In the meantime, the official truth was that Anita wanted a paid job, and her desire for a paid job led her to want and need Ray to share the second shift. When I asked Ray and Anita, in a joint interview, to describe how they divided the work at home, an old argument flared. Anita complained that Ray didn’t help. Ray countered that if Anita would quit working, she wouldn’t need help; the key to the problem, he said, was that Anita didn’t know how not to work. He was offering Anita the freedom he denied himself—the freedom not to work. In return, he said Anita should offer him freedom from housework except for weekend gardening and doing repairs.
Ray didn’t claim that his higher earnings excused him from the second shift. He argued that his work had a different meaning than hers. As he said: “I don’t mind her quitting and starting, quitting and starting. She can do that as long as she wants. I wouldn’t care if she never went back to work. But I would never consider doing that myself, because it’s my job that holds us together.”
As Ray saw it, he was working the way a man works: for the money. Whether he liked his job or hated it, he had to be committed to doing it. He wanted Anita to behave more like a woman. She didn’t have to be committed to work. She could trust him to do that. However much she actually worked, he wanted her to want to work less, and to like it less. He was offering her the chance to be casual about it.
So why did she reject this chance? Anita defended her right to like work and her right to get Ray’s help at home. “I’d pay two hundred dollars a month for child care, just to keep busy.” She said she’d feel bored staying at home all day.
I like to work because of the recognition it gives me. I want to make a good impression. That’s all. My desk is important to our department. My job is a one-person job. Nobody else knows anything about Customer Service. They’ve been laying people off, so I’ve had to do more, so my desk is even more important than it was. I feel good about my work. I’m working because I want to work. I don’t think Ray is taking that into consideration at all. I go out to work, and then come home and cook. But whether I work or not, Ray expects his meals on the table!
Ray was baffled. “I can’t understand why she feels they’d miss her so much. I consider my job very valuable. It’s not that hers isn’t valuable, because it is; but mine provides the basic income for our house. So why does she feel they’d miss her so much that she can’t take some time off?”
“You never worked in an office before!” Anita snapped. “If you found an interesting job that you really liked, then you’d dedicate yourself to that job.” Ray retorted, “I don’t see how a group of women working in an office could be any different from the men at my job. What does your job have that mine doesn’t?” Anita’s job had a middle-class veneer. Ray conceded that. But it was still “just a clerical job.” His job was more stressful, hers less so. His was outside, hers was inside. His was dirty, hers was clean. He dressed down for work, she dressed up. She read and typed and sat at a desk, but he steered a forklift all day and lifted heavy bags of cement. His, he felt, was the harder job.
Turning to me, Anita explained:
Ray always says, “You don’t work hard. You sit behind that desk and punch out numbers and come home.” He sees the physical part of his job, sitting on the jitney, driving every day. He sees the dust all over him and he feels that’s the hardest job a person can do. But he doesn’t think about what I do. I work twenty-four hours a day! I come home and I work. And there’s the children on top of that! He doesn’t see that.
In light of this dispute, I compared their workdays. Ray described his typical day:
If I’m working days, I’ve got to be up about five-thirty. I get up and sometimes I iron some clothes to go to work and put gospel music on the radio. I don’t eat breakfast. I’ll mess around the house and get in my truck and get to work by six-thirty or six-forty on a good day. Then we load the freight cars. We load them up and then take a break around nine o’clock. Then we work until eleven-thirty and we’re off until twelve-thirty. Me and my buddies usually go down to the park and either get half gassed or sit around and talk about each other. Then we come back to work and finish between one-thirty and two. I come home, grab me a beer out of the box, and start messing around with my guitar or lay down and sleep until Anita gets home with the children. Then I’ve got to get up. If the weather’s nice I work in my yard—I love flowers. Or maybe I’ll take a piece of meat out to the barbecue pit and do that. Usually after I’m through doing that, Anita’s through cooking [the rest of the meal] and we’ll eat dinner together while we’re watching TV. Then I’ll go off upstairs and start playing my guitar again or try to mess with the keyboards, and by then it’s usually time for the kids to go to bed, so we’ll say our prayers together.
Anita described her typical day in less detail:
I get up about six-thirty and get the two kids up. I get my son dressed. My daughter dresses herself. They eat breakfast while I’m getting myself dressed. I leave about seven-fifteen. I drop off Eric, and then Ruby. I go to work and do my seven and a half hours and come back. I have to stop at the grocery store, come home, cook, and then feed them. I watch TV for a while, go to bed around nine-thirty or ten, and do the same thing the next day.
