoke of times she was away from them that suggested this “solution” of halfheartedness.

  If Seth’s unconscious move was to remove himself in body and spirit from his children, Jessica’s move was to be there in body, but not much in spirit. She would accommodate his strategy on the surface but limit her emotional offerings underneath—give some nurturance to the children, little to Seth, and save the rest for her-self, her separate life.

  GETTING HELP

  This took some arranging. Jessica had had a history of bad experience with help. First she’d hired a nanny who was a wonderful baby-sitter but refused to do anything else, like pick up toys or occasionally wash breakfast dishes. So Jessica hired a housekeeper to do the housecleaning. Then the two began to quarrel, each calling her at work to complain about the other. At first, Jessica tried to unravel the problem, but she ended up firing the housekeeper. Then she hired a wonderful but overqualified woman for the job, who left after three months. Now she had Carmelita, an El Salvadoran mother of two, who worked at two jobs in order to support her family and send money back home to her aging parents. Carmelita did this by arranging for her sixteen-year-old daughter, Filipa, to cover for her mornings in the Stein household while Carmelita worked her other job.

  Because neither Carmelita nor Filipa could drive a car, Jessica hired Martha, an old high school friend, as an “extra driver-housekeeper.” Martha shopped, took Victor to classes, and did Jessica’s typing and bookkeeping. Jessica also hired a gardener. Beyond that, she hired another “helper,” Bill, a nineteen-year-old student at a local junior college, as a “father substitute.” He played ball with Victor, age five, and in general did “daddy-type things.” Jessica felt this was necessary for Victor because “Victor suffers the most from Seth’s absence.” Bill, a cheerful and reasonable young man, had a cheerful and reasonable girlfriend who sometimes stayed overnight. It was Bill’s barbells that Seth tripped over in the hallway and Bill’s girlfriend’s sweater that sometimes lay on the kitchen table. Sensing that Bill was a “bought father,” Victor chose to treat him “just like my brother. He can go with us everywhere.” On Saturday afternoons, Jessica wrote checks to pay Carmelita and Filipa; Martha; Bill; the gardener; and other occasional helpers such as plumbers, tree trimmers, and tax accountants.

  When I remarked to Jessica that she seemed to have quite a bit of help, she replied, “Well if you want to have children and have a career, I can’t think of any other way to do it except to live in a foreign country and have tons of people taking care of you.”

  In many ways, she had as many servants as a British colonial officer’s wife in prewar India but still she was missing something. As she explained in a flat monotone:

  I think I didn’t look hard enough for a housekeeper that would really talk to the kids when they got home, would be sure they remembered their permission slips from school, would remember birthday parties or to sign the children up for field trips so that they’re not late—like Victor was this morning. I came home and found he hadn’t been signed up for a field trip. I thought my housekeeper would handle that stuff, but she just doesn’t.

  Jessica had hired many parts of the attentive suburban mother; but she could not hire the soul of that person—the planner, the empathizer, the mother herself. Nor could she hire someone to nurture her.

  Jessica had now given up on Seth. Indeed, three years after our first interview, when I asked her again how she felt about Seth’s being home so little, she answered with assurance: “Partly it works out so well for me this way because Seth doesn’t demand much from me. I don’t have to do anything for him. He takes care of himself. Other husbands might do more for the kids, but they would also ask more of me.” When I asked what she wanted from her husband, she seemed surprise: “What do I want from him? I think he should let me do what I want to do. Go to New York, Washington, conferences.”

  A politics of emotional absenteeism had set in. Jessica had stripped down her needs, retracted her demands. Seth should let her “do what she wants.” And she offered little in return: “just enough” mothering of the children and very little mothering of him. In a dejected tone, she explained: “Last year, I started being home less and less myself. I still shop and tell Carmelita what to make for dinner, but then if I go away for a conference or somewhere else, I don’t pay any attention to it. Seth has to do it.” Jessica also created for herself a separate world of interest and leisure, where she found nurture for herself:

  I try to do what makes me least dissatisfied, which is going to Seattle on Fridays. I fly there after I put the kids to bed on Thursday evening. I have Friday free for shopping, going to the library, and seeing a psychiatrist I really like who’s there, and whom I went to when we lived there. Then I come back that evening. I worry about the kids and my job if I’m here, but going there I have real time to myself. Also, the psychiatrist I am seeing there is really exciting to talk to. I can be fanciful and regressed with him and I’m enjoying that. Plus I have lunch with old friends. That’s my perfect day.

  With this “perfect day” to make up for the rest of the week, Jessica no longer found Seth’s absence so oppressive. After all, Bill was taking Victor to his piano lessons, and Filipa was playing hide-and-seek with Walter. In the past, when problems with Seth came up, she pried them open, worked on them. Now she’d resigned from that job and withdrawn to another world of perfect days.

  YOU CAN’T STONEWALL THE CHILDREN

  Certain vestiges of Jessica’s earlier strategy remained. Although she often articulated her words hesitantly, as if trying to see clearly through a dense fog, the fog vanished suddenly when she spoke of her children’s feelings about Seth: both children felt cheated of time with their father. In this the
Stein children differed from neighboring children whose fathers were also often gone but whose mothers had prepared them for such absences. Victor settled into a quiet, withholding resentment not so different from his mother’s. Walter reacted to his father’s absence by stirring himself into a state of agitation. When called to bed, he would suddenly shout, “I’ve got to put away my blocks!” or “I’ve got to finish the drawing!” or “I need a drink of milk!” He would run frantically from one activity to another. When Jessica tried to drag him to bed, he struggled violently. Explaining the matter as if it were entirely out of her hands, Jessica said, “He won’t go to bed for me but he will for Seth.” So Walter was allowed to stay up until Seth came home and coaxed him to bed.

  Now when Seth came home, it was to Walter’s chaotic frenzy and Victor’s stone-faced disregard. With Jessica coolly withdrawn in her study, home became even more a place for Seth’s solitary recovery from work.

  HOLDING IT TOGETHER

  “I used to think of us as a couple of really bright, attractive, well-liked people,” Seth said softly, at the end of my interview with him, “but the last three years have been tense. When I’m doing an eleven-hour day, I’m sure I’m no fun. When Jessica is bummed out, she’s awful to live with.”