At work Ray had more control over the pace of his cargo loading than Anita had over her flow of bills. Ray’s foreman did not ride his men. In fact, he allowed a spirit of play: Ray and his coworkers wore cowboy hats and joked and razzed the boss, softening his orders in these ways. But Anita’s supervisor often questioned her if she was away from her desk for more than twenty minutes. In this way, their workdays reflected different supervisory styles that exist in most “male” and “female” jobs. A 1972 study by Robert Karasek, for example, showed that men and women report roughly equal workload demands in their jobs. However, women are likely to experience high demands for work performance while exercising less control over the pace of that demand. A telephone operator and a waitress typically have less control over the pace of their work than a meter reader or a telephone repairman. For this reason, Karasek concluded that women’s jobs are more stressful. In addition, women in service jobs like Anita’s actually suffer more stress-related coronary disease than the group popularly supposed to be at risk—top male executives.1
In addition, Ray had more leisure during his workday than Anita had during hers. He could, after all, spend an hour getting “half gassed” with the boys, while Anita could not. The sociologist J. P. Robinson has found that, in general, working men enjoy about half an hour more leisure during their workday than do working women.2
But to Ray, what mattered was the weight of his responsibility to provide. One family, Ray reasoned, didn’t need two who work like that. Just one. He was that one.
Anita didn’t back down, and this dispute about the second shift dogged them like it had the Holts, the Tanagawas, the Steins. Nancy cut back her hours. The Tanagawas and Steins hired a housekeeper. Ray brought ten-year-old stepdaughter, Ruby, in as a possible solution. Ruby, he said, could do the dishes and vacuum. She was old enough. It was good training. Besides, he said, he had helped his aunt with a lot of the housework when he was growing up.
But Ruby, already feeling low on the family totem pole, interpreted this assignment as a sign she wasn’t valued. She refused to do the dishes and vacuuming and proposed instead to weed the garden—maybe with Ray? The logic Ray had already applied to Anita when she asked him to share the housework, he now applied to Ruby: “I’m sure not going to wait hand and foot on somebody I’m working for already.” Ruby sought support in her grandmother next door, who prodded Ray further: Why couldn’t Rudy weed the flower beds instead of cleaning house? He felt pressured by his mother-in-law. Anita herself was next door more and more these days. And the kinswomen were ganging up on him.
As he became increasingly alienated from Anita and his children, Ray began to drink too much, and the drinking precipitated some bad fights. Anita and the children moved next door into her mother�
��s house. Now Ray was forced to confront the one thing he had all along dreaded most: the possibility that Anita would leave. And indeed, Ray and Anita were to separate and reunite, separate and reunite, over the next years. The last I heard, they were apart.
The official reasons Ray gave for not sharing the second shift were that he provided most of the income, took his job more seriously, and worked harder. The first statement was true, the second hard to say, and the third was false. But his official reasons also seemed to coincide with a private agenda: to dampen Anita’s desire to work, to increase her dependency on him and try to reduce the chance that she might leave.
For her part, the drinking and the fights made Anita feel unsafe. She fought Ray continually over the value of her work. Hers was not a glamorous career, but she clung to it tenaciously, because her mother had warned her, “You’ve got to think about yourself, your work,” and at heart Anita was unsure of her union with Ray. If the marriage was to continue, she felt, her work would help Ray “respect her.” Earning money kept Ray “on his toes,” which in turn improved their marriage. If the marriage was not to continue, she would need her job even more than she needed it now.
In their views of manhood and womanhood, the Judsons were a mismatch. Ray was transitional; Anita wavered between traditional and egalitarian—knowing only that she didn’t want the transitional woman’s responsibility for both spheres. This clash caused them trouble in the exchange of marital gifts. Anita offered Ray the “gift” of her wage for her family. Sensing she might be preparing to leave, Ray turned it down. For his part, Ray offered Anita the choice to work or not. Disliking the double shift if she worked and sensing a danger in staying home, Anita challenged this choice. Their public myth—though not one they privately believed—was that the second shift was simply an issue of Anita’s badgering Ray because she had “too much to do.” Certainly this was true, but it was not the whole truth. The issue had an umbilical link to the meaning for each of Anita’s work.
Anita’s job gave her the modest financial independence she would need if her marriage deteriorated. It was an insurance policy: she worked in self-defense. Early in their marriage, she had tried to trust Ray, tried to avoid divorce. It had been impossible to openly confess that she wanted to work “just in case.”
But the possibility of divorce had all along entered the life of their marriage. In this, Anita’s dilemma may speak to an increasing number of women. As a black woman she could not look back to a long tradition of marriage as a woman’s path to financial security, for most black men have long been barred from higherpaying jobs. For at least a century, the experience of white women in America was different because marriage to a man, almost any man, could lift them to a class higher than that in which their own job would place them. But more and more working- and middle-class white women now face the situation black women have long faced. Now they, too, cannot rely as much as in the past on marriage.
Gradually over the last century, the economic footing that marriage has provided women and their children has become less secure. Half of all marriages in America end in divorce, and despite a short-term dip in that rate, experts expect it to remain as high as it is now. In addition, after divorce, the income of most men rises while that of women drops. A third of divorced women never remarry. Of the two-thirds who eventually do, many divorce again. For most women, then, a shaky marriage raises the prospect of economic insecurity, and for many, outright poverty.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earn 83 percent of the median wages of men. Women age 35 to 44 earn about $200 less a week than men, but their wages rose 12 percent in the last decade, while those of men rose 1.2 percent. And in 2008, young, childless women in most of America’s biggest cities actually earned 8 percent more than comparable men.3
Still there remains what Joan Williams calls a “maternal wall.” Compared to their male counterparts, mothers earn 27 percent less. Partly they earn less because they take jobs more compatible with family, work shorter hours, take more time off, and are less willing to move the whole family to a higher-paying job.4 But women also work differently these days. Male jobs took a bigger hit in the Great Recession of 2008, causing wives’ jobs to become a more important part of the family budget. And for women like Anita there is something else. Anita lived a married life but secretly imagined becoming divorced. She resisted pressure from Ray to quit because she feared the prospect of losing her place at work, divorcing and falling into a financial trap. Yet the official reality was that their marriage “was for keeps.” So Anita hid her pragmatic motive for working, claiming instead to work because “she loved it,” because she “needed to keep busy,” because “they needed her at the office.” As divorce has spread, more and more uncertain women are led to seem married but to ponder work and family in unmarried ways.
CHAPTER
10
The “His” and “Hers” of Sharing: Greg and Carol Alston
AT 7:45 one Sunday morning I slowly drive my car up a newly paved street lined with young trees and clusters of two-story homes that form a curving line up a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It has the feel of a new housing development; along each street the shrubs are sculpted with the same taste. Streets have names like Starview, Overlook, Bayside, and though the traffic goes back and forth only within the development, there are ten-mile-an-hour signs every half block, as if an informal understanding could not be trusted. Between groups of every six houses, ivy lawns sprawl into large communal spaces, and mailboxes are clustered under a small, communal mailbox roof. It was a developer’s attempt at community.
At this hour the empty sidewalks are strewn with Sunday newspapers. Other times of day I see only employees—a Chinese gardener trimming, a Chicano handyman fixing floodlights, two white workmen carrying rolls of carpeting from their truck to a home. Half the units are filled with retired couples, Carol Alston tells me later, and the other half with two-income families. “The elderly don’t talk much to the young, and the working couples are too busy to be neighborly: it’s the kind of place that could be neighborly, but isn’t.”
Greg Alston answers the door. At thirty-seven, Greg is a boyish, sandy-haired man with gold-rimmed glasses, dressed in well-worn jeans and a T-shirt. Also at the door is Daryl, three, with a dimple-cheeked grin. He has bare feet, and shoes in hand. “Carol’s still asleep,” Greg tells me, “and Beverly [their three-month-old baby] is about to wake up.” I settle in the living room, again the “family dog,” and listen as the household wakes up. At 7:15 Greg has risen, at 7:30 Daryl, and now, at 8:00, Beverly is up. For a while, only Greg and Daryl are downstairs. Greg is talking to Daryl about tying shoes, Daryl is discussing the finer distinctions between Batdog, Spiderbat, Aquaman, and Aquababy. Soon, Carol has dressed and calls out to me; I help her make the bed. She breastfeeds Beverly and puts her in a swing that is hung near the dining-room table between two sets of poles; the swing is kept in motion by a mechanical bear, whose weight, as it gradually slides down one of the poles, drives the mechanism that moves the swing. As Carol cleans off the dining-room table and does the dishes, she tells me about a wild two-year-old child of friends whom they had taken to Marine World Saturday, and who had thrown a metal car at the baby. She begins making pecan and apple pancakes for breakfast. Greg is repairing a torn water bed downstairs. Each parent has one child.
Carol, thirty-five, is dressed in a jogging suit and sneakers. She has short-cropped hair, no makeup, tiny stud earrings. There is something pleasantly no-nonsense in her look and a come-on-and-join-me quality to her laugh. She and Greg have shared an extremely happy marriage for eleven years.
Carol is not trying to integrate family life with the demands of a fast-track corporate career like that of Nina Tanagawa. Three years before, she had quit what she called her “real” job on the fast-track as a systems analyst and begun freelance consulting for twenty-five hours a week. As a child, Carol had always envisioned having a career, and, as an adult, she
’d always had one. She says she’s always divided the work at home 50-50. “I don’t know if I’d call myself a feminist,” she tells me, as if studying the term from a distance, “but yes, Greg and I have always shared at home, no discussion about it, up until I went part time, of course.”
From the beginning, Greg wanted Carol to work and, in fact, told me he felt “upset” when she went part time since he missed her income. For seven out of their eleven years together, Carol earned as much as a systems analyst as he earned as a dentist. In fact, she now earned part time almost as much as Greg earned full time. “The more income she makes,” Greg said, “the earlier we can retire.”
For the past three years, since having Daryl, Carol’s strategy has been to reduce her hours and emotional involvement at work, and to do most of the second shift. But the couple would share again after next November, she said, when they planned to fulfill an eleven-year dream of escaping the gridlock traffic and drugs and racial violence of the urban schools to move to a tiny town in the Sierra mountains called Little Creek. There Greg, too, would take up part-time work. The Alstons have always loved boating and camping; in Little Creek they could enjoy the outdoors in a 50-50 version of a Rousseauist retreat from modern life. They are among the lucky few who could afford this. In short, the financial and ideological stage was set for them to really share the work of the home.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 